Reyes, now a student at Bentley University, said that finding a diverse campus community was a top priority when applying to colleges and universities — a concern born out of the alienating experiences he had at summer enrichment programs in Boston.
“That really changed me,” he said, a first-generation citizen whose parents immigrated from El Salvador. “I never felt that way before, like being the only person of color in a classroom and just feeling off and questioning if I should be there.”
With applications still to submit, Reyes was focused on the tasks at hand, unaware that a U.S. Supreme Court decision was changing the rules of the college admissions game.
The Supreme Court decided in June 2023 to strike down race-conscious college admissions. Reyes became one of hundreds of thousands of students across the nation whose college applications, for the first time in decades, are being evaluated without considering racial identity.
Studies of states that had previously banned affirmative action policies foreshadow a grueling uphill climb for colleges and universities trying to boost diversity in a post-affirmative action landscape. One example is California, which has seen a sharp decline in enrollment numbers of Black and Latinx students since affirmative action policies were eliminated from schools and workplaces in 1996. Last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released data that shows the percentage of its incoming class of 2028 who are Black, Native American, Hispanic or Pacific Islander fell to 16% from a baseline of 25% in previous years.
Now, many high school students — particularly students of color — are struggling with the sudden change to college admissions rules while others, rather than yielding to feelings of helplessness, are focusing on factors they can control.
Navigating new college application rules
Cristian Lopez, another Excel Academy graduate, said applying to colleges was easier with the help of Minds Matter, a national nonprofit organization that offers one-on-one college advising to minority high school students.
Adequate counseling can help students overcome procedural obstacles such as writing college essays and applying for financial aid and loans as well as intangible hurdles like feeling confident enough to apply to competitive schools. The college application process is “hard,” said Lopez, who is now a Boston College student majoring in Neuroscience. He’s thankful for the opportunities and help Minds Matter provided. Lopez said he would have been “lost” without that help.
Adam Jaffe, Lopez’s Minds Matter mentor, assured him that he could unlock a future in neuroscience despite systemic hurdles. Students can’t control the system, Jaffe told Lopez, “but you can control how you interact with it.”
Jaffe, a retired Brandeis University economics professor, also helped Lopez highlight his heritage in college essays, which the court signaled is an allowable way to discuss applicants’ race and ethnicity. Lopez’s essay focused on how translating for his Spanish-speaking parents at medical appointments sparked his career choice and ambitions of becoming a doctor.
“It’s unfortunate for the courts to tell the schools what tools to use and not use. But I do think there are other ways to achieve those objectives,” Jaffe said. “The end of traditional affirmative action does not have to be the end of diversity.”
Schools searching for a solution
Malden High School is one of the most diverse school districts in Massachusetts. Melissa Loftus and Michelle Sun, two AmeriCorps interns who work at the school’s college and career center, estimate that 60% of Malden students will be the first in their family to attend a four-year college or university.
Malden High is a high-needs school, Sun said, recalling the families she’s met during parent office hours with unconventional tax situations and delicate documentation statuses that can complicate the college application process.
Yet still, an impressive number of low-income students at the school have landed coveted scholarships this year. The Malden High class of 2024 boasts four Posse Scholars and two Questbridge scholars, competitive scholarship programs for low-income students that cover all tuition costs. The school’s advising center is never empty.
Visits from college representatives offer Malden High’s diverse student body some solace amid the uncertainty of affirmative action’s fall. The representatives often highlight supplemental essay questions that prompt students to discuss a social issue they care about or an ethnic, religious, or other identity-based community they contribute to. On the other hand, Loftus whispered, some of the representatives “don’t even know what the term PWI stands for.”
In early February, the college application process cast a long shadow over a small Advanced Placement Research class of 13 juniors and seniors.
The students introduced themselves by their research projects, extracurriculars, and ambitions. Henry Wallis volunteered as a civics leader and competed in mock trials. In class, he wrote a comparative analysis of librarians’ reactions to book bans nationwide. Hadjar Yousfi bookended her school days with computer science classes she took through Bunker Hill Community College’s early college program, and on Fridays, she met with friends at their local mosque.
In a soft Venezuelan accent, Alejandra — who asked to be referred to only by her first name — recalled a seven-day power blackout in her home country. She wrote about the blackout’s impact on her career choice of electrical engineering in her college essay, and how the memory follows her as she researched power plants in Venezuela.
The classroom was awash with natural light, and stacks of the student newspaper, like stout pillars, shrunk as students filed into class. The teenagers’ English teacher, Ryan Gallagher, labeled them “thoughtful students.” Here, the term “affirmative action” elicits nuanced reactions.
