ACE Panel: Socioeconomic Diversity Policies Failing

WASHINGTON — The focus used to be on a lack of minority representation in higher education. Now it has expanded to include a focus on the dearth of socioeconomic diversity.

Some would contend that the one is a proxy for the other, and that by opening the door to more students from lower-income families, problems of diversity would be solved. While that would no doubt be a start, as several panels at the American Council on Education (ACE) conference suggested, there is no easy fix when it comes to ensuring access to higher education for underrepresented minorities. Simply providing need-based financial aid alone may not be enough when certain admissions criteria may prevent underrepresented minorities from accessing that aid.

Panelist Dr. Richard L. McCormick said that he saw the negative effects of forbidding affirmative action play out in Washington state during his tenure as president of the University of Washington. One historic means of ensuring full racial representation has been affirmative action policies. But as speakers at a panel on Monday showed, the slow reversal of affirmative action in some states has forced universities to resort to alternatives that may not be as effective as the original policy.

So far, eight states have reversed affirmative action. Michigan was the most recent state to forbid it, in 2014, and some fear that Texas may follow suit, due to a series of lawsuits filed by Abigail Fisher and her legal counsel against The University of Texas at Austin.

“We are an extremely segregated country. We’re more segregated than we’ve been for 40 years, in our elementary and secondary schools,” said Dr. Gary Orfield, distinguished research professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Orfield is also the co-director of the Civil Rights Project.

UCLA’s Civil Rights Project is collaborating with Pearson, Inc., and ACE’s Center for Research and Strategy to produce a report that will look at admissions and enrollment management practices in the “post-Fisher era,” to be published in July 2015.

Panelist Dr. Richard L. McCormick, president emeritus of Rutgers University, said that he saw the effects of forbidding affirmative action play out in Washington state, during his tenure as president of the University of Washington from 1995 to 2002. He was there just in time for the state to adopt Initiative 200 in 1998, which disallowed the university from using race as a plus factor in admissions.