On February 14, Trump administration officials at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education released guidance in the form of a Dear Colleague Letter to the nation’s schools, including colleges and universities. Fourteen days later, OCR released a “Frequently Asked Questions” addendum to the letter in response to the confusion and consternation the original letter caused.
The letter is a blistering attack on various programs and policies related to race in schools and on campuses. It applies a blatantly overreaching interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision on the use of race in college admissions, Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard (for short, SFFA), applying the holding both too broadly and in contexts it was never meant to address. In contrast to OCR’s mission to “ensure equal access to education” through “vigorous enforcement of civil rights in our nation’s schools,” the letter is poised to make access to higher education less equal through a selective reading of the law.
In SFFA, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of race in Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admissions processes was illegal. In the letter, OCR makes significant leaps from SFFA’s ruling, asserting that any decision-making based on race is inherently discriminatory, and thus illegal. It states, for example, that eliminating standardized testing as a selection criteria to increase racial diversity would violate the law. The letter uses the threat of the revocation of federal funds, an existential threat for most institutions, as a cudgel to badger these colleges and universities into submission. The threat is grave enough that institutions that actually value diversity on campus might overreact out of fear, while those institutions that do not may use the letter as a pretense to shutter the doors of opportunity to even more students. A group of more than sixty higher education associations recently called for OCR to rescind the letter due to the confusion it sows, and multiple lawsuits challenge the letter’s legality.
Via an egregious misreading of the law, the letter seeks to intimidate universities into a shutdown of the diversity initiatives that make colleges better institutions. The nation’s education leaders need to see the letter for what it is—a veiled power grab on behalf of the wealthy and well-connected—and hold firm to the core principles and values of diversity as our greatest strength. If they fold, they run an even greater long-term risk: the continued erosion of trust from an American public who sees selective colleges as privileged clubs for privileged kids.
This commentary will assess the stakes, and will seek to demonstrate that educators have not yet run out of options that place dignity and equity foremost.
Diversity Initiatives Are Mission-Driven
Colleges are first and foremost mission-driven institutions. Colleges’ missions form their identity and guide their leaders’ decisionmaking.
Most universities’ missions center on teaching, learning, and research: for example, “Harvard’s mission is to advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge,” and “The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.” Other institutions’ missions might include different focuses: a military academy might put greater emphasis on character development and public service, for instance.
Nowhere, however, does any college’s mission say that it must admit those who score the highest on the SAT.
Nowhere, however, does any college’s mission say that it must admit those who score the highest on the SAT. In fact, only admitting the highest-scoring SAT wizards would directly undercut the stated missions of many universities. The question of which applicants to admit—who “merits” admission—is a matter of academic freedom, which is a First Amendment right, and is guided by the mission of each institution. It’s the freedom to ask: Who will produce excellent research? Who will work hard on their biochemistry problem sets? Who will produce a compelling one-act play in their drama class? Who will bring a unique take on Paradise Lost? (Who will actually read Paradise Lost when it’s assigned to them, not just the SparkNotes summary?) What constellation of various student backgrounds will create the environment that will lead students to learn the most through group projects in psychology or political theory? Perhaps students who have had to overcome significant adversity will offer something different from applicants who have not.
It is akin to an airline deciding it should not simply select new pilots on the basis of which pilot scored the highest on the written pilot’s exam. Rather, an airline—with a mission statement like American Airlines’, which is “to provide safe, reliable, and friendly air travel”—seeks out the pilot who flies the best, communicates the best, and has steered a plane in adverse conditions during training. That profile is not necessarily found in the highest-scoring test-taker.
As a result, colleges naturally look beyond an applicant’s GPA and test scores to their identity, upbringing, and experiences. If students have similar identities, upbringings, and experiences, then perhaps the institution’s mission isn’t being advanced as well as it could be. That’s the origin of policies referred to as race-based affirmative action, the limited practice of considering race in college admissions, which was upheld by the Supreme Court for a period spanning nearly four decades until the SFFA decision in 2023. (College and universities apply this judgment in all sorts of other domains not challenged by the courts: language proficiency, musical ability, athletic talent, contributions to geographic diversity, and more.)
