Top Colleges Continuing Diversity Drives

A Supreme Court ruling in June that colleges could no longer factor in race when considering potential students ended a decades-old affirmative action policy designed to boost the numbers of Black and Hispanic students.

Despite the court’s ruling, some top colleges, with guidance from the Biden administration, are continuing diversity drives when selecting students, the Daily Mail reported. 

Students who wish to attend Harvard, UMass and Tufts, for example, are being asked on application websites for details about their upbringing, community, and what makes them “diverse.”

To counter the Supreme Court decision, the Biden administration on Monday began urging colleges to use a range of strategies to promote racial diversity. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the administration faced the task of enforcing a court ruling that it strongly disagreed with, The New York Times reported.

“This is a moment of great urgency in higher education,” Dr. Cardona said.

In a letter, the Biden administration 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.

The Biden administration wants institutions to focus on recruiting in high minority areas and take steps to retain students of color who are already on campus, including by offering affinity clubs geared toward students of a certain race, the Daily Mail reported.

The Biden administration guidance advises colleges to consider how an applicant’s race has shaped their personal experience, as detailed in students’ application essays or letters of recommendation. It also encourages colleges to consider ending preferences for legacy students and the children of donors.

“Ensuring access to higher education for students from different backgrounds is one of the most powerful tools we have to prepare graduates to lead an increasingly diverse nation and make real our country’s promise of opportunity for all,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

“A university could consider an applicant’s explanation about what it means to him to be the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra or an applicant’s account of overcoming prejudice when she transferred to a rural high school where she was the only student of South Asian descent,” according to the Biden administration guidance.

Schools can also consider a letter of recommendation describing how a student “conquered her feelings of isolation as a Latina student at an overwhelmingly white high school to join the debate team,” it says.

Students should feel comfortable to share “their whole selves” in the application process, the administration said.

Students for Fair Admission, the group that brought the issue to the Supreme Court through lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, sent a letter to 150 universities in July saying they must “take immediate steps to eliminate the use of race as a factor in admissions.”