CARDONA: COLLEGES SHOULD STILL SEEK DIVERSITY
The Biden administration, in its first guidance on how to handle the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, offered colleges and universities on Monday something of a road map for how to achieve diverse classes while abiding by the court decision.
The administration said schools still had broad latitude when it comes to expanding its pool of applicants, through recruitment, and retaining underrepresented students through diversity and inclusion programs, such as affinity clubs.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, in a news briefing, made it clear that the administration faced the task of enforcing a court ruling that it strongly disagreed with. “This is a moment of great urgency in higher education,” Cardona said.
Alluding to how the enrollment of students of color had initially plunged in states that have banned affirmative action, he said, “We cannot afford that kind of backsliding on a national scale.”
The guidance from the Education and Justice Departments — in what is known as a “Dear Colleague” letter, accompanied by a questions-and-answers document — did not address some of the more contentious issues around the court’s decision, including how it would apply to hiring, student scholarships for particular racial groups and potential conflicts between state and federal policies.
The administration’s letter urged colleges to maintain or create pipeline programs to prepare and recruit a diverse student body.
It said the court’s decision “does not require institutions to ignore race when identifying prospective students for outreach and recruitment,” as long as all students, whether targeted or not, “enjoy the same opportunity to apply and compete for admission” into the recruitment programs.
Conservative activists have threatened to challenge any recruitment methods that could be seen as a proxy for consideration of race.
But the Biden administration’s letter endorsed recruiting students through targeted characteristics — including whether they live in a city, suburb or rural area, their family background, experiences of adversity including discrimination, and whether the students speak more than one language.
At least one critic of racial preferences found the guidance on outreach to be fair.
“I actually think it’s a good idea to target racial groups that have been historically underserved by an institution and try to find ways to increase the chance of applying,” said Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles.
He said it was unlikely that anyone would challenge such a program, “and if they did, you’d have a pretty good chance of surviving, because it’s separated from the admissions process.”