Outreach matters, if done right
Eric Hoover, The Chronicle‘s resident expert on all things admissions, recently wrote a sweeping story detailing how the Supreme Court’s decision to effectively ban affirmative action has driven a wrecking ball through selective colleges’ admissions processes, forcing administrators to overhaul the way they recruit and retain students of color.
From his story:
“While the share of Black, Latino and Latina, and Native American students increased in recent decades, members of those groups are now more underrepresented than they were in 2002, making up 40 percent of high-school graduates but just 20 percent of enrollment at selective colleges, one recent analysis found.
Such statistics reflect many realities, but one is a lack of institutional commitment to expanding access. It seems fair to ask: Why didn’t so-called elite colleges use that tool to achieve greater racial diversity while they still could? Rebuilding the admissions process will require many high-profile colleges to confront the ways they have undermined racial and socioeconomic equity all along.”
This overhaul will carry high stakes for low-income high-school students of color for whom getting to and through college can drastically change the trajectory of their lives.
Toward the end of Eric’s story, he highlights ways college admissions officers can alter their day-to-day practices now that the rules around consideration of race have changed.
“In private conversations, a handful of enrollment leaders shared similar appraisals of the challenges before them. They described the court’s ruling as narrow, covering only evaluations of applicants — and not, say, student recruitment and pre-college programs. So they planned to continue their targeted outreach to underrepresented minorities, a practice that many legal experts describe as relatively sound because it doesn’t confer a benefit to an individual student. ‘We’re going to keep calling Black students, keep calling Latino students, keep building the enrollment funnel as broad as we can for diversity,”'one admissions dean said. Some said they were altering their recruitment programs to emphasize earlier contact with ninth and 10th graders.”
Our race reporter, Brian Charles, recently traveled to a rural area of Virginia where cell-phone reception is almost nonexistent to meet Jontel Armstead. Armstead is a recent University of Virginia graduate who has committed through the Virginia College Advising Corps to help students at Sussex Central High School apply to college. Sussex is mostly Black and mostly poor and, as Brian describes, students there face a host of obstacles and disincentives on their path to college.
Brian returned with a richly told story about the many ways outreach can be laudable on paper but burdensome in reality.
From Brian’s story:
“The notion that college is a wise investment of time and money is something that needs to be made explicit to students, says Drexel Pierce Jr., the school’s principal. He knows this too well. Pierce spent a decade as a school counselor before becoming a principal this year. ‘We have a generation of parents and grandparents who do not understand the importance and the process of attending college,’ he says during a conversation with Armstead about college counseling. ‘In a rural area our students don’t have access to opportunities others see on a regular basis. To a student living here in a trailer court, they see the McDonald’s and the 7-Eleven but they don’t see much beyond that.’”
Students in Sussex know few, if any, college graduates, and face pressure to work on local farms or at “the nearby Smithfield Foods processing plant, preparing hams that will sit on dining-room tables across the country and world.”
Racial disparities are caused by a wide range of historical and contemporary barriers, some of which researchers are still discovering. The Supreme Court has spoken. The question now before selective colleges is: What responsibility do selective colleges have in using their largess to lower those barriers?
What I’m reading:
- Some residents in Easton, Md., are upset with a mural painted by a Jewish man that depicts Frederick Douglass in a fitted suit, high-top Converse sneakers, and a rap pose, Petula Dvorak writes for The Washington Post. Others are inspired.
- Has the Black elite captured the movement for civil rights? Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò gives compelling evidence for the Boston Review.
- Those wanting to get rid of colleges’ and companies’ diversity programs are exploiting the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that helped end slavery and that was cited several times by the civil-rights activist and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, according to The Washington Post.
- White ex-Gannett journalists are suing the company over layoffs and promotions they say gave preference to employees of color to meet diversity quotas, Taylor Telford reports for The Washington Post.