Admissions policies make a difference. Race-based affirmative action increased the enrollment of underrepresented student groups by more than 20 percent in the University of California (UC) system, according to a study of UC administrative data, and increased the graduation rates of students from these groups at institutions across the country. Nationwide, selective colleges have conferred an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 degrees each year to Black and Hispanic students who otherwise might not have been accepted, boosting their average earnings for years to come.
Even though colleges can no longer use race qua race in admissions decisions following SFFA, Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion calls Harvard and UNC’s pursuit of diversity “worthy” and “commendable.” His opinion explicitly allows for colleges to consider students’ testimonies of how race has shaped their lives, “be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” and delineates a “detailed framework” for how to consider race’s impact. (OCR’s letter makes no mention of this.) Education leaders ought to remember that diversity in all its forms, including racial diversity, remains deeply relevant for the advancement of many institutions’ missions.
Without Diversity Initiatives of All Kinds, the Admissions Game Will Remain Rigged for the Rich
The consideration of race in admissions is just one battleground in a broader struggle that affects Americans of all backgrounds and identities. By continuing to overrepresent students from families and communities that have historically had high access to college, elite institutions do not fulfill their fullest potential to address inequality and create new pathways to opportunity, which promote diversity of thought amongst the nation’s leaders.
Take the two defendants in the SFFA litigation as an example. UNC–Chapel Hill’s Black share of enrollment in 2016 (8 percent) pales in comparison to the Black share of the population of the state of North Carolina (21 percent). The eight Ivy League colleges, including Harvard, enroll more students from the top 1 percent of families by income than students from the bottom 60 percent of families by income. Anyone who believes that talented students can be found everywhere can’t continue to accept this status quo.
Anyone who believes that talented students can be found everywhere can’t continue to accept this status quo.
It’s true that students from lower-income families require more financial aid, which makes admissions policies that favor those students as much about business and finance as about merit and mission. But it’s also true that colleges who could do more have not done enough. They have been complicit in the obstruction of equity, but some are trying to do better. That’s part of the motivation for some colleges to reconsider the use of standardized testing, which has become a mainstay of college admissions yet is known to favor high-income students and white students while providing little additive information about college readiness. OCR’s decision to single out colleges that have eliminated standardized testing is inconsistent with the current law governing diversity initiatives, and it indicates that OCR is casting the widest possible net in which policies and practices it will target.
Why is there a skew in admissions in favor of the wealthy? Students do not all enter the selective admissions process on equal financial footing, a disparity which starts with the geography of where they are born and raised. Segregation by income across school districts is large and increasing, meaning more and more families live in either “poor” or “rich” neighborhoods. Districts serving nearly two-thirds of the nation’s students face funding gaps, which are greater in districts with more poverty and more students of color. Gaps between students emerge as early as kindergarten, because students from rich families enter kindergarten better prepared to succeed than students from lower-resourced families. This gap does not go away through later grades.
Neighborhood-level and school-level gaps are often linked to wealth by way of home prices. Housing policies such as redlining, as well as discrimination in the mortgage market, sharpen the role of race in the distribution of wealth across geographies. And racial wealth gaps can be found even within income groups, particularly gaps between Black and white households.
Disparities in children’s environments shape their disparities in academic credentials when they apply for college. Only 57 percent of Black students have access to all the math and science courses needed to be college-ready, compared to 71 percent of white students and 81 percent of Asian students. These courses are not a nice-to-have luxury for children who might like to be an engineer one day: calculus, for example, is treated by selective colleges as nearly a must-have in admissions, regardless of the applicant’s intended field of study.
Academically strong students in high-poverty school districts are not short on ambition, but they face greater adversity that affects their likelihood of college admission, according to our analysis of data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. When compared to academically strong students in lower-poverty school districts, they are more likely to aspire to complete a doctoral degree, but they are less likely to earn a credit in calculus, less likely to take the SAT or ACT, and less likely to say that they feel safe at school; they also spend more hours working for pay during the typical school day and spend fewer hours in extracurriculars. Despite their strong grades, those same students are less likely to enroll in college, and those who do enroll in college are less likely to attend a highly selective one, compared to students with the same grades from lower-poverty areas.
