August 18, 2014
More Voices Call for Equity, Not Just Access
As the population of prospective college students becomes more diverse, efforts to expand their opportunities have come from not only advocacy groups and researchers, but also the White House. The future of affirmative action, meanwhile, remains unclear, with courts upholding this year both a race-conscious admissions policy in Texas and a voter-passed ban on racial preferences in public-college admissions in Michigan.
By 2020, projections show, minority students will make up nearly half of the nation’s public high-school graduates. Increasing numbers of Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander students and decreasing numbers of white students will drive that trend, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.
Gaps in college-going rates by race and ethnicity have narrowed in recent years. While the share of white high-school graduates who enroll in college the following fall has held steady over the past decade, at about 67 percent, for black students the rate has gone up 5 percentage points, to 62 percent, and for Hispanic students it has jumped 14 percentage points, to 69 percent.
Greater access for black and Hispanic students, however, has been accompanied by increasing stratification by race and ethnicity. Selective colleges enroll predominantly white students, researchers have found, while black and Hispanic students, even those with good grades and test scores, largely attend open-access institutions, which spend less on instruction and see lower shares of students through to graduation. By establishing tiers of quality, the higher-education system is at risk of perpetuating an underclass, a report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce argued last summer.
The graduation rates of underrepresented minority students—particularly men—tend to lag behind overall averages. That’s partly attributable to differences in academic preparation and patterns of enrollment, but researchers have identified another challenge: stereotype threat, or the risk of confirming a negative image of one’s group. “No student rises to low expectations,” said Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, at a summit at Morehouse College in March.
By providing positive reinforcement, mentoring, and academic support for black men, some colleges and advocacy groups have committed to raising stubbornly low graduation rates—35 percent nationally, compared with 59 percent for all students, according to the federal government. President Obama has started two programs that share that goal: the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans and My Brother’s Keeper.
‘Propelling’ Students
Michelle Obama, whose journey from her modest Chicago neighborhood to Princeton University serves as the emotional core of the administration’s campaign to broaden college access, said in January that she would expand her efforts on that front. Also that month, the White House convened dozens of higher-education leaders to discuss expanding opportunities for low-income students. All participants had to make new pledges to that end, and they promised to offer college advising, for example, and more financial aid.
At the White House summit, David Coleman, president of the College Board, described its efforts to scale up a research experiment to send college information and application-fee waivers to top students from less-privileged backgrounds. “We must be committed to propelling them,” he said, “into the opportunities they have earned.”
To inform students of their options and help them choose a good-fit college, several models proved promising. Researchers in economics and other fields have continued testing interventions such as sending text messages about tasks necessary to prepare for college. And studies of at-risk young people who had a mentor and of low-income students who were coached and tutored by a nonprofit group found this year that they were more likely to enroll in college, or at more-selective institutions.
Racial Preferences and Tensions
Supporters of affirmative action welcomed a federal appellate court ruling in July that upheld a race-conscious policy at the University of Texas at Austin. A year before, the Supreme Court had ordered the lower court to re-examine the policy, applying “strict scrutiny” to determine if it was constitutional.
Although the new decision found that it was constitutional, the case—Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin—is far from over. The Project on Fair Representation—the advocacy group representing Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was denied admission to the state flagship university—said it expected to appeal the latest ruling all the way back to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Meanwhile, the group is seeking plaintiffs for potential lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Ballot questions on racial preferences in public-college admissions may also appear in more states after a separate Supreme Court decision in April. The ruling upheld a ban passed by voters in Michigan in 2006, which an advocacy group had challenged in the case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.
In Michigan and other states where colleges can no longer consider race in admissions, selective institutions in particular have struggled to maintain the enrollment of underrepresented minority students. To expand the pool of prospective students, they have stepped up programs like Wolverine Express, in which diverse groups of faculty, staff, and students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor visit high schools in underprivileged communities across the state to talk about college aspirations. Other race-neutral strategies used by colleges included considering applicants’ socioeconomic status and whether their parents attended college.
In part because of the low representation of minority students, tensions arose on social media and on some campuses this past year. In November a student at the University of California at Los Angeles posted on YouTube a video of a spoken-word performance decrying the small number of black male undergraduates at the university. Also that month, students used the Twitter hashtag #BBUM, or “being black at the University of Michigan,” to share stories about discrimination and insensitive comments they had faced at the predominantly white institution. “Some of my professors,” wrote one, “already assume I am an underachiever so I have to work twice as hard to prove them wrong.”
And in March, black students at Harvard University started a photo campaign on Tumblr. “Our voices often go unheard on this campus,” it says. “Our presence is questioned.” The project’s name: “I, Too, Am Harvard.”
