Colleges seek diversity ideal but pick differing paths to it

Just a year ago, after the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions program by a single swing vote, the question seemed to be edging, at last, toward an answer: Colleges could, the justices ruled, consider race when deciding whom to let through their gates.

“I thought this was settled,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, an economist at Georgetown University who studies affirmative action. “I thought it was done.” Only for the moment. A series of lawsuits and complaints have continued to challenge such practices, and last week, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department joined the chorus, signaling it would marshal lawyers to investigate and possibly sue colleges for “intentional race-based discrimination” in admissions.

Besieged in court, routed in eight states, accused of favoring blacks and Latinos at the expense of Asians and whites, affirmative action is once again the subject of scrutiny.

But even without federal intervention, a look at affirmative action policies in 2017 shows they have achieved their own kind of diversity, evolving from race-based quotas to a range of approaches that occasionally near the ideal, often by giving preference to students from low-income backgrounds.

“The reason a liberal like me is intrigued by Trump’s actions on affirmative action is that I think it could have the effect of driving universities to really pursuing socioeconomic diversity as a way of indirectly creating racial diversity,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has pushed for classbased admissions to replace race-based admissions.

Public universities in California and Washington, forbidden by state law from considering race in individual admissions decisions, have attempted to use socioeconomic factors as a substitute, hoping to draw from the overlap of minority and low-income students. Others, such as the University of Texas, accept a set percentage of the top students at every state high school. Neither method, however, has fully succeeded in composing student bodies that match the racial makeup of their states.

Other colleges with more freedom to curate their student bodies continue to weigh race as a factor in admissions, which can lead to more diversity. But their decision-making can be so subjective, in the minds of high school seniors staring down application season, it can border on the occult.

It is this opacity that has left few happy: not Asian-American students who feel they are being held to a higher standard and whose complaint against Harvard has become a focus of the Justice Department’s efforts, not white students who feel similarly penalized and not those who remain the theoretical face of affirmative action, African-American and Latino applicants who have said the assumption their success depended on their race could shadow them far beyond commencement.

“When I told people I was going to Princeton, it was not uncommon for me to hear: ‘Oh, you’re going to Princeton because you are black,’” said Jonathan Haynes, a sophomore from Midland, Mich., where 2 percent of the population is black. He was among a group of students pushing Princeton, where 9 percent of students are black, to admit more students from low-income backgrounds.

For Mike Coiro, who will enter Columbia University in the fall, the role race might or might not play in college admissions had inserted itself into conversation after conversation as he and others at his New Jersey boarding school filled out their applications.

“It’s not something I actively worried about but it was definitely in the back of my mind,” he said. “I wondered whether being a straight white male would have any effect on Columbia.”

But Coiro said he supported affirmative action, despite being, in his words, “kind of right-leaning.” That is partly because his best friend, a Hispanic student who is set to be the first person in his family to attend college, will also be a freshman at Columbia in the fall.

“We’re both here,” Coiro said. “I don’t feel disadvantaged at all.”

In states that have rejected affirmative action policies at universities — including Michigan, Washington and Florida — the new approaches to assembling a diverse student body have tended to give an edge to applicants who have overcome disadvantages, such as poor neighborhoods, troubled schools and language barriers.

But though these methods may have somewhat increased the number of low-income students of all backgrounds, racial diversity remains elusive.

Socioeconomic considerations “may be desirable in and of themselves,” said Mark Yudof, a former president of the University of California and former chancellor of the University of Texas. “But I don’t think they can get the job done.”

In the University of California system, which was forced to drop affirmative action programs after voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996, officials have had to rely on what they call “race-neutral” solutions to strive for a student body that more closely mirrors the state’s population.

Starting in 2011, most of the system adopted what university officials call a “holistic” review, under which admissions officers considered the entirety of the applicant’s circumstances, “reading the application beginning to end before making a judgment,” said Han Mi Yoon-Wu, undergraduate admissions director for the system. “Nothing is particularly weighted more than anything else.”

Race is not one of the criteria, but to opponents of race-conscious admissions, such methods sound suspiciously like a euphemism for affirmative action. Admissions officers are using details about a student’s background as a “proxy” for race, said Ward Connerly, an African-American businessman who is a longtime outspoken critic of affirmative action.

Although Latinos made up about 52 percent of students graduating from high school in California in 2016, only about onethird of the freshmen who enrolled in one of the 10 UC campuses that fall were Latino, a disparity Yoon-Wu called “troubling.”

The number of black and Latino students enrolling at Los Angeles and Berkeley, the flagship campuses, has declined even more steeply. Blacks made up about 3 percent of all undergraduates at Berkeley last year, with Asians at 39 percent and whites at 26 percent.

“There is still a lot of work to be done,” YoonWu said.