Unequal Futures: Florida’s universities admit far fewer students from low-income areas
High school seniors across the state dream of attending the University of Florida, with thousands more teens applying every year, leaving the majority of applicants disappointed when admissions decisions are released each February.
But becoming a Gator is more likely for students at high schools in wealthy suburbs like Oviedo than their peers from schools in poor urban areas like Pine Hills.
It’s not just UF.
Admissions at Florida universities have become increasingly competitive for all applicants in the last decade. But an Orlando Sentinel investigation found it’s even harder for students from low-income families, who are disproportionately Black, to be accepted than for their wealthier peers.
Students at high schools that serve poorer communities struggle to gain admission and they’re less likely to enroll in Florida’s public universities than their peers in wealthier communities, according to University of North Florida professor Mary Borg, who analyzed three years of data from the state university system for the Orlando Sentinel.
The average Florida high school where 40% of students are from low-income families will have 11 more students enroll at UF and 16 more at the University of Central Florida than a school of the same size where 80% are disadvantaged, Borg found.
Two Orange County high schools, West Orange High School near Winter Garden, which serves a largely middle-class community, and Evans High School, in mostly poor Pine Hills, illustrate those stark differences. At West Orange, 48 of the school’s 537 graduates received admission offers to UF in fall 2020. At Evans, 10 miles east, fewer than 10 graduates were admitted.
And UF wasn’t the only school that favored West Orange graduates. Florida State University admitted 69 would-be Seminoles from West Orange, 47% of those who applied, and just 14, or 15% of those who applied, from Evans. And UCF accepted 101 graduates from West Orange, or 52% of applicants, and just 10 from Evans, or 20%.
These inequities during the admissions process result in state campuses with few Black students. Despite making up 21% of the state’s high school graduates, Black students are vastly underrepresented at 10 of the state’s 12 public universities, including campuses that tout their diversity and present themselves as champions of opportunity for residents.
At UF, they account for less than 6% of undergraduate enrollment, or 2,000 of nearly 35,000 students. The university admitted just a quarter of the Black high school seniors who applied for fall 2020 admission, compared with 40% of the white applicants.
The Sentinel’s investigation, which was funded by a grant from the Education Writers Association, also found that these disparities are exacerbated by Florida’s continued reliance on college entrance exams during the admissions process. While many state university systems have stopped requiring applicants to submit scores from the college entrance exams, Florida has not.
Students from low-income families, on average, score lower on those tests, which some research suggests are not consistent predictors of college success.
Thousands of recent high school graduates each year, including those who don’t gain admission to state universities, start at Florida’s state colleges. Though students who enroll at the state colleges are guaranteed admission to public universities after receiving associate degrees, it typically takes them longer to earn a bachelor’s degree than it does for their peers who enroll immediately at the universities.
Public universities should prioritize providing an affordable, accessible education to all residents, said Terry Vaughan III, the vice president for research and director for the Pell Institute at the Council for Opportunity in Education, which advocates for college access for low-income and first-generation students.
“If your residents cannot participate in the public institutions, then what is the point of the public institutions?” Vaughan said. “The whole idea of public institutions is to provide the resources needed for the state to prosper.”
Black students scarce
Since former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ended affirmative action in 1999, the state’s public universities can’t use race as a factor when making admissions decisions. At the time, Bush described race-based university admissions as discriminatory and vowed to improve educational opportunities for Black and Hispanic students.
Florida is one of fewer than 10 states that ban public universities from using race in admissions decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently weighing a pair of cases involving challenges of race-conscious admission programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina and if the court determines the programs are unlawful, the decision could jeopardize affirmative action at colleges and universities across the country.
When Florida ended affirmative action more than two decades ago, students of color accounted for about 32% of those enrolled at the state’s universities. Across the state, 13.5% of public university students identified as Black.
Changes to federal reporting requirements in 2010 make it difficult to directly compare the number of Black students currently attending state universities to the number enrolled when Florida ended affirmative action. But Black students clearly remain underrepresented, as data from the state university system shows they comprised just 16% of students at universities in 2020.
Black students are even scarcer among traditional freshmen, who enroll at universities immediately after finishing high school. Less than 12% of the first-year students who started in fall 2020 were Black and of that group, 30% were concentrated at the state’s historically Black campus, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
At UF, there is “absolutely a concern” about the scarcity of Black students, said Mary Parker, the school’s vice president of enrollment management. The university needs to do a better job recruiting students from low-income areas, she said.