The admissions process itself has literally favored the wealthy and well-connected through “tips” in favor of the children of donors and alumni (known as “legacy” admissions), an unfortunate example of colleges’ business incentives getting in the way of their mission. But this is not an isolated example of those with power seeking to influence universities, and over the last few years, major donors have used their power and dollars to maintain the status quo. For example, donor pressure led to the resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard’s first Black woman president, and a donor pressure campaign blocked Nikole Hannah Jones from an academic appointment at UNC.
The Takedown of Colleges’ Racial Diversity Efforts Will Kill Socioeconomic Diversity Too
The playing field is clearly uneven, and the game of working hard to get a degree to achieve the proverbial American Dream is rigged in favor of the wealthy. To un-rig it, colleges have been using different approaches to assessing merit, and eliminating standardized testing is just one example.
For instance, the University of Colorado uses a “disadvantage index” and an “overachievement index” to operationalize adversity and give admissions boosts to those who faced disadvantages and overachieved. The medical school at UC Davis takes a similar approach, using a “socioeconomic disadvantage scale.” Several states employ “percentage plans,” which guarantee admission to the state’s public university system to the top-ranked students at each in-state high school, rich and poor alike; percentage plans are found to increase enrollment, graduation rates, and earnings. Others give a tip for applicants who would be the first in their family to attend college. And some colleges have become disillusioned with how the SAT has been gamified by parents who can afford SAT tutors and repeat-testing, so much so that they have made it optional for applicants. Following the SFFA decision, four states and ninety-two colleges banned legacy admissions. Policy changes like these expand access for communities that skew low-income, low-attainment, and under-resourced, as well as Black and Hispanic.
Changes like these also lead to a better admissions system, and inclusion on campus leads to healthier learning environments and improved student outcomes. But those adjustments are the kinds of policy responses that OCR, in its letter, threatens to forbid if they are deployed to increase racial diversity. How is a college supposed to advance socioeconomic diversity without advancing racial diversity? It’s hardly possible, yet conservative litigants have shown that they will interpret anything less than the decline of Black and Latino students on elite campuses as evidence of wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court rendered the SFFA decision not to end the pursuit of diversity on campus, as OCR would have colleges believe, but to reshape it under terms it deemed acceptable. The court did not strike down race-neutral policies that pursue racial diversity, and in a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas wrote, “If an applicant has less financial means … then surely a university may take that into account.” Last year, the Supreme Court let stand lower court decisions from Virginia and Massachusetts affirming race-neutral admissions policies at the K–12 level.
The lower court decisions from Virginia and Massachusetts are instructive, not only because they were left in place by the Supreme Court, but also because they deal with admissions policies that are race-neutral, superior to previous admissions policies in admitting a stellar incoming class, and also happen to boost racial diversity. These are exactly the types of policies that the OCR letter attempts to scare institutions from using by intimating that such a policy must have, by virtue of its improvement of racial diversity, been motivated by discrimination. But valuing racial diversity and endorsing racial discrimination are not the same thing. The majority opinion in the First Circuit, which the Supreme Court left in place, said so in plain English: “There is nothing constitutionally impermissible about a school district including racial diversity as a consideration and goal in the enactment of a facially neutral plan.”
Almost any policy change that seeks to improve access for under-resourced communities could fail this test, not because of a college’s intention to skirt SFFA but because every college operates in the aftermath of history.
What happens, though, if OCR makes good on its promise to treat race-neutral diversity initiatives as illegal? The Department of Education could come after policies that promote socioeconomic diversity just as much as they promote racial diversity. In a February 28 follow-up to the Dear Colleague Letter, OCR identified “statistics demonstrating a pattern of the policy or decision having a greater impact on members of a particular race” as one potential test for identifying violations. Almost any policy change that seeks to improve access for under-resourced communities could fail this test, not because of a college’s intention to skirt SFFA but because every college operates in the aftermath of history.
Take the admissions policy at issue in the Virginia case, which is about Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”). TJ’s new admissions policy—which actually increased the minimum GPA required, among other changes—doubled the number of offers made to Black students, quadrupled the number of offers made to Latino students, and increased the number of spots offered to low-income Asian applicants fifty-fold (from one to fifty-one) in just one year. TJ’s race-neutral policy dramatically increased socio-economic diversity and increased racial diversity. Perhaps most importantly for proponents of merit, the policy was also better at creating a stellar incoming class of freshmen.
