When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that colleges could no longer consider an applicant’s race as a factor in admissions decisions, the justices didn’t say anything about financial aid.
But within hours, state and university officials in Missouri, Kentucky, and Wisconsin made the call themselves: If considering a student’s race in awarding benefits was discriminatory, race-conscious scholarships would have to go, too.
Months later, colleges are still struggling with where to draw the line as some institutions face pressure to change how they dole out financial aid.
Most recently, several public Ohio colleges announced this month that they will review scholarships and their criteria. The reviews were prompted by the state’s attorney general, who asserted in a January opinion that it was now unconstitutional to use race as a factor in awarding scholarships.
For many colleges, awarding scholarships designated for students from underrepresented racial backgrounds is one prong of a larger strategy to try to diversify their campuses. Such programs aim to ensure that cost is not a barrier for students of color, many of whom come from low-income families.
Some experts told The Chronicle that critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher ed — many of them Republican state leaders — could be leveraging an overly broad interpretation of the admissions ruling to wield influence over colleges.
Regardless of what’s driving the trend, colleges are having to take a closer look at their scholarship programs. And some higher-ed experts fear that students will lose access to aid they were counting on.
A Developing Trend
Public and private colleges in Missouri were among the first to be affected by the fresh scrutiny of scholarships. The same day as the Supreme Court’s admissions ruling, Missouri’s attorney general ordered all colleges to stop considering race in financial aid.
The directive affected three competitive diversity scholarships offered across the University of Missouri system, said Christian Basi, a system spokesperson. Two of the scholarships were limited in scope and only awarded to less than 15 total students this year, Basi said.
Moving forward, the system will no longer offer or promote scholarships that consider race. But Basi said students are encouraged to seek out outside scholarships and the system will continue other efforts to recruit students from diverse backgrounds.
In Ohio, Attorney General Dave Yost sent a memo to colleges a day after the admissions ruling, warning them to take compliance seriously. Then, in late January, Yost told a group of college general counsels to ensure their institutions’ scholarships complied with the court’s arguments, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
Now hundreds of scholarships are under review across at least eight Ohio colleges.
At the University of Toledo, administrators have paused the distribution of about $500,000 in scholarship money for which race was part of the award criteria, a spokesperson said in a statement. Ohio University is reviewing $450,000 worth of aid.
The change could frustrate donors who gave money to scholarship funds with the explicit goal of supporting students of color, according to C.J. Powell, director of advocacy for the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC). And major gifts could be pulled back if the benefactor disagrees with a college’s stance on DEI.
“If folks stand by the things that they said during the summer following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, this is one of those places where that rubber meets the road,” Powell said.
Ohio University and the University of Toledo said they are exploring potential revisions to scholarship agreements with donors.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin lawmakers are considering legislation that would eliminate race-based criteria in scholarship, grant, and loan programs. A University of Wisconsin system spokesperson told the news site WisPolitics that its campuses would remove race as a factor in most scholarships by the end of the academic year, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
Elsewhere, college leaders have announced reviews of scholarships even without a mandate from the state. The University of Kentucky announced that it would stop considering race in financial aid immediately after the admissions ruling. Weeks later, Western Illinois University did the same, but then quickly reinstated scholarships as they awaited guidance from the U.S. Education Department. As of now, the scholarships are still in place, the university confirmed.
The Title VI Argument
A key argument underpinning the Supreme Court’s ruling on race-conscious admissions is that the practice violated Title VI, which prohibits colleges that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, color, or nationality.
Title VI should be applied with uniformity across higher ed, including with respect to scholarships, said Dan Lennington, a lawyer with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm and advocacy group. He pointed out that the admissions ruling doesn’t only apply to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the two defendants.
Scholarship criteria based on race are not tailored, Lennington said, leaving a broad interpretation of who qualifies based on the perception of one’s physical appearance. Today, it’s not fair to assume a person is disadvantaged based on their racial background, he said.
“There’s been people who have been subjected to horrible racial trauma. There’s been people who have grown up in horrible neighborhoods. Like, why can’t we just evaluate people case by case?” he said. “That’s sort of our whole pitch for equality.”
Two experts at Temple University said they understood the interpretation that both race-conscious scholarships and admissions violate Title VI, but they don’t support it — and argue that context matters.
“Legally it’s a sound argument,” said Timothy Welbeck, director of Temple’s Center for Anti-Racism and a civil-rights attorney by training. “I don’t want to diminish the plausibility of the argument. I’m just saying that the argument originated from a place of bad faith.”
While conservative lawyers often argue that affirmative-action policies like race-conscious admissions are outdated, Welbeck said the persistence of racism in society remains unchanged. The only difference is the makeup of the Supreme Court, he said, which now has a majority of justices who oppose affirmative-action programs.
Donald Harris, a professor in Temple’s law school, said the Supreme Court had an opportunity to hear arguments further testing the scope of race-based admissions with a case challenging an admissions plan for a selective K-12 magnet school — but the justices declined. He doesn’t see the justices stepping in to clear up the confusion with financial aid in higher education. So it’s up to the lower courts to interpret the ruling.
Impacts on the Ground
Some higher-ed experts see the end of race-conscious scholarships as part of a national campaign against DEI — even if states and institutions cite the admissions ruling as the primary reason for the changes.
“Many institutions and states are now using it as an excuse to walk away from focused scholarships and from focused programs,” said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president of the Education Trust, an advocacy group for students of color in higher ed.
In Florida, race-conscious scholarships were discontinued when state legislation banned public colleges from spending money on DEI offices and programs. And the University of Texas at Austin announced in January that the Monarch scholarship, awarded to undocumented students, would no longer be available. University officials said the program violated the state’s DEI ban, according to The Daily Texan, the student newspaper.
Powell, NACAC’s director of advocacy, said as targeted resources like scholarships for students of color disappear, colleges could become whiter and wealthier as people of color are “systemically left out of wealth-generating policy.”
The policy changes are throwing a wrench into the plans of high-school students who’ve been on track for years to receive a diversity scholarship for college, Powell said. High-school counselors will have to do more work researching options for students from underrepresented groups. But at predominantly Black and Hispanic high schools, those counselors are already overburdened, he said.
In Ohio, for instance, Black people are significantly less likely than white people to have an associate degree or higher level of education, Powell said. The loss of targeted scholarships could worsen those gaps in educational attainment.
Del Pilar pointed to the cautionary tale of California’s 1998 affirmative-action ban. Enrollment of Black and Latino/a students fell by 40 percent a year later.
“We have to be really careful with the actions we take,” Del Pilar said, “because, many times, those institutions become places that Black students don’t see themselves at.”