“We don’t get a lot of applications,” Parker said. “I think students think they can’t get in.”
UF does receive far fewer applications from Black students than from white students, data provided by the state university system shows. In 2020, the equivalent of roughly 30% of the state’s white high school graduates applied for fall admission at UF, but less than 10% of their Black peers did.
The university is working to improve its outreach to counselors and alumni to increase the pipeline of potential students, Parker said. Some students “self-select out,” she said, thinking UF might not be a place welcoming to them. The school is trying to do away with “false narratives” that Parker heard when she arrived, including that no Black students had applied nor gotten in. Neither are true.
This fall, the number of Black freshmen increased to roughly 400, up from a little over 300 last year. Parker attributes that result, in part, to individual phone calls to low-income admitted students to discuss their financial aid packages and efforts to assure students of color that they will feel welcome. But Black students account for just 6% of UF’s freshman class this fall.
And state university system data shows that at high schools with more disadvantaged students, fewer graduates enroll at UF.
Consider two similarly sized South Florida campuses: At Cooper City High School in an affluent part of suburban Broward County, 142 of the school’s graduates in 2020 applied to UF and 47, or a third, were admitted for the fall. At nearby Miramar High School, in a less-wealthy area of the county, 49 students applied and 15, or about 31%, were accepted to UF.
More than 80% of the students at Miramar are Black and the majority come from low-income families. Though the campus, a stone’s throw from the Miami-Dade County line, has a rigorous International Baccalaureate program, less than 3% of the class received offers for fall 2020 admission at UF.
At Cooper City, where less than a third of students are poor and just 6% of the 2020 graduates were Black, nearly 9% of graduates were accepted to UF for the fall.
For the few Black students who do enroll at UF, those disparities can be striking.
“You’re walking on campus and you see tons of white people, but you don’t see one Black person,” said Maya Bhola, a 2021 Miramar High School graduate and UF sophomore who is Black.
Upon arriving at UF, Bhola joined several organizations tailored to serving Black students, including the Black Student Union and Black Students in Business. It’s possible for Black UF students to find peers with similar backgrounds if they intentionally seek them out, she said.
But she fears that UF’s increasingly competitive admissions process, with its heavy emphasis on high school GPAs and test scores, will eventually shut out Black students.
“As they continue to become more competitive, it’s going to be harder for minorities to get in,” she said.
At USF, Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society has denounced the lack of Black students on campus for years, urging the university to step up recruiting efforts for students from underrepresented backgrounds, provide more scholarships and slash funding for the campus police force, which they say makes some Black students feel unwelcome.
School administrators have rebutted those requests, saying disparities between white and Black students exist almost everywhere, said Gareth Dawkins, a Black undergraduate who first enrolled at USF in 2019. Black students made up just 7% of the freshmen admitted for the fall 2020 semester.
USF acknowledged that the number of Black students has not increased at the same rate as the university’s overall enrollment. The school is “taking a critical look,” at recruitment and working with groups like the USF Black Leadership Network to develop a plan and pre-college programs to help boost Black enrollment, said spokesperson Althea Johnson in an email.
“As a public university, we believe that our student population should reflect the diversity of our state and our communities,” Johnson wrote. “Consistent with USF’s deep commitment to diversity and inclusion, the university will continue to develop and apply new strategies to recruit, enroll, and graduate more students of color from across the state, the nation and the globe.”
But among Black USF students, Dawkins said, “there’s constantly these conversations about feeling alone and isolated and there not being enough Black students on campus.”
Rival UCF doesn’t have many Black students, either. For years, the Orlando school has billed itself as a diverse campus, vowing to “embrace and celebrate a culture of inclusive excellence” on its website and proclaiming that 49% of its students are people of color.
That statistic, which also includes Hispanic and Asian students, masks the scarcity of Black undergraduates at UCF. Black freshmen accounted for less than 8% of UCF’s fall 2020 class.
And although less than 40% of the state’s 2020 graduates were white, that fall, nearly half of UCF’s freshmen class identified as white.
While UCF’s freshman admissions process has become increasingly competitive, Black students faced especially steep odds. The university accepted less than a quarter of the nearly 6,000 Black students who applied to UCF for the fall 2020 semester but more than half of more than 20,000 white students who applied were accepted.
