How "race-neutral" can universities really be?
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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.
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.
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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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What happened after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action?
0:56–1:26
2
How have Black and Hispanic enrollment numbers changed?
1:26–5:38
3
What is the significance of socioeconomic status in admissions?
5:38–7:04
4
How are universities adapting to a race-neutral admissions process?
7:04
5
What are the implications of the PhD Project investigation?
2:13–4:17
6
How do universities maintain diversity without race-based data?
4:17–8:57
7
What alternative methods are being used for college admissions?
8:57–12:55
8
What challenges do universities face in maintaining diversity initiatives?
12:55–20:41