It has been just over a year since the Supreme Court decision in the cases filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In that year we have a much clearer view about the direction of the Court–its disregard for ethical standards that guide other jurists and public servants, its lack of concern about public trust and the appearance of impropriety, its willingness to abandon the concepts of precedent and “settled law,” and its definition of “originalism” that is, well, original.
As Eric Hoover pointed out in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, it is far less clear how the Supreme Court decision has changed the admission landscape. That is not surprising. Until we have finished a complete cycle we won’t have enough information to know how admission offices have coped with reading applications without awareness of race in individual applications or the ability to sculpt the class at the end of the process.
There is another factor, of course. The impact of the Supreme Court ruling has been put on the back burner by a more immediate crisis. In 2019 our attention was on the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, but a year later the issues arising from the Covid pandemic turned OVB into a distant and vague memory. The FAFSA fiasco has had the same effect this year.
We may be starting to see how some colleges are changing policies and practices against the backdrop of the court decision. Recently a loyal ECA reader forwarded me an email she had just received from a highly-selective college. The email reported that the admission office had conducted an audit of its admission visit programming and would be making some changes for the coming year.
One is abolishing the three-day fly-in program the institution has used to bring prospective students, many of them from diverse backgrounds, to its rural campus. It intends to replace that program with increased opportunities for school and CBO counselors to visit the campus and expanded travel assistance for accepted applicants from low-income backgrounds to attend the yield open house in April.
There were two other statements in the email that caught the counselor’s attention–and mine as well.
The first promised that counselors would receive “consistent outreach” throughout the year. Describing outreach as “consistent” would seem to be a low bar, as it describes a wide spectrum of possible responses. I am not accusing the university in question of planning to do this, but providing no outreach whatsoever would technically qualify as “consistent.” We have certainly seen a number of colleges, especially those that are most selective, abolish the counselor call to discuss the applicant pool in the name of “equity.” There were clearly equity issues present in that practice, but it is also possible to define the equity justification as “treat everyone equally badly.”
The more newsworthy nugget was that the institution’s fall and spring travel will “prioritize” CBOs, Title 1 schools, and “feeder school connections.” That’s an interesting combination, and a more interesting message.
First of all, colleges have a right, and perhaps even an obligation, to determine what is the most efficient and effective use of their resources for recruitment purposes. The experience of Covid, when many schools were virtual and many college campuses closed to visits, forced admission offices to be creative in how they interacted with prospective students. That inevitably led to discussions about whether traditional tools like high school visits are as effective or necessary as they once were. At one level that is all that the email is communicating.
At the same time, the decision to prioritize CBOs, Title 1 schools, and feeder schools can be read as shifting the institution’s focus on diversity and family connections from the admission process itself to recruitment. The Supreme Court decision outlawed racial preferences in the selection process to achieve a certain mix of students, and one consequence of that decision was renewed scrutiny on legacy preferences. The court did not speak to preferences in recruiting.
The term “affirmative action” has encompassed two different paradigms in the past. One of those involves expanding the pipeline of talent by broadening outreach. The other is giving advantage in the selection process for underrepresented and desired groups. The court cases involving affirmative action in college admission, dating back to the 1978 Bakke case, have always been about the latter.
The attention to CBOs and Title 1 schools is about the former, and makes sense from both a pragmatic and an ethical perspective. Community-based organizations play an increasingly important college counseling role as school counselors are burdened with duties that prevent them from assisting students with the college process. CBOs provide an entree to a group of students that higher education hasn’t effectively reached in the past. We need colleges, and especially selective colleges, to provide leadership and public service by adopting and supporting CBOs and schools they have historically overlooked.
The outlier here is the focus on “feeder school connections.” Recruiting priority for feeder schools is not the same thing as admission preference for legacy applicants, but what they have in common is that they benefit groups who are already members of the club or college family. Neither group expands the college’s outreach.
The definition of “feeder school” is a school that consistently and regularly sends students to a college. They feed the college, but do they also need to be fed? Are they like Seymour, the plant from “Little Shop of Horrors,” screaming “Feed me!”? Do they require special care and attention from an admission office? I certainly hope that it is not the feeder schools pressuring the admission office for special attention.
The answers to those questions depend on what you think the point of school visits is as part of a recruitment strategy. Is it about expanding outreach or nurturing existing relationships (it can certainly be both)? Should colleges do school visits to expand their outreach and visibility into new markets, or is it important to visit schools where the college is already known and popular? And what about schools that don’t fall into either category? Are they not important? How does a school become a feeder school if it is starved for attention?
There obviously aren’t easy or right answers, but how and whom we choose to recruit sends a clear message about institutional values. Priorities matter. Prioritizing CBOs and Title 1 schools in recruitment makes sense. Prioritizing feeder school connections may not pass the smell test.