That disparity is reflected in the admission rates from two similarly sized high schools within a 30-minute drive of UCF: At affluent Oviedo’s Hagerty High School, where just 6% of the 2020 graduates were Black, the hometown university accepted 130 of 219 applicants, or nearly 60%. But at Orange County’s Oak Ridge High School, where most students are poor and Black or Hispanic, UCF admitted 20 of 88 applicants, or about 23%.
Theodorea Regina Berry, vice provost for student learning and academic success at UCF, said students need more information, as early as middle school, about what they need to be a competitive college applicant, including advice about which high school courses to take.
“We do recruit students and we are intentional about where we recruit,” Berry said, adding “At the end of the day, we have little control over who actually submits an application and how thorough the application might be.”
Some of the state universities, including UCF and Florida State, offer programs tailored to disadvantaged students. UCF directs roughly 200 students each year to its Access Program, where they complete six weeks of additional academic preparation in the summer before their freshman year before they are fully admitted to the university. Those students are disproportionately Black and Hispanic.
Florida State’s CARE program targets first-generation, low-income college students and provides extra support to students throughout college. The typical CARE student has lower test scores and grades than the average FSU freshman.
FSU initially denied admission to Samaurya Hicks, a 2022 Apopka High School graduate who scored a 20 out of 36 points on the ACT, far lower than most freshmen on campus this fall. But the school later offered her a spot in the CARE program, and she accepted.
“I’m glad I chose Florida State and I wouldn’t have chosen anywhere else,” said Hicks, who is majoring in business management.
State college students graduate slower
Admissions have become much more competitive during the past two decades and the state’s most selective schools now hand out more denials than acceptances. UF admitted roughly 60% of its applicants for the fall 1999 semester, but in 2021, the Gainesville school accepted less than a third of its applicants. At the University of Central Florida, more than 60% of students who applied for fall admission in 1999 were accepted. In 2021, the school admitted 45% of applicants.
Catherine Murray, a first-year Valencia College student, learned this year how competitive getting admitted to some state universities has become: Though Murray graduated from high school with a 4.2 GPA and several Advanced Placement courses on her transcript, plus a full slate of extracurricular activities, she was denied a spot at UCF, her top choice.
Murray said she thinks she didn’t get in because her SAT score in the 1100s, though above average compared with her peers across the state, was lower than many students accepted at UCF. Members of UCF’s freshman class scored an average 1325 points on the SAT this year, the school reported.
“I’m a very bad test-taker,” Murray said.
She said just two students from her graduating class at Avon Park High School in rural Highlands County, two hours south of Orlando, were accepted at UCF this year. Though she received offers from other universities, Murray decided to enroll at Valencia, with plans to transfer to UCF through the Direct Connect program, which guarantees university admission to students who earn their associate degrees at six Central Florida state colleges.
That’s how thousands of Florida students enter state universities each year. Statewide, nearly a quarter of undergraduates enrolled in universities first earned associate degrees at state colleges. Many of the state colleges market themselves as a backdoor to the universities.
But students who start at the state colleges, on average, take longer to graduate than their peers who start at the universities. Nearly 60% of students who start at the state universities as freshmen graduate within four years, according to data from the Board of Governors. Only about 45% of students who enter the state universities after receiving an associate degree at a state college go on to complete a bachelor’s degree within two years.
Sherry Paramore, the former president of ELEVATE Orlando, which provides mentoring, scholarships and other resources to students at three Orange County high schools that serve high numbers of low-income students, said she’d like to see more of the at-risk students start at the universities.
“If we could get them straight into a university, they’ll have a better chance of graduation,” said Paramore, who left the organization earlier this year to become a vice president at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach.
Proponents of Direct Connect and similar “two plus two” programs at other state universities tout them as attractive options for students who aren’t admitted to a four-year university right after high school or are worried about the cost of tuition, since the state colleges charge less per credit hour.
The term “two plus two” refers to the time it generally would take a full-time student to complete an associate degree at a state college, plus the additional two years it would take them to finish a bachelor’s degree after transferring to a university.
Terrence Curran, the University of North Florida’s associate vice president for enrollment services, said students in lower-income neighborhoods often think starting at the state college is their only option. Others, he said, don’t look beyond the largest schools, where admissions are most competitive. But he said smaller campuses like UNF have lots of advantages, including small classes and access to faculty members.
“I can also provide you a campus community that is going to make sure you don’t get lost,” Curran said.