Table 1, below, compares the outsized share of enrollment by certain racial/ethnic groups at schools with barriers to academic achievement, versus high schools overall. (High schools where fewer students take the SAT or ACT, for example, tend to enroll more Hispanic students.) These figures suggest that, if a college wants to give preference to a group of students who have had fewer opportunities placed before them, even when defined in a race-neutral way, it would inevitably benefit at least one racial/ethnic group more than others.
Table 1
|
Some students face uphill battles to access college, based on high school characteristics.
|
| High School Characteristic |
Share of Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity at Such Schools
Groups with outsized representation highlighted |
| White |
Hispanic |
Black |
Asian/Pacific Islander |
Native American |
Two or more races |
| Less than 5 percent of students are in advanced math |
43.6% |
33.0% |
16.2% |
2.8% |
1.1% |
3.4% |
| Doesn’t offer AP or IB classes |
52.9% |
23.9% |
17.2% |
1.5% |
2.3% |
2.1% |
| Low SAT or ACT participation |
36.7% |
41.4% |
11.6% |
6.1% |
0.7% |
3.5% |
| Not all classrooms have wifi |
39.0% |
33.9% |
19.5% |
4.1% |
0.6% |
2.9% |
| More than 10 percent of teachers are not certified |
31.4% |
33.4% |
28.2% |
3.6% |
0.6% |
2.9% |
| U.S. high schools overall |
46.1% |
29.6% |
14.5% |
5.7% |
0.6% |
3.5% |
| Source: Author’s analysis of data from the Civil Rights Data Collection reflecting 2021–22, U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, accessed March 2025. “Low SAT or ACT participation” is defined as annual SAT or ACT participants comprising less than 10 percent of total enrollment. |
Colleges ought to give boosts in the admissions process to students from the high schools in Table 1, be it to pursue racial diversity or another goal, such as rewarding students who achieved high GPAs amid environments that weren’t conducive to high achievement. But more importantly, Table 1 shows that increases in racial groups receiving a benefit is not “proof” of a race-conscious scheme or of racial discrimination. Given that the plaintiffs in SFFA pointed to race-neutral alternatives as justification for removing race-based affirmative action, it would be a cruel irony that those same alternatives are removed through the Trump administration’s so-called enforcement of the ruling.
Many of the attacks on diversity initiatives, including the Dear Colleague Letter, are part of a bigger plan to reverse decades of progress in closing the gap between haves and have-nots. Colleges recognize that they are a poor representation of society. They want to fix it. This opinion seeks to chill those efforts. For the nation’s rich and well-connected, it’s a win-win. Colleges would be forced to forgo federal funds (meaning only the rich would be able to afford them) or they would make their own policy changes that exclude low-income students (leaving more room for children from wealthy families).
The legal architect of the assault on racial diversity over the last several decades, Edward Blum, who also recently sued the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy over the use of race in their admissions practices, foreshadowed the long game last month, saying, “This is an ongoing battle…there is no endpoint. I said that the Harvard opinion was the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.”
OCR Would Have Institutions Think They’re in Checkmate. They Are Not.
Through the Dear Colleague letter, OCR wants colleges to feel like they’re in checkmate, with no winning moves. The administration doesn’t have that power, and colleges can’t give it to them.
The Supreme Court’s SFFA decision was about the role of race in college admissions. OCR’s letter goes beyond that in a way that is simply off-base, encompassing virtually all programs at schools and universities, including race-neutral policies. But even in the very thing SFFA is actually about, the letter gets the facts wrong.
Facts be damned, the Trump administration’s education officials want colleges to choose between diversity in their student body and their continued existence. It is a false choice, a scare tactic. As others have pointed out, colleges have the protections of due process, and the courts’ judgment supersedes OCR’s. The risk to universities’ missions from undercompliance is less than the risk from overcompliance.
Institutions that bend over backwards to serve only the wealthy will gain no sympathy from the vast majority of American families who do not have the resources or connections to send their children to highly rejective institutions.