Alejandra recalled learning about the fall of affirmative action in another AP class where current events were emphasized in the curriculum. Most of her own struggles relating to the college application experience boil down to her recent immigration. Having left Venezuela during the pandemic, Alejandra enjoyed limited interactions with her peers and access to extracurriculars until her junior year when, through what she described as extensive self-advocacy, she enrolled in advanced classes and threw herself into clubs related to science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM.
Alejandra held hands with another student as she lamented the added challenge of having parents who don’t speak English. She has relied on help from Loftus and Sun to navigate an application process many of her peers have been preparing for since middle school and to manage unexpected complications, like the delayed release of the Free Application for Federal Student, or FAFSA.
Alejandra said she feels optimistic — after all, she applied to 25 colleges and received eagerly-awaited acceptances from Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Wellesley — but still anxious. Then she offered a pointed critique: It confuses and frustrates her that affirmative action has been outlawed but legacy admission, deference shown to the children of alumni, remains a common practice at some universities.
“It’s shocking that that is still legal in the U.S.,” she commented. Heads nodded in silent agreement and Wallis, who is White, spoke up.
“Most of all, I really want to go to college for that sense of community,” Wallis said. “I’ve always been of the belief that surrounding yourself with people exactly like you, I mean, that’s not what the world was made for.”
Yousfi, a petite girl wearing a hijab, shyly raised a hand to add her insight. Yousfi plans to major in computer science and expressed concern over diversity on campuses with strong STEM programs on the “White side of Massachusetts.”
Her strategy: Before applying to any colleges, Yousfi vetted them for a Muslim students association. If there was none on campus, she interpreted it as a sign not to apply.
Lydia Evans, a Black student at Boston University, is a member of one of the last classes of students who were evaluated, accepted, and enrolled while affirmative action policies still were in effect. Evans’ family roots trace back to South Carolina, where affirmative action was a vital lifeline for previous generations climbing out of poverty.
Evans’ mother, father, and grandmother all have a college education, and she affirms with conviction that affirmative action helped pave the way.
“When I heard that affirmative action was banned, I felt bad for the people that my mom, dad, and grandmother represent,” Evans recalled.
For Evans, who transitioned from a majority Black and brown high school to a university where she feels underrepresented, the fall of affirmative action was doubly upsetting because it seemed to echo an unwelcoming refrain about her place as a Black student. Although she couldn’t remember instances where she encountered overt prejudice on campus, Evans said her experience of BU as a campus that is “extremely White” shook her confidence at first.
“I feel like I fought to overcome impostor’s syndrome — it’s this feeling that you don’t belong and you aren’t worthy,” Evans said. She mourns most the loss of a potential future where alienating experiences on campus are no longer the norm for students of color.
Among an older generation of beneficiaries and bystanders to the history of affirmative action, Fredericka King represents an ordinary but lucid demographic long engaged in discussions surrounding equity and representation. King is a faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music Preparatory School, where she is involved in the admissions process. She characterized the Supreme Court’s decimation of affirmative action as a step backward, expressing concern about the additional erosion of civil liberties and resurgence of discriminatory practices — a trend she fears the court’s conservative composition will lead to.
“It’s not even that they are removing affirmative action because it didn’t do enough or because they want to give you a better solution,” King said, positioning the fall of affirmative action as a conservative political plot to “make the life that they feel they should have in this country.”
Mike Lobov, a White parent from Massachusetts whose 15- and 17-year-old children are preparing for college, agrees that the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action is a step in the wrong direction.
Lobov said he fears the ruling will “create unfair advantages for people with privilege” and “take the country backwards in its efforts to uplift marginalized communities.”
There is not an overnight one-toggle option that solves everything.
Mike Lobov
To Lobov, affirmative action is a corrective measure created to combat the legacy of slavery. “It’s a great bandage for the situation that was created decades and decades ago of the systemic racism that still exists,” he said.
Still, Lobov said, affirmative action policies were never a perfect solution. “There is not an overnight one-toggle option that solves everything,” he said, lamenting that even an imperfect tool for reckoning with America’s racist past is now gone.
For Evans, the Boston University student, “affirmative action was never just about meeting quotas or appearing politically correct.” Instead, she said, the policy symbolized an offer of “whatever support they need” to people from marginalized communities.
This project was reported and designed by the Media Innovation Studio at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, part of its graduate program in Media Innovation + Data Communication. The student reporting teams interviewed dozens of graduating high school seniors, admissions officers and researchers across the US to produce the stories and data visualizations.
Source: This article first appeared on The Emancipator and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Photo by JOHNY REBEL, the Explorer Panda: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-brown-building-357271/
