A Race-Neutral Alternative
Michaell Santos Paulino said he would never have had the confidence to apply to Yale University if he hadn’t already passed four courses from highly selective colleges during his last two years of high school.
There were the two classes, in criminal justice and environmental justice, from Howard University. Then, a modern and postmodern history course from Wesleyan University and the writing class from Stanford. Each one whittled away at the doubts he harbored about whether a kid in the Bronx, who’d immigrated 10 years ago from the Dominican Republic, belonged in an Ivy League institution.
Today he’s a freshman at Yale with a full-ride scholarship.
The credit-bearing classes that gave him a glimpse at what a rigorous college course might look like were offered through the National Education Equity Lab. The nonprofit enrolls students from disadvantaged communities at no cost to the students in courses from a dozen colleges and universities that have included Georgetown, Harvard, Howard, Princeton, Spelman, Stanford, and Wesleyan. The program hopes to add more colleges to the mix.
The equity lab, begun in 2019 and now offered in more than 100 school districts across 29 states, helps identify first-generation students, mostly students of color, who’ve flown under the radar of highly selective institutions.
As Santos Paulino tackled rigorous college-level material, he said: “I realized I was capable of succeeding in these courses and could go beyond the work I was doing in high school. That made me go in much more open-minded about where I could apply and what colleges were possibilities.”
Students are selected by their high schools based largely on grades, test scores, and teachers’ determination that they could thrive in the course. A typical course might work like this:
A college professor would deliver a weekly asynchronous lecture to students spread out in classrooms across the country in places like Flint, Mich., Gallup, N.M., and the South Bronx in New York City. The professor would also typically hold online office hours, and during the week, undergraduate or graduate students selected by the professor and trained as teaching fellows would meet with the high schoolers, help grade their quizzes and papers, and offer tips on succeeding in college. High-school teachers who have been trained to work with the program also help support students, and the equity lab shares performance data with teachers to allow them to refer students for tutoring.
Students are held to the same standards as the college students who take the courses, program leaders say, but with the added support, more than 80 percent have earned passing grades.
Leslie Cornfeld, the nonprofit’s founder and chief executive officer, is a former federal civil-rights prosecutor and education adviser in the Obama administration. In visiting Title I schools across the country, she said, “We’d meet with students and principals who’d tell us their most talented students didn’t feel they belonged in competitive colleges — or even in college.”
Even if they did, they often felt they had no way to prove it. Many colleges have stopped requiring SATs and ACTs, and grade-point averages from little-known and under-resourced schools don’t carry much weight with admissions officials, Cornfeld said. Extracurricular activities are a luxury for students who have to work and can’t spend summers building orphanages or coaching sports teams, she added.
College leaders, meanwhile, would tell Cornfeld they couldn’t find academically qualified first-generation students of color in those ZIP codes — despite their recruiters’ ease at flying in to woo athletes from those same schools.
“We need to redefine merit in college admissions in our country,” Cornfeld said. “Until we do that, we’re going to be handicapped in finding diverse students.” The metrics colleges currently use, she said, “so powerfully favor more affluent students.”
The equity lab began in 25 classrooms with a single Harvard poetry class, and since then has served more than 10,000 students. It’s attracted support from numerous philanthropies, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The program, which hopes to add more colleges, prioritizes large public institutions with broadly transferable credits. Colleges are required to offer their courses at cost, and schools, districts, and states pay about $250 per student for a three-credit college course and the supports that go with it.
Dual-enrollment classes, where students simultaneously earn high-school and college credit, have long been promoted as a way to give students a leg up on college that can lift their confidence and save on tuition. The same is true of Advanced Placement classes.
But a study by the Community College Research Center found that white students enroll in traditional dual-enrollment courses at twice the rate of Black students. Black and Native American students had the lowest participation rates in AP courses.
Programs like the equity lab, which help colleges identify diverse students without explicitly considering their race, are getting increased attention as higher ed prepares for a post-affirmative action world. Next year the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to sharply curtail, or even eliminate, race-conscious admissions as an option for colleges.
The program “is a race-neutral opportunity for colleges to identify talent in historically underrepresented communities,” Cornfeld said. “What better way is there to demonstrate college readiness than to show a grade you received in an actual college class?” —Katherine Mangan