But if that is not reason enough, colleges should consider another risk. Institutions that bend over backwards to serve only the wealthy will gain no sympathy from the vast majority of American families who do not have the resources or connections to send their children to highly rejective institutions. Most Americans are not among the lucky few who can buy their children access to a selective institution. Absent positive change, “elite” schools will continue to lag behind the rest of higher education in public opinion, which in turn props the door open for policymakers to threaten to raise endowment taxes or impose cost-sharing.
Should colleges follow the path laid down by OCR, the far-right can say to middle-class and working-class voters, “Elite, liberal institutions are closed to people like you,” and public trust will be lost even further. As great as the immediate threat seems, the longer-term threat is even greater. Society has endowed elite colleges with immense power, and they need to use that for good, promoting upward mobility rather than entrenched privilege. One letter does not change that mission.
Tags: college admissions, school diversity, diversity, university admissions, college students
College Admissions Are Rigged for the Rich. Trump’s Officials Say, “Keep It That Way.”
On February 14, Trump administration officials at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education released guidance in the form of a Dear Colleague Letter to the nation’s schools, including colleges and universities. Fourteen days later, OCR released a “Frequently Asked Questions” addendum to the letter in response to the confusion and consternation the original letter caused.
The letter is a blistering attack on various programs and policies related to race in schools and on campuses. It applies a blatantly overreaching interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision on the use of race in college admissions, Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard (for short, SFFA), applying the holding both too broadly and in contexts it was never meant to address. In contrast to OCR’s mission to “ensure equal access to education” through “vigorous enforcement of civil rights in our nation’s schools,” the letter is poised to make access to higher education less equal through a selective reading of the law.
In SFFA, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of race in Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admissions processes was illegal. In the letter, OCR makes significant leaps from SFFA’s ruling, asserting that any decision-making based on race is inherently discriminatory, and thus illegal. It states, for example, that eliminating standardized testing as a selection criteria to increase racial diversity would violate the law. The letter uses the threat of the revocation of federal funds, an existential threat for most institutions, as a cudgel to badger these colleges and universities into submission. The threat is grave enough that institutions that actually value diversity on campus might overreact out of fear, while those institutions that do not may use the letter as a pretense to shutter the doors of opportunity to even more students. A group of more than sixty higher education associations recently called for OCR to rescind the letter due to the confusion it sows, and multiple lawsuits challenge the letter’s legality.
Via an egregious misreading of the law, the letter seeks to intimidate universities into a shutdown of the diversity initiatives that make colleges better institutions. The nation’s education leaders need to see the letter for what it is—a veiled power grab on behalf of the wealthy and well-connected—and hold firm to the core principles and values of diversity as our greatest strength. If they fold, they run an even greater long-term risk: the continued erosion of trust from an American public who sees selective colleges as privileged clubs for privileged kids.
This commentary will assess the stakes, and will seek to demonstrate that educators have not yet run out of options that place dignity and equity foremost.
Diversity Initiatives Are Mission-Driven
Colleges are first and foremost mission-driven institutions. Colleges’ missions form their identity and guide their leaders’ decisionmaking.
Most universities’ missions center on teaching, learning, and research: for example, “Harvard’s mission is to advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge,” and “The mission of MIT is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.” Other institutions’ missions might include different focuses: a military academy might put greater emphasis on character development and public service, for instance.
Nowhere, however, does any college’s mission say that it must admit those who score the highest on the SAT. In fact, only admitting the highest-scoring SAT wizards would directly undercut the stated missions of many universities. The question of which applicants to admit—who “merits” admission—is a matter of academic freedom, which is a First Amendment right, and is guided by the mission of each institution. It’s the freedom to ask: Who will produce excellent research? Who will work hard on their biochemistry problem sets? Who will produce a compelling one-act play in their drama class? Who will bring a unique take on Paradise Lost? (Who will actually read Paradise Lost when it’s assigned to them, not just the SparkNotes summary?) What constellation of various student backgrounds will create the environment that will lead students to learn the most through group projects in psychology or political theory? Perhaps students who have had to overcome significant adversity will offer something different from applicants who have not.
It is akin to an airline deciding it should not simply select new pilots on the basis of which pilot scored the highest on the written pilot’s exam. Rather, an airline—with a mission statement like American Airlines’, which is “to provide safe, reliable, and friendly air travel”—seeks out the pilot who flies the best, communicates the best, and has steered a plane in adverse conditions during training. That profile is not necessarily found in the highest-scoring test-taker.
