Some of New England's elite colleges and universities say this year's freshman class is less diverse than in previous years. That's a direct result, they say, of the Supreme Court ruling in 2023 against affirmative action.
Harvard University, which was at the center of the court decision, reported a 4% decline in the number of first-year Black students. Amherst College reported an 8% drop.
UMass-Amherst says its class of 2028 is the most diverse in the school's history, with 39% being students of color.
Joanna May, vice-president of enrollment at Smith College, said a number of initiatives helped that school's number of Black students remain relatively unchanged.
Joanna May, Smith College: We have an incredible financial aid program where we meet 100% of every student's demonstrated need. Three years ago, we implemented a no-loans initiative where students are packaged now entirely with grant and a bit of work study, and we've removed loans from their financial aid packages and replaced them with grants. And so that's made Smith more accessible to families with lots of different backgrounds.
Twenty-one percent of our students this year are eligible for Pell Grants, they're eligible for federal grants. We have students coming from all across the country, all over the world. And so that diversity has been an important part of who Smith is, and we were really committed to trying to maintain that.
We partnered with a number of college access organizations, and we're a new partner with QuestBridge. And QuestBridge is a national organization that seeks to link low-income, high-achieving students with top colleges. And so, Smith is a brand new partner with them, and we're really proud that we're enrolling over 40 QuestBridge students in this year's class.
Kari Njiiri: How do you navigate that given the Supreme Court ruling that effectively ended, as we know, affirmative action?
Well, the Supreme Court ruling says that you can't use racial classification as a factor in the college admissions process. It allows colleges to still take into account students' lived experiences and their stories, their curricular involvement, their essays. And so, all of those things help us in our holistic admissions process to really understand a student in total.
We also ... continue to think about the diversity of the class in terms of geography, really wanting to bring in students from all over the country. We think about it in terms of socioeconomic diversity, wanting to ensure that we have students who are coming from first-generation college backgrounds and low- and middle-income backgrounds. We think about it in terms of academic diversity that students want to major in STEM, but we also have students who want to major in English and foreign languages.
So there's a lot of different factors that go into a holistic admissions process that we've been able to maintain.
Are you satisfied with the school's plan to address and maintain the diversity of the student body?
I wouldn't say I'm satisfied. I'm — I feel very supported that we have the resources at Smith to try to attract the most diverse class that we can.
I think it remains a challenge to bring in students of different backgrounds, and we'd like to increase the percentage of students of color that we have at Smith. We'd like to increase the percentage of first-generation college and low-income students we have here. And we're going to continue to strive to do that within the restrictions of the legal decision.
Have you discussed the findings with other schools that have reported similar figures, not just in terms of recruiting students of color, but more specifically Black students?
I can't really comment on other schools and sort of the conversations that they're having now. But, as admissions professionals, I think we were concerned about the impact that this would have, and it appears to be having at a lot of highly selective colleges. Recognizing that not every student is starting at the same place when they're applying to highly selective colleges, and really wanting to make sure we're understanding every student in their own context, to look at what they've had available to them and how they've taken advantage of those resources at their high school and within their family and their community.
So I think there's been a lot of concern about the decision and how to navigate it, and how to represent this decision to students, and really wanting students to make sure that they knew that they were still wanted at highly selective colleges and at predominantly white colleges, that they still value students of every different background.
Disclosure: Smith College, Amherst College and UMass Amherst are funders of NEPM. Our newsroom operates independently.
