Dr. Brendan Cushing-Daniels
Clearly, what has been until now a largely unmet moral obligation, namely, expanding access to higher education to students from all backgrounds, is now also a financial imperative.
We in higher education have only slowly adapted to the changing profile of our students, and even then, it has been imperfect. What can’t be forgotten amidst these efforts though is the exclusionary foundation created by more than 700 years of global higher education, which only truly sought to open its doors to those other than the most privileged in societies over the past few generations.
There is some debate about whether we have gone too far or not far enough down this path. The current U.S. administration is among those who say ‘too far.’ Emboldened by a U.S. Supreme Court that boasts three justices he appointed that ended affirmative action in higher education admissions in 2023, President Trump has ordered administration officials to pursue regulatory and legal action against schools that, among other perceived offenses, have considered race in admissions decisions.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, penned the majority opinion 20 years earlier that affirmed the national interest in upholding explicit consideration of race as one of many legitimate factors in admissions. She famously included the line, “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Reversing generations of exclusion over the course of just 25 years was wishful thinking and indeed, it is a difficult case to make empirically that the conditions that warranted such consideration of race in 2003 no longer exist today. For example, while there has been some narrowing of the enrollment gap by race, graduation rates remain far apart.
Much of the history of exclusion in higher education was neither subtle nor hidden. Most U.S. colleges and universities did not admit women until the 1960s or 1970s. For example, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and Dartmouth all first enrolled women in the first-year class between 1969 and 1972. Columbia went fully co-ed only in 1983. U.S. service academies all became co-educational in the 1970s. Before this, some Black (male) students were granted access, but their experience was defined by discrimination. Even Jesse Owens, after winning 4 Olympic gold medals in Berlin, was not permitted to live in on-campus housing. This policy existed at Ohio State, not some institution in the Jim Crow South. Of course there, the GI Bill ‘had to’ be left to the states to manage in order to secure support from Southern Democrats who wanted to exclude Black veterans from the program.
Overcoming the 700 years of exclusion in higher education globally and the last 100 years specifically in the U.S. will be neither swift nor easy. Black and Hispanic household family incomes are 63% and 74%, respectively, of white, non-hispanic incomes. Family incomes are closely tied to property values, and property taxes are the largest source of funding for public schools in the U.S. Under-resourced schools are less likely to provide the most rigorous college preparatory curriculum. Thus, students in any demographic group in under-resourced schools will look “objectively” less qualified for college admission than students from wealthier school districts, and since students of color are more likely to have lower family income, that disadvantage will disproportionately deny access to Black and Hispanic students.
We live in an era when colleges and universities have increasing capacity, but declining resources at the federal level and the attack on efforts to promote broader access to higher education undermine our ability to support our students. Now is a time for greater public investment in our education system, not a time for retrenchment.
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Dr. Brendan Cushing-Daniels is an Associate Professor of Economics at Gettysburg College and the author of Higher Education is History (Bloomsbury, 2025).
