Diversity still achievable

“Expect a shock,” the president of the University of California warned The Post of the Supreme Court’s then-pending decision to prohibit affirmative action in college admissions. Now the shock has come, and selective schools around the country are scrambling to figure out how they can continue cultivating diverse campuses — legally.

There are strategies to help college campuses continue to look like the whole country, even when admissions officers aren’t allowed to take race into account. But none of those strategies is sufficient — at least not on its own. That means schools might throw the whole playbook at the problem. They can, and should, continue trying to combine and perfect some of the tactics they have tried before. But they have an opportunity for bolder experimentation, too. They should take it.

Judging by the Golden State’s experience after voters in 1996 imposed an affirmative action ban on public universities, the near-complete prohibition on considering applicants’ race could have a dramatic and immediate effect on institutions’ racial makeup. The portion of Black students in the freshman classes at the highly competitive Berkeley campus was at least halved, to 3 percent, after the restriction took effect.

The undergraduate body there still hasn’t recovered, nor have the numbers at the University of Michigan, another flagship university in a state without affirmative action. Today, the school can boast a student body that’s 4 percent Black. But in 2006, before the state banned affirmative action, the number was 7 percent.

Schools have generally employed two sets of strategies to tackle the diversity problem. The first is outreach. California nixing affirmative action didn’t only result in fewer Black and Latino enrollees — it also resulted in fewer qualified Black and Latino applicants. These groups may have gotten the message that they shouldn’t bother trying. Today, universities should tell them the opposite.

UCLA’s VIP Scholars program dispatches volunteers to high schools with largely minority student bodies to mentor kids through the college application process. If they complete the program, they can earn scholarships — but even just showing up to schools, or creating opportunities for campus visits, can make a difference. Similarly, the University of Michigan created an office in Detroit to forge relationships with local high schools.

The second set of strategies involves reexamining factors other than race in a way that, hopefully, still results in racial diversity. Getting rid of so-called legacy preferences — a bump in admissions for the children of alumni, who are often White and wealthy — is more urgent than ever. Reducing slots reserved for, say, distinguished squash players is worth considering, too. Early admissions tends to favor those who already have advantages, so schools should think about scrapping the practice.

Then there are more sweeping changes. The bluntest instrument schools have tried is what’s known as the percent plan, in which public universities automatically admit a percentage of the top students from their state’s public high schools. Such programs have produced limited results — partly because the plans increase diversity only if many of a state’s schools are significantly segregated. Besides, the most selective state schools have tended to opt out, unable to accommodate the volume of admits.

Most promising is an increased emphasis on socioeconomic status. The idea is that higher-income students tend to be Whiter students, too, so offering a leg up to the economically worse-off will yield racial diversity as a byproduct.

The problem is that there are vastly more low-income White households than low-income Black households, meaning income isn’t as solid a proxy for race as it may seem. Using family wealth as an admissions factor has more potential because the racial gap in families’ net worth is even more staggering than the racial gap in their yearly incomes: White Americans have 10 times more wealth than Black Americans. Advocates of this approach point to UCLA’s law school, which has such a policy, to show its success. So wealth is something of a proxy for race, though by no means a perfect one.

Yet considering applicants’ socioeconomic background would bring other benefits, too. Affirmative action policies may have introduced racial diversity to campus, but the minorities selected tended themselves to be disproportionately welloff — convenient for colleges looking to balance their budgets but not necessarily for maximizing the range of life experience among their students.

This fact reflects a larger point mostly lost in the current debate. And it shouldn’t be. More schools should be explaining what diversity on campus actually achieves — what benefits it provides to their student bodies and to the world in which they will live beyond their college years.

The list of possible answers is long. One is recompense for past wrongs, from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. Another is to ensure fair representation in the professional world’s upper echelons. Yet the prevailing explanation, and the one to which courts have been friendliest, is that diversity in education is a good in itself: that students will benefit from learning from students who are different from them, in an environment that looks like the whole country.

Schools seek racial diversity in pursuit of a diversity of experience. An advantage of leaning on family wealth as an admissions metric is that it can help provide just that by bringing students of different races and students of different socioeconomic status onto campuses at the same time. The tactic can assist schools in capturing the fullest possible spectrum of American life — an end more important to these institutions’ mission than the current discourse acknowledges.

As universities explore how to integrate factors such as family wealth into their admissions processes, they could even think more comprehensively. Schools could give a leg up to those whose particular experiences have made it least likely they’ll get through the door on their own. Those students most in need of an advantage will generally tend to be those who’ve previously been most disadvantaged — those whose circumstances have, throughout their lives, rendered it hard to craft picture-perfect résumés. President Biden called this concept of adversity scoring, a version of which has turned UC Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the nation, a “new standard” in admissions.

Poverty certainly increases the adversity a young American faces; so do personal challenges such as health struggles or the death of family members. So could sexual orientation. And so, naturally, could race. The good news is that considering such life experiences dovetails with the permission that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave schools to consider race not for its own sake but as a factor that has shaped students’ lives.

Admissions offices are still allowed to look at who students are. Race is a part of that — and it will not cease to be.