Can race-neutral admissions enroll diverse students? Here's what Ohio colleges can do

Jefferson Blackburn-Smith remembers the fallout at Ohio State University following the U.S. Supreme Court's previous affirmative action decision 20 years ago.

In 2003, the court ruled in favor of Grutter v. Bollinger, upholding universities' ability to consider an applicant's race in admissions, so long as it was one factor among many and applicants were evaluated on an individual basis. But in Gratz v. Bollinger, a separate case decided on the same day, justices struck down the use of points-based admissions systems that awarded students of color a bonus for their race on their applications.

Ohio State was using a similar points system in its admissions department, said Blackburn-Smith, who at the time was a director of undergraduate admissions and first-year experience at the university. That led to a complete reengineering of its processes.

Higher education: Most Ohio colleges don't use race in admissions. How will court decision affect them?

Blackburn-Smith said Ohio State began reviewing the majority of applications by hand and created a new scale to weigh applicants’ merits. The university hired 30 outside readers, in addition to its more than 20 staff members, and introduced new training on how to read student's applications.

"There were ways to bring race into the decision without making it the only factor," Blackburn-Smith said.

Now, after this summer's Supreme Court decision to end race-conscious admissions practices, Blackburn-Smith (who now works at Otterbein University as its vice president of enrollment management) said he expects many schools will be reengineering their admissions processes once more.

The Class of 2024 will be the first to apply to colleges this fall under this new order. Without considering an applicant's race, what other options do Ohio colleges and universities have to create diverse classes on campus?

Colleges likely to see fewer students of color enroll

Before the Supreme Court officially overturned the use of affirmative action in college admissions, nine U.S. states had already banned the practice.

California, which ended all state affirmative action programs through Proposition 209 in 1996, was the first to make such a ban. Eight other states eventually followed: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.

After California's ban, the entire University of California system saw a hit to their enrollment numbers, said Mitchell Chang, a professor and interim vice provost of equity, diversity, and inclusion at University of California Los Angeles.

Public institutions statewide saw a 12% decrease in the students from underrepresented groups the first year following the ban. UC Berkley and UCLA saw the biggest blows, with a 60% drop in Black, Latinx and Indigenous students, among the steepest in the university system.

It took many of those schools years to recover, Chang said.

“It took about a little over 10 years to get the Latino numbers back to where they were pre-Proposition 209, and African Americans closer to 20 years, especially for male (students) beyond athletics,” Chang said.

Other states have had similar experiences.

Since 2006, after Michigan passed a ban on race-conscious admissions, Black undergraduate enrollment at the University of Michigan has dropped nearly by half, from 7% to barely 4.5% in 2022, according to university data.

Colleges in states with affirmative action bans not only saw a reduction in the number of applicants from underrepresented communities, Chang said. Schools also saw a smaller yield of students of color from their applicant pools, meaning fewer students who were admitted actually enrolled at the institution.

Chang said those smaller yields are a consequence of less diversity on campus, making them an unattractive choice to students of color who want to attend a college where they will fit in and don’t want to experience microaggressions and stereotype threat at a higher rate.

Blackburn-Smith said it's important to note that this is seen most at highly selective institutions, like Ivy-Plus schools and state flagships universities where there are far more applicants who apply than seats available for students.

Can race-neutral admissions increase student diversity?

Despite such bans, many states have attempted to maintain and increase diverse student populations on their campuses through race-neutral means to varying levels of success.

Elise Colin, a research assistant with the Urban Institute's Center on Education Data and Policy, said there are a lot of different avenues schools can take to enroll diverse student bodies, but “the first step is making sure you have a diverse pool from that start.”

That means schools need to have solid K-12 pipelines and good relationships with school districts, especially those with large minority student populations. Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin, for instance, created partnership programs with underrepresented schools to recruit, provide financial aid and support to a certain number of students.

Chang said California’s ban led UCLA to switch to a more holistic approach to admissions, rather than looking at just numbers such as grades and test scores (which they no longer consider, as a state that is now “test blind” as of 2020.)

The university began considering the types of courses students took in high school, extracurriculars and local contexts, that is, “What kinds of educational opportunities are being provided by the schools that students attend?” Chang said.

UCLA also began engaging more with neighborhoods where fewer students were applying. College advisors visited those schools and offered mentoring and tutoring. As a result, more students from those schools visited University of California schools.

Texas, as well as Florida and California, also instituted percentage plans, where a percentage of students from the top of a high school’s graduating class would be automatically admitted to state universities. By admitting students from a number of high schools around the state, the idea is that universities would be more representative of its state’s population, thus reflecting its diversity.

Another popular race-neutral enrollment option is class-based affirmative action, meaning schools consider a student’s socioeconomic background and give greater weight to disadvantaged applicants.

But Bryan J. Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute Center on Education Data and Policy, said there is no silver bullet.

“What works all depends on context,” Cook said. “It involves a lot of trial and error, and innovative, creative approaches.”

Take class-based admissions, for instance. Cook said while students of color are more likely to come from low-income backgrounds, there are also a lot of white students from low-income families. So a better approach, he said, might be to layer an applicant’s socioeconomic background and their ZIP code to get a fuller picture.

“When you layer different factors, you begin to see how a school could take multiple approaches,” Cook said. “But even that approach still isn’t like just being able to consider race as a factor.”

In an amicus brief filed in support of the University of North Carolina and Harvard University’s Supreme Court cases, the University of Michigan laid out its “extensive race-neutral efforts to increase diversity.”

“The University has conducted year-round recruiting and outreach campaigns to identify and contact talented students, including minority students, from across the country; attended recruiting fairs in areas with substantial minority populations; hosted workshops for high-school counselors; maintained an office in Detroit to recruit local high school students; coordinated campus visits for high school students; enlisted current students and others to contact admitted minority students, among others, and encourage them to enroll; and hosted events for admitted students.”

In that time, Michigan was able to get diverse student enrollment back to pre-Grutter levels.

In 2006, the last admissions year before Michigan’s ban took effect, undergraduate students of color made up nearly 13% of Michigan’s total enrollment. By 2014, that number dropped to 10.67%. In 2021, students of color represented 13.46% of undergraduates.

What’s at stake?

Not all efforts are in vain, however, said Otterbein’s Blackburn-Smith. There are still significant ways schools can holistically consider applicants and create diverse campuses.

About a decade ago, Blackburn-Smith said Otterbein, which has never considered race in its application process, began “very aggressively” recruiting students from low-income families and urban districts.

In 2012, about 12% of Otterbein freshmen were from underrepresented minorities. This fall, students of color make up 35% of Otterbein’s roughly 550 student incoming class.

Research has found that diverse campuses benefit all students. Which is just one reason why Blackburn-Smith said the stakes are high for universities to understand the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision and revise their admissions processes accordingly.

“We would hate to see that fewer students are applying,” Blackburn-Smith said. “As a society and as a culture, we need those students.”

shendrix@dispatch.com

@sheridan120

aesmith@gannett.com

@arismith02

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Can race-neutral admissions enroll diverse students? Experts say results vary