Tests hurt disadvantaged students
Florida’s public university system is one of few nationally that still requires students to submit scores from the SAT or ACT college entrance exams. Though many universities adopted test-optional policies after administrators canceled exam sessions in 2020 due to the pandemic, Florida did not.
More than 1,000 colleges and universities across the country, including all eight of the Ivy League schools, have made their admissions processes test-optional, at least through the 2022-2023 school year.
But traditional applicants must take the SAT or ACT to gain admission as a freshman into any of Florida’s 12 public universities and, as the number of applicants has risen over the past two decades, so have the average test scores for admitted students.
At FSU, for example, 75% of the freshmen admitted for this fall received scores of 1300 or higher out of a possible 1600 points on the SAT, better than roughly 86% of their peers across the country. At UCF, this year’s freshman class posted an average score of 1334, in the 88th percentile among test-takers nationwide.
That puts Black and Hispanic students at a disadvantage because they, on average, score lower than white and Asian students, advocates say. Black students scored an average of 934 points on the test in 2021, while Hispanic students received 967, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The average score was 1112 for white students and 1239 for Asians.
Florida universities consider other criteria during the admissions process, including high school grade-point averages and coursework; extracurricular activities; and sometimes personal essays. But test scores remain an important factor, creating an unnecessary barrier for disadvantaged students, Paramore said.
“There are other ways to measure academic achievement than the SAT or ACT,” Paramore said.
Students at high schools that serve lower-income neighborhoods also tend to score lower than their counterparts in wealthier areas. At Pine Hills’ Evans High School, one of the schools that ELEVATE serves, students who graduated in 2020 scored an average of 841 points on the SAT, far below most students admitted to state universities that year. At West Orange, graduates scored an average of 1028 points, above the state average and high enough to be seriously considered for admission at some state universities.
Overall, West Orange students racked up 437 admissions offers from state universities, more than four times the number that Evans graduates received. That fall, 141 students from the Winter Garden school enrolled in state universities, while just 32 from Evans did.
Advocates and higher education officials disagree on whether entrance exams should continue to play a role in college admissions.
Paramore said she thinks there are better ways to predict who is likely to do well in college and a bevy of research supports her position. A study published in 2020 out of the University of Chicago found that high school GPAs were a “strong and consistent” predictor of future college success, while ACT scores were not. The study looked at more than 17,000 Chicago high school graduates who enrolled in four-year colleges immediately after completing high school.
High school GPAs, the researchers found, “are not equivalent measures of readiness across high schools, but they are strongly predictive in all schools,” likely because they measure a variety of skills and behaviors necessary for success in college. Additionally, the authors said, spending extensive time preparing for standardized tests was less likely to prepare a student for college than devoting that time to coursework.
In some families, test preparation is a rite of passage. Boca Raton father David Serle said last spring he was spending up to $750 a week for tutoring to help his daughter learn the “tricks of the trade” and ace the college admissions tests. UF is the college pinnacle for Serle’s 12th-grade daughter and seemingly all of her friends and classmates, he said.
“Everyone wants to go to the University of Florida and if you don’t get into the University of Florida, you’re a failure,” he said, describing how his daughter and her friends talk about college.
Serle’s daughter attends majority-white Spanish River Community High School in Boca Raton, where 75 students of the 204 who applied to UF received admissions offers in 2020. The school had 637 graduates that year, so nearly 12% of the class received offers to UF. Nearly 39% of the graduates from that campus, where less than a third of students come from poor families, enrolled in a state university.
A half an hour north, at Santaluces Community High School in working-class Lantana, 10 students, or less than 2% of the school’s 639 graduates, received admissions offers to UF. Roughly 9% of the school’s graduates, who were mostly Black and Hispanic, started at a state university that fall. Most Santaluces students also are economically disadvantaged, with roughly 72% qualifying for free or reduced-price meals.
Spanish River’s class of 2020 scored an average 1091 points on the SAT, within the middle-50% range for admitted freshmen that fall at several state universities, including nearby Florida Atlantic University, where 92 Spanish River graduates enrolled. The average score for Santaluces graduates was 910, not high enough to gain admission at many state universities.
Proponents of using college entrance exams in the admissions process argue that high school grading systems are inconsistent and test scores do provide valuable information about students. In 2019, a task force formed by the University of California system found that scores better predicted the GPAs of first-year college students than high school GPAs did and were about as equally good at forecasting whether students would return for their second year.
