Washington U. Is No Longer America’s Least Economically Diverse College. Is That Good Enough?

For two years, The New York Times browbeat Washington University in St. Louis about the institution’s dearth of students from low-income families.

Students at Vassar College were three times as likely to receive Pell Grants than students at WashU, the Times first reported in 2013. A year later, it compiled a College Access Index, which ranked WashU the least economically diverse of all top colleges, with only 6 percent of its students Pell-eligible.

WashU decided enough was enough. The university made a New Year’s resolution for 2015: It would more than double its number of Pell-eligible students by 2020. “I want us to get to 13 percent and maintain that as a minimum going forward,” Holden Thorp, the university’s provost, told the student paper at the time.

Now, with 2020 looming, the university has met its goal, with nearly 15 percent of its student body eligible for Pell Grants. For the 2017-18 academic year, its average Pell award was larger than those of Northwestern University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Chicago, indicating that WashU wasn’t just taking the barely Pell-eligible students. The university created the Office for Student Success to support its growing share of low-income students, and it devoted an additional $25 million a year or more to financial-aid awards. Mission accomplished, it seems.

But the university has new leadership: Mark S. Wrighton, the longtime chancellor, retired this past summer, and Thorp moved on to new pursuits as well. And the student activist group that sounded the alarm prior to the Times’s articles is now calling for the university to switch to need-blind admissions.

“The refrain we heard commonly during my college years was that WashU was just trying to be in the middle of the pack,” said Shaun Ee, a 2017 graduate and former leader of that activist group, Washington University for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity, or WU/Fused. “My concern is that WashU makes changes to meet certain metrics, hits its goal of Pell-eligible students, officially goes need-blind, and then just stalls.”

Hitting the 13-percent goal hasn’t quieted questions about the university’s socioeconomic diversity as much as it has raised new ones. How has the university supported the additional low-income students it has admitted? Will the new leadership share the outgoing administration’s vision? What about student debt? And maybe most importantly, now what?

How WashU Changed

When The New York Times published that first article, in 2013, Thorp knew another shoe was going to drop. So he started putting together the numbers for the eventual 13-percent-by-2020 plan. By the time the second article came out a year later, Thorp was prepared.

The university announced the new plan in January 2015. At that time, neither Ronné Turner nor Anthony Tillman worked at the university. But as the current assistant provost for student success and the vice provost for admissions and financial aid, the two have been instrumental in transforming the university’s student body. Both arrived in the summer of 2016, with Turner directed to reorient the university’s recruitment efforts and Tillman in charge of creating the Office for Student Success.

For Turner, re-evaluating the university’s admissions practices boiled down to increasing the university’s outreach and decreasing the barriers that might convince a student not to apply. The admissions office started working with QuestBridge, a nonprofit that connects low-income students with educational opportunities, and enhanced existing partnerships like one the university has with Kipp, a college-prep charter-school system.

Turner also expanded an application fee-waiver program for students from high-poverty high schools and allowed self-reporting of test scores before admissions so students could avoid having to pay fees to send official scores. Undergirding all of those efforts was the university’s policy of meeting 100 percent of demonstrated need with no loans included in aid awards to Pell-eligible students.

But still, when low-income students “come to an institution like WashU, where there are significant populations of students who have never really worried about finances,” Turner said, “there are a bunch of cultural things that need to happen and support that needs to happen.”

That was Tillman’s challenge: to demonstrate the university’s commitment that it would support the low-income students it was trying to recruit.

As a result, Tillman spearheaded the Deneb Stars program, named for one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way. All Pell-eligible and first-generation students who are admitted to WashU are invited to join the program, and about 70 percent of them accept, Tillman said. The program seeks to create social equity at the university and cultivate a sense of belonging among low-income students who may feel out of place among their classmates from wealthier backgrounds.

