Higher Ed Ponders Diversity Strategies Following Court Ruling

After the U.S. Supreme Court ended race-conscious college admissions policies in June, focus turned to searching for alternatives. Seemingly everything from using class-based preferences to ditching legacy admissions to replacing admittance regimes with lottery systems has been suggested. But can these race-neutral means allow colleges and universities to maintain their current levels of diversity? Here is a look at some more common ideas offered up with the latest evidence on whether the measures can maintain enrollment rates among students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Socioeconomic status

One of the most proposed alternatives to race-conscious admissions is to use socioeconomic status (SES) instead — to give an advantage to students from families with less money. Race and SES are deeply intertwined, and so the argument goes, focusing on wealth would benefit students from underrepresented backgrounds. However, research has repeatedly shown that even aggressive admissions policies based on SES fail to generate as much diversity as policies that use race.

In the most recent study, performed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), researchers simulated admissions policies that used SES in combination with factors such as high school class rank, grades, and standardized test scores. The results revealed that, in models ignoring race and ethnicity, percentages of underrepresented minorities at selective schools dropped.

There may be multiple reasons for these outcomes. Though many underrepresented groups are collectively ‘worse off’ economically than white and Asian applicants, there are still plenty of economically disadvantaged whites and Asians who would receive admissions benefits under any SES policy.

Dr. Zack Mabel“Even though applicants who are white and Asian tend to come from more upper-class backgrounds — because there’s a large number of those students — over half of the students that you’re potentially giving a boost to are actually coming from overrepresented racial and ethnic groups,” said Dr. Zack Mabel, a research professor at Georgetown CEW. He worked on the study.

Another factor is that, because of structural racism, white families often have educational advantages that Black families do not enjoy, even if they have the same net worth. White families, including those a low net worth, are less likely than Black families to live in impoverished neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods, schools tend to have fewer resources, and there are more likely to be environmental hazards like lead paint, asbestos, and toxic waste that can impact learning. Thus, students from white families may appear to demonstrate higher levels of academic merit than Black peers with similar economic status.