That was the heart of the message that a panel of current and former institutional leaders delivered Tuesday at an American Council on Education conference titled “Race, Class, and College Access: Achieving Diversity in a Shifting Legal Landscape.”
The strategies espoused during the discussion took on forms that ranged from targeted outreach to high schools in low-income zip codes to working with the private sector to raise scholarship money for students from ethnic and racial minorities.
Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University, detailed how his institution spends “millions of dollars every single year” on various efforts to achieve a more diverse student body.
Quinlan made his remarks following ACE’s release of a new report titled “Race, Class, and College Access: Achieving Diversity in a Shifting Legal Landscape.”
“One of the things I really found valuable about this report was the emphasis on the idea that there are all of these race-neutral and race-conscious strategies working in concert together,” Quinlan said. “Places like Yale and other institutions … have been putting a lot of resources toward a whole array of strategies that — depending on how you define it — could be on the spectrum from race neutral to race conscious.”
He said Yale probably spends more on race-neutral efforts than on efforts that focus on race because “the way we value diversity and define diversity is so much broader than that.”
