After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in higher education, there was legitimate worry that Black and Hispanic students would be overlooked or otherwise shut out of college admissions. But the enrollment numbers are showing something different. In some cases, even without the aid of race-based decision making, Black and Hispanic enrollment either stayed the same or increased. What does the data tell about the decisions admissions offices are making when thinking about demographics of their student body? And what does that process mean for future culture clashes about diversity and inclusion? NPR's Elissa Nadworny and labor economist Zach Bleemer join the show to get into the enigmatic world of college admissions and why higher education is still pushing for diversity in an anti-DEI minefield.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What happened after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action?
It's worth thinking a little bit about where this term is coming from.
After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, many have been curious to see how the ruling would affect college admissions, particularly as it pertains to race.
The worry was, OK, you get rid of programs that used race in admissions, then you're going to see the percentage of Black students, the percentage of Hispanic students go down and the number of white students go up. But That didn't happen.
Chapter 2: How have Black and Hispanic enrollment numbers changed?
Not exactly.
What we've seen in states that have banned affirmative action is that some schools have basically no effect in terms of their Black and Hispanic enrollment due to a cascade effect. So UC Berkeley doesn't have an affirmative action program. They might not get into Berkeley, but they're still going to go to college somewhere.
And so if you look at the least selective schools, they actually gain in Black and Hispanic enrollment.
Now, some of this was already in the works. For example, places like Yale University have been steadily increasing their Black and Latino student enrollment for years. And while there has been some expected decline at some institutions like Amherst and MIT, I was shocked to learn that there were some cases where Black and Latino enrollment either stayed the same or went up.
And that hasn't gone unnoticed. As a part of the Trump administration's policy to end DEI, over 50 schools are being investigated for alleged racial discrimination against white and Asian students.
The majority of those like 50 plus universities are being investigated over a program called the PhD Project, which basically helps doctoral students who are underrepresented get PhDs. This small nonprofit has helped about 1,700 people get PhDs. And so I think that there is a really big concern that even these small programs, these are all on the table and ripe for investigation.
And I think that is really going to have even more of a chilling effect on institutions going forward.
At the same time, Harvard just announced that it'll make tuition free for families with income under $200K as a way to make it more accessible. And that made me wonder, as DEI initiatives are being shut down and hefty legal fines threaten longstanding endowments, why do some of these schools seem to be getting more inclusive?
And more importantly, how are they doing this without racial demographic data? To find out, I'm joined by NPR's Alyssa Nadwarni. Excited to be here. And labor economist Zach Bleamer.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of socioeconomic status in admissions?
And so if you just target race, you tend to get middle income and at some schools higher income black and Hispanic students because the lower income black and Hispanic students have even lower test scores and providing a bump just on the basis of race won't be enough for those kids.
On the flip side, when you target just on the basis of income, you tend to get lower income white and Asian students because the lower income black and Hispanic students tend to have even lower test scores and the bump isn't sufficient for them.
I mean, and of course, you know, every student, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, has the capacity to learn, to achieve, to do well and what have you in college. But what you're saying is that these are some ways that policy affects who's getting admitted to college.
And so you sort of end up with different groups under these two different policies, but also race-based affirmative action tends to bring in middle-income or sometimes upper-income students who need much less financial aid than the lower-income white and Asian students who tend to get pulled in by class-based affirmative action.
Fascinating. Oh, my gosh. I'm sorry. You gave me so much to think about with that. Gosh. Some people have called what you're talking about, even specifically looking at income or zip codes or high schools or whatnot. A lot of people call what you're talking about in that sense, like, quote, unquote, race neutral alternatives for decision making.
What do you all think about that term, race neutral alternatives?
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Chapter 4: How are universities adapting to a race-neutral admissions process?
Chapter 5: What are the implications of the PhD Project investigation?
And that hasn't gone unnoticed. As a part of the Trump administration's policy to end DEI, over 50 schools are being investigated for alleged racial discrimination against white and Asian students.
The majority of those like 50 plus universities are being investigated over a program called the PhD Project, which basically helps doctoral students who are underrepresented get PhDs. This small nonprofit has helped about 1,700 people get PhDs. And so I think that there is a really big concern that even these small programs, these are all on the table and ripe for investigation.
And I think that is really going to have even more of a chilling effect on institutions going forward.
At the same time, Harvard just announced that it'll make tuition free for families with income under $200K as a way to make it more accessible. And that made me wonder, as DEI initiatives are being shut down and hefty legal fines threaten longstanding endowments, why do some of these schools seem to be getting more inclusive?