Entrance exam scores were especially good at predicting college success for students from underrepresented backgrounds, including students of color and those from low-income households or who were the first in their families to attend college, the task force report said. The university system’s comprehensive review of applications, which considers more than a dozen other factors, likely helped make up for disparities in test scores between disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers, the group found.
University admissions officials say that there are limited reliable ways for them to judge students’ academic potential, and college entrance exams are one of them.
“We get criticized because we use the SAT and ACT, but what else do we have to use?,” said Glen Besterfield, the dean of admissions and associate vice president of student success at USF.
Some high schools tend to produce stronger candidates because of the type of coursework they offer, he said, and focusing solely on a student’s GPA and transcript “doesn’t necessarily create a level playing field, either.”
Others say they still think test scores are significant, including John Barnhill, the associate vice president for academic affairs at Florida State. Barnhill said he believes they generally reflect how prepared a student is for college.
Still, he acknowledged the admissions process is rife with inequities, with some families able to pay for college coaches and exam preparation, assistance that’s out of reach for low-income students, said
“I think the playing field isn’t level at all, on any level,” he said.
Many universities, including FSU, tout the average test scores of incoming freshman each year as evidence of the academic talent they are attracting. But some students are discouraged from even applying when they see schools advertise median test scores for admitted students that are well above their own scores, said Abaco Rayner, the former college and career readiness coordinator for Volusia County schools.
“They see, ‘Oh I’m scoring in the 1100s and these kids that are going to this school are scoring 13-something,’” said Rayner, who previously worked as a counselor at Deltona High School.
Students from high schools that serve low-income communities tend to submit fewer applications to state universities than their peers in wealthier communities, the Board of Governors data shows.
At Deltona High School, where nearly 60% of students are from low-income families, roughly 400 graduates submitted 121 applications in 2020. That year, students scored an average of 1009 points on the SAT, slightly above the average for Florida public schools.
But across the county at similarly sized Seabreeze High School, where less than 40% of students are poor, graduates submitted nearly three times as many applications as their Deltona peers in 2020. The Seabreeze graduating class scored an average 1112 points on the SAT, more than 100 points better than the Deltona graduates. That fall, 52 Seabreeze alumni enrolled at state universities, compared with just 19 from Deltona.
Test scores remain an important part of USF’s admission process, but the school started putting less emphasis on test scores about three years ago after a Tampa-area valedictorian was denied admission because their test scores were deemed too low, Besterfield said.
“At the end of the day, I denied a great student to the university that I knew would succeed and we would be proud of,” he said.
The student appealed the school’s decision and was ultimately admitted, he said.
Other campuses also are putting less weight on test scores during the admissions process, including UNF. The Jacksonville school, which admitted more than three-quarters of applicants during the 2022 admissions cycle, is among the state’s least selective universities.
A student’s high school transcript shows whether they tackled tough courses successfully, UNF’s Curran said. If the decision were left solely to him, he said he “would take any student with a 3.5 GPA or better.”
“I don’t believe in test scores. I don’t think test scores are a true measure of a student’s ability,” Curran said.
Still, more than three-quarters of UNF’s fall freshman class scored 1000 points or better on the SAT, putting them above the state average.
‘We have some work to do’
While campuses like UNF offer opportunities for students who don’t have the credentials to get into UF, attending the state’s unofficial flagship is lifelong dream for many Florida teenagers.
But some Black teenagers fear UF might not be a welcoming place for them. Black students and faculty say it’s especially difficult to find people who look like them in predominately white Gainesville, a small college town where just 21% of residents are Black.
For Shannon Biassou, an Evans graduate who was admitted to UF and FSU, that was reason enough to say “no thanks” to UF and opt for FSU instead. Other students told her FSU and Tallahassee were more diverse and, as a Black student, she’d feel more comfortable there.
Still, FSU’s campus felt very different from her high school’s, where 84% of students are Black. In some of her classes, Biassou said she is one of just a few Black students.
“It is completely different from Evans,” she said. “It was a bit of a culture shock.”
Professor David Canton, director of the African American Studies program at UF, said in a class he taught last spring, just two of 27 students were Black.
He and his wife can go out to eat in Gainesville and see no other Black families seated in the restaurant. For would-be Black UF students, a mostly white campus and town might make them “doubt the environment is conducive to their success.”
Canton, who took the job in 2020, said he is working with admissions staff to help boost Black enrollment, by doing virtual sessions with students and meeting in person with local high school students.
“I’m optimistic, but I’m not naïve about history,” he said. ”We have some work to do.”