As a result, colleges naturally look beyond an applicant’s GPA and test scores to their identity, upbringing, and experiences. If students have similar identities, upbringings, and experiences, then perhaps the institution’s mission isn’t being advanced as well as it could be. That’s the origin of policies referred to as race-based affirmative action, the limited practice of considering race in college admissions, which was upheld by the Supreme Court for a period spanning nearly four decades until the SFFA decision in 2023. (College and universities apply this judgment in all sorts of other domains not challenged by the courts: language proficiency, musical ability, athletic talent, contributions to geographic diversity, and more.)
Admissions policies make a difference. Race-based affirmative action increased the enrollment of underrepresented student groups by more than 20 percent in the University of California (UC) system, according to a study of UC administrative data, and increased the graduation rates of students from these groups at institutions across the country. Nationwide, selective colleges have conferred an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 degrees each year to Black and Hispanic students who otherwise might not have been accepted, boosting their average earnings for years to come.
Even though colleges can no longer use race qua race in admissions decisions following SFFA, Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion calls Harvard and UNC’s pursuit of diversity “worthy” and “commendable.” His opinion explicitly allows for colleges to consider students’ testimonies of how race has shaped their lives, “be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” and delineates a “detailed framework” for how to consider race’s impact. (OCR’s letter makes no mention of this.) Education leaders ought to remember that diversity in all its forms, including racial diversity, remains deeply relevant for the advancement of many institutions’ missions.
Without Diversity Initiatives of All Kinds, the Admissions Game Will Remain Rigged for the Rich
The consideration of race in admissions is just one battleground in a broader struggle that affects Americans of all backgrounds and identities. By continuing to overrepresent students from families and communities that have historically had high access to college, elite institutions do not fulfill their fullest potential to address inequality and create new pathways to opportunity, which promote diversity of thought amongst the nation’s leaders.
Take the two defendants in the SFFA litigation as an example. UNC–Chapel Hill’s Black share of enrollment in 2016 (8 percent) pales in comparison to the Black share of the population of the state of North Carolina (21 percent). The eight Ivy League colleges, including Harvard, enroll more students from the top 1 percent of families by income than students from the bottom 60 percent of families by income. Anyone who believes that talented students can be found everywhere can’t continue to accept this status quo.
It’s true that students from lower-income families require more financial aid, which makes admissions policies that favor those students as much about business and finance as about merit and mission. But it’s also true that colleges who could do more have not done enough. They have been complicit in the obstruction of equity, but some are trying to do better. That’s part of the motivation for some colleges to reconsider the use of standardized testing, which has become a mainstay of college admissions yet is known to favor high-income students and white students while providing little additive information about college readiness. OCR’s decision to single out colleges that have eliminated standardized testing is inconsistent with the current law governing diversity initiatives, and it indicates that OCR is casting the widest possible net in which policies and practices it will target.
Why is there a skew in admissions in favor of the wealthy? Students do not all enter the selective admissions process on equal financial footing, a disparity which starts with the geography of where they are born and raised. Segregation by income across school districts is large and increasing, meaning more and more families live in either “poor” or “rich” neighborhoods. Districts serving nearly two-thirds of the nation’s students face funding gaps, which are greater in districts with more poverty and more students of color. Gaps between students emerge as early as kindergarten, because students from rich families enter kindergarten better prepared to succeed than students from lower-resourced families. This gap does not go away through later grades.
Neighborhood-level and school-level gaps are often linked to wealth by way of home prices. Housing policies such as redlining, as well as discrimination in the mortgage market, sharpen the role of race in the distribution of wealth across geographies. And racial wealth gaps can be found even within income groups, particularly gaps between Black and white households.
Disparities in children’s environments shape their disparities in academic credentials when they apply for college. Only 57 percent of Black students have access to all the math and science courses needed to be college-ready, compared to 71 percent of white students and 81 percent of Asian students. These courses are not a nice-to-have luxury for children who might like to be an engineer one day: calculus, for example, is treated by selective colleges as nearly a must-have in admissions, regardless of the applicant’s intended field of study.