“It is the reality that Washington University operates vis-a-vis a culture of affluence,” Tillman said. “If you’re a student from a particular background that receives a Pell Grant and you come here to Washington University, you’re like, Oh my goodness. Impostor syndrome starts to creep in with respect to, Did I make the right decision?”

The program hosts weekly unwinding hours on Fridays, provides leadership opportunities to older students, and assigns mentors to younger students to help them navigate the university’s culture, norms, and opportunities. “It’s the culture of the institution that if you’re not familiar with it, if there’s no one there to guide you, you could have a very isolating experience,” Tillman said.

Rob Wild, dean of students, said Tillman’s office is not the only one on campus working to support low-income students. For instance, the university has held its increases in housing costs to a consistent 3 percent annually since setting the Pell-eligible goal, as opposed to yearly increases of 6 percent previously. Also, the university has been more cognizant of fees and hidden costs in co-curricular activities.

“What you become aware of very quickly is how many programs are fee-based,” Wild said. “All universities want students to have as equitable an experience as possible. So it’s just been really trying to be vigilant about where there are extra costs.”

A Pledge for the Future

In Chancellor Andrew Martin’s inaugural address this past October, he made two decrees: free tuition, room, board, and fees for any student from Missouri and Southern Illinois whose family makes less than $75,000 a year and a “moral imperative to become need-blind in due course.” While the free-education pledge had a definite timetable attached, the fall of 2020, Martin couldn’t give a date for when the university would go need-blind.

“Our students appropriately want me to define what ‘in due course’ means,” Martin said in an interview. “And of course I haven’t been able to.”

As a result, WU/Fused has resumed its call for admissions reform. The group wants reassurances that the university’s increases in low-income students haven’t come at the expense of middle-income students, and it wants the institution to go need-blind as quickly as possible.

“We were really trying to drive home the fact that it’s getting to a point where it’s embarrassing that we’re not need-blind and also is a disservice to the institution,” said Rachel Hellman, a senior and member of WU/Fused. “We’re aware the university can make these changes quickly if they’re embarrassed.”

Ee, the former WU/Fused leader, said the administration’s need-blind goal is a mark of progress.

“We spent a very long time pressuring them to at least commit to it in the longer term, and they would never give any commitment,” Ee said. “The fact that they’re now, to my limited knowledge, talking about it seems to me to be a promising first step.”

In hindsight, Thorp says he dodged the questions of need-blind admissions during his time at the university because he knew how far the institution had to go. “I didn’t want to set any expectations that we weren’t going to meet on any practical timeline,” Thorp said in an interview. “Absolutely it’s a moral imperative for institutions like WashU to do absolutely everything they can for educational opportunity.”

For now though, WashU is still focused on admitting more low-income students. Five years ago, The New York Times showed that the university was at the bottom, the worst of the elite. Now it sits somewhere in the middle. And Martin says that’s not enough.

“I’m proud that we’re middle of the pack, but my aspiration for Washington University is for us to be a leader,” Martin said. “If you can roll forward five years from now, 10 years from now, what a story you could write.”

But WashU’s story hasn’t concluded. Maybe it’s a few chapters in — somewhere on the long slog between the instigating event and the triumphant finish. Or maybe this is where the story trails off, with the university never quite rising to its ambition. After all, forecasting an ending doesn’t bring it to fruition.

Thorp, now the editor in chief of Science magazine, noted that the university exceeded every expectation it set five years ago. He said Martin has the momentum behind him to build on the 13-percent goal and to continue to make strides in socioeconomic diversity. But the bar is higher now, and the questions will continue.

Corrections (12/19/2019, 12 p.m.): An earlier version of this article stated that the nonprofit organization QuestBridge serves nonwhite students. It serves low-income students, regardless of race. It also stated that WashU promised free tuition to students from Missouri and Southern Illinois whose family income is below $75,000. In fact, the WashU Pledge covers tuition, room, board, and fees for those students. The university was already providing free tuition to all Pell-eligible students. Both errors have been corrected.

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.