And more importantly, how are they doing this without racial demographic data? To find out, I'm joined by NPR's Alyssa Nadwarni. Excited to be here. And labor economist Zach Bleamer.
Hey, thanks for having us.
To get into the mysterious world of college admissions and how higher education is finding its way around an upended system.
They glean. so much information from what I perceived as such little data. And I think maybe this gets to your question of kind of like, what are the theories of kind of how they could do this without specifically asking for a race? They knew about which high schools and where they were. They knew zip codes.
You know, they had tools that kind of showed them maybe income data or demographic data just based on the name of the high school or the name of the town that this person came from. And so, like, you know, they're good at kind of building a whole narrative over just the teeny pieces.
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Chapter 6: How do universities maintain diversity without race-based data?
You know, one theory that I've seen is that, you know, schools figured out that socioeconomic status could be used as a proxy signifier for race. According to the Department of Labor, Black folks, for example, make about 76 cents to a white person's dollar. In what ways does socioeconomic status show up in the admissions process?
So admitting students on the basis of parental income is a lot more expensive than admitting students on the basis of race for schools that are trying to provide financial aid to meet or close to meeting students' financial need as defined by a federal expected family contribution.
And can I jump in and just say like what you mean by that, Zach, is like it's more expensive to admit someone who needs a lot more money to go to your college. The school has to actually like fill the gaps that that student needs. Whereas like race, if it's not connected to income, is like not more expensive or less expensive.
And the reason these things aren't so closely paired to each other is that when it comes to academic preparation, they're kind of additive in the way they contribute to student preparation. So what I mean by that is if you're lower income, you have lower SAT scores than if you're higher income. That's true overall, but it's also true within race.
So if you just look at black applicants to college, lower income black applicants have much lower test scores than higher income black applicants.
And so if you just target race, you tend to get middle income and at some schools higher income black and Hispanic students because the lower income black and Hispanic students have even lower test scores and providing a bump just on the basis of race won't be enough for those kids.
On the flip side, when you target just on the basis of income, you tend to get lower income white and Asian students because the lower income black and Hispanic students tend to have even lower test scores and the bump isn't sufficient for them.
I mean, and of course, you know, every student, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, has the capacity to learn, to achieve, to do well and what have you in college. But what you're saying is that these are some ways that policy affects who's getting admitted to college.
And so you sort of end up with different groups under these two different policies, but also race-based affirmative action tends to bring in middle-income or sometimes upper-income students who need much less financial aid than the lower-income white and Asian students who tend to get pulled in by class-based affirmative action.
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Chapter 7: What alternative methods are being used for college admissions?
Coming up.
I think we're starting to see colleges who were kind of saying, you know, we believe in what we're doing. We believe in this say, well, we're going to take a harder look and make sure we're in line.
The legal costs of trying to maintain diversity initiatives in higher education and beyond.
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So I want to introduce some more complexity into the situation here. There's this man, Edward Bloom. He's the head of Students for Fair Admissions, SFFA, and was also the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that ended affirmative action.
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Chapter 8: What challenges do universities face in maintaining diversity initiatives?
And so I think public universities have long felt a direct part of their mission is representation of their state, not just in terms of race, but also in terms of geography and class and any kind of student background and any large gaps between the high school graduating population and the students on campus.
reflect badly, university administrators think, because they suggest that the California population that has invested in and built UCLA is not as a whole deriving UCLA's benefits.
Okay, but what about private universities? Why would they implement these policies?
Why private universities would implement these policies is very much up to the private university. So just to pull two examples, one university you already mentioned is Northwestern, a second is Georgetown. And there's no reason for Northwestern and Georgetown to have even overlapping missions in the sense that Northwestern is sort of typical of many private universities in the U.S.
It is effectively owned and managed by alumni and donors to the university. And it's admitting whichever students it thinks best serve the private missions of that institution. Georgetown is a Jesuit university. It's owned by the church. And its mission might have nothing to do with, for example, perpetuating alumni wealth or promoting alumni activities on campus. It might.
It's allowed to do whatever it wants except for admit students on the basis of race.
I mean, there's also in this whole conversation, there is an elephant in the room. And yes, I am talking about Republicans, specifically the president and his administration's campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, both within the federal government, but also in education. We know that Trump wants to disband the Department of Education.
He recently laid off, I think, over 1,000 department employees and plans to use the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to go after private and public companies that explicitly or implicitly uphold DEI in some capacity. I think I just saw this morning that the Trump administration was planning to go after, I think, 50 colleges and universities specifically on the grounds of DEI.
Yep. More than 50 universities are being investigated by the Department of Education.
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