Academically strong students in high-poverty school districts are not short on ambition, but they face greater adversity that affects their likelihood of college admission, according to our analysis of data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. When compared to academically strong students in lower-poverty school districts, they are more likely to aspire to complete a doctoral degree, but they are less likely to earn a credit in calculus, less likely to take the SAT or ACT, and less likely to say that they feel safe at school; they also spend more hours working for pay during the typical school day and spend fewer hours in extracurriculars. Despite their strong grades, those same students are less likely to enroll in college, and those who do enroll in college are less likely to attend a highly selective one, compared to students with the same grades from lower-poverty areas.
The admissions process itself has literally favored the wealthy and well-connected through “tips” in favor of the children of donors and alumni (known as “legacy” admissions), an unfortunate example of colleges’ business incentives getting in the way of their mission. But this is not an isolated example of those with power seeking to influence universities, and over the last few years, major donors have used their power and dollars to maintain the status quo. For example, donor pressure led to the resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard’s first Black woman president, and a donor pressure campaign blocked Nikole Hannah Jones from an academic appointment at UNC.
The Takedown of Colleges’ Racial Diversity Efforts Will Kill Socioeconomic Diversity Too
The playing field is clearly uneven, and the game of working hard to get a degree to achieve the proverbial American Dream is rigged in favor of the wealthy. To un-rig it, colleges have been using different approaches to assessing merit, and eliminating standardized testing is just one example.
For instance, the University of Colorado uses a “disadvantage index” and an “overachievement index” to operationalize adversity and give admissions boosts to those who faced disadvantages and overachieved. The medical school at UC Davis takes a similar approach, using a “socioeconomic disadvantage scale.” Several states employ “percentage plans,” which guarantee admission to the state’s public university system to the top-ranked students at each in-state high school, rich and poor alike; percentage plans are found to increase enrollment, graduation rates, and earnings. Others give a tip for applicants who would be the first in their family to attend college. And some colleges have become disillusioned with how the SAT has been gamified by parents who can afford SAT tutors and repeat-testing, so much so that they have made it optional for applicants. Following the SFFA decision, four states and ninety-two colleges banned legacy admissions. Policy changes like these expand access for communities that skew low-income, low-attainment, and under-resourced, as well as Black and Hispanic.
Changes like these also lead to a better admissions system, and inclusion on campus leads to healthier learning environments and improved student outcomes. But those adjustments are the kinds of policy responses that OCR, in its letter, threatens to forbid if they are deployed to increase racial diversity. How is a college supposed to advance socioeconomic diversity without advancing racial diversity? It’s hardly possible, yet conservative litigants have shown that they will interpret anything less than the decline of Black and Latino students on elite campuses as evidence of wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court rendered the SFFA decision not to end the pursuit of diversity on campus, as OCR would have colleges believe, but to reshape it under terms it deemed acceptable. The court did not strike down race-neutral policies that pursue racial diversity, and in a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas wrote, “If an applicant has less financial means … then surely a university may take that into account.” Last year, the Supreme Court let stand lower court decisions from Virginia and Massachusetts affirming race-neutral admissions policies at the K–12 level.
The lower court decisions from Virginia and Massachusetts are instructive, not only because they were left in place by the Supreme Court, but also because they deal with admissions policies that are race-neutral, superior to previous admissions policies in admitting a stellar incoming class, and also happen to boost racial diversity. These are exactly the types of policies that the OCR letter attempts to scare institutions from using by intimating that such a policy must have, by virtue of its improvement of racial diversity, been motivated by discrimination. But valuing racial diversity and endorsing racial discrimination are not the same thing. The majority opinion in the First Circuit, which the Supreme Court left in place, said so in plain English: “There is nothing constitutionally impermissible about a school district including racial diversity as a consideration and goal in the enactment of a facially neutral plan.”
What happens, though, if OCR makes good on its promise to treat race-neutral diversity initiatives as illegal? The Department of Education could come after policies that promote socioeconomic diversity just as much as they promote racial diversity. In a February 28 follow-up to the Dear Colleague Letter, OCR identified “statistics demonstrating a pattern of the policy or decision having a greater impact on members of a particular race” as one potential test for identifying violations. Almost any policy change that seeks to improve access for under-resourced communities could fail this test, not because of a college’s intention to skirt SFFA but because every college operates in the aftermath of history.
Take the admissions policy at issue in the Virginia case, which is about Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”). TJ’s new admissions policy—which actually increased the minimum GPA required, among other changes—doubled the number of offers made to Black students, quadrupled the number of offers made to Latino students, and increased the number of spots offered to low-income Asian applicants fifty-fold (from one to fifty-one) in just one year. TJ’s race-neutral policy dramatically increased socio-economic diversity and increased racial diversity. Perhaps most importantly for proponents of merit, the policy was also better at creating a stellar incoming class of freshmen.
Table 1, below, compares the outsized share of enrollment by certain racial/ethnic groups at schools with barriers to academic achievement, versus high schools overall. (High schools where fewer students take the SAT or ACT, for example, tend to enroll more Hispanic students.) These figures suggest that, if a college wants to give preference to a group of students who have had fewer opportunities placed before them, even when defined in a race-neutral way, it would inevitably benefit at least one racial/ethnic group more than others.
Table 1
Some students face uphill battles to access college, based on high school characteristics.
Groups with outsized representation highlighted
Colleges ought to give boosts in the admissions process to students from the high schools in Table 1, be it to pursue racial diversity or another goal, such as rewarding students who achieved high GPAs amid environments that weren’t conducive to high achievement. But more importantly, Table 1 shows that increases in racial groups receiving a benefit is not “proof” of a race-conscious scheme or of racial discrimination. Given that the plaintiffs in SFFA pointed to race-neutral alternatives as justification for removing race-based affirmative action, it would be a cruel irony that those same alternatives are removed through the Trump administration’s so-called enforcement of the ruling.
Many of the attacks on diversity initiatives, including the Dear Colleague Letter, are part of a bigger plan to reverse decades of progress in closing the gap between haves and have-nots. Colleges recognize that they are a poor representation of society. They want to fix it. This opinion seeks to chill those efforts. For the nation’s rich and well-connected, it’s a win-win. Colleges would be forced to forgo federal funds (meaning only the rich would be able to afford them) or they would make their own policy changes that exclude low-income students (leaving more room for children from wealthy families).
The legal architect of the assault on racial diversity over the last several decades, Edward Blum, who also recently sued the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy over the use of race in their admissions practices, foreshadowed the long game last month, saying, “This is an ongoing battle…there is no endpoint. I said that the Harvard opinion was the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.”
OCR Would Have Institutions Think They’re in Checkmate. They Are Not.
Through the Dear Colleague letter, OCR wants colleges to feel like they’re in checkmate, with no winning moves. The administration doesn’t have that power, and colleges can’t give it to them.
The Supreme Court’s SFFA decision was about the role of race in college admissions. OCR’s letter goes beyond that in a way that is simply off-base, encompassing virtually all programs at schools and universities, including race-neutral policies. But even in the very thing SFFA is actually about, the letter gets the facts wrong.
Facts be damned, the Trump administration’s education officials want colleges to choose between diversity in their student body and their continued existence. It is a false choice, a scare tactic. As others have pointed out, colleges have the protections of due process, and the courts’ judgment supersedes OCR’s. The risk to universities’ missions from undercompliance is less than the risk from overcompliance.
But if that is not reason enough, colleges should consider another risk. Institutions that bend over backwards to serve only the wealthy will gain no sympathy from the vast majority of American families who do not have the resources or connections to send their children to highly rejective institutions. Most Americans are not among the lucky few who can buy their children access to a selective institution. Absent positive change, “elite” schools will continue to lag behind the rest of higher education in public opinion, which in turn props the door open for policymakers to threaten to raise endowment taxes or impose cost-sharing.
Should colleges follow the path laid down by OCR, the far-right can say to middle-class and working-class voters, “Elite, liberal institutions are closed to people like you,” and public trust will be lost even further. As great as the immediate threat seems, the longer-term threat is even greater. Society has endowed elite colleges with immense power, and they need to use that for good, promoting upward mobility rather than entrenched privilege. One letter does not change that mission.
Tags: college admissions, school diversity, diversity, university admissions, college students