Why the Classic Learning Test, which embraces Aristotle but spurns calculators, has caught Indiana’s eye

A test that relies on classic Western texts and bans calculators for math will soon play a role in assessing how well Indiana students and schools are doing.

Since February, Indiana has expanded the use of the Classic Learning Test in two key ways. First, a new law requires state colleges and universities to consider CLT scores to the same extent that they would consider SAT or ACT scores for admission.

Second, under a new state accountability model that gives schools an A-F grade based on points students earn for proficiency, the Classic Learning Test is one way high school students can earn bonus points for their schools’ grades. The Indiana State Board of Education approved the use of the test at the last minute when adopting the new A-F model in March. It was not part of previous drafts of the model.

The Classic Learning Test’s expansion is part of a in Indiana and by conservatives to counter what they see as an education system that leans too progressive by providing alternatives they believe are more rigorous and in line with Western tradition.

The elevation of the CLT follows state leaders’ decision in 2024 to in Indiana higher education, a move seen by many as a boon to conservatives on campuses, as well as previous years’ efforts to that could make students feel guilt or . This year, lawmakers also required higher education leaders to explore — in line with .

Supporters of the CLT say they like the test because it assesses students’ reading skills with texts that are foundational to the country’s history. That also aligns with a to foster “a shared understanding of America’s founding principles” on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

But there’s also practical reason to welcome the CLT, supporters say: It shakes up a long-standing testing establishment that gave students just two options for college readiness testing — the SAT or the ACT. That reflects the school choice environment that includes a growing number of classical schools.

“The CLT is the first newcomer since Eisenhower was president,” said Michael Torres, director of legislative strategy for the CLT. “We offer an opportunity for our students to prove they’re ready for college based on the curriculum they use.”

But critics counter that there is not enough evidence to say a CLT score is on par with a score on the SAT or the ACT — especially when the scores are used for high-stakes decisions about school accountability and college admissions.

“It especially matters to make sure that kind of mathematical relationship between the scores is stable and well-founded when there are any consequences in how these tests are used,” said Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president for College Readiness Assessments at the College Board, which administers the SAT.

Indiana could eventually decide to let students using vouchers to attend private schools take the CLT instead of the ILEARN state exam that voucher students must now take. A private school leader raised that idea during the legislative session, and CLT officials would support it, Torres said.

But that could make it harder to compare how private school students are performing compared with their peers in public schools. Indiana officials have not discussed this idea publicly.

As Indiana expands the use of the CLT, the state should want to ensure the test it’s well-suited to its academic content standards, measures for school quality, and its goals for students, said Chris Domaleski, executive director of the Center for Assessment. The state advisory committee that focuses on required assessments did not weigh in on including the CLT for school accountability because it’s an optional test, Indiana Department of Education officials said.

“The more it’s used, the more we need to seek evidence that it’s useful, that it has reliability, validity, and fairness, for all student groups, including students with disabilities and multilingual learners,” Domaleski said. “All those kinds of questions we’d ask for any assessment used in a consequential way.”

How do Classic Learning Test scores stack up?

The CLT for juniors and seniors is a two-hour, 120-question test developed in 2015 by founder Jeremy Tate, who “saw there might be interest in a third option that proved students are ready to go to college but didn’t force schools to embrace the Common Core,” Torres said, referring to the state standards that some conservatives came to distrust. Classic Learning Initiatives, the company behind the test, also offers a CLT for grades 3-8 and a 10th grade test.

The CLT uses passages by a bank of Western writers from the ancient to the late modern times — the most recent listed is author Toni Morrison — as well as contemporary nonfiction texts.

Sample questions on “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” for example, ask students to determine based on the passage the reason that caused the gods to flood the land, and determine which lines in the poem support the argument.

Critics say this focus promotes of culture and society — and that the test offers an advantage to students familiar with the pieces. Still, classical schools and educators say these works are fundamental to all students’ understanding of history.

“When we talk about college readiness, what are we talking about? Is it the use of AI? Is it being able to critically think, look at passages, look at historical text?” said Kylene Varner of the Indiana Association of Home Educators, who supported the bill to require colleges to consider CLT results like SAT and ACT results. “If we can’t understand the culture and history … and the writing of our Constitution, how do we learn?”

There are also differences on the math portion of the test, where the CLT does not allow calculators; Torres said that means students must show they are “independently numerate.”

And around 15% to 20% of test-takers utilize a remote option not available on the SAT or ACT, Torres said. This option is important to home-schoolers who may not have access to other tests, Varner said.

But what makes the CLT stand out has in turn raised questions about whether comparing scores from the test to results from other exams can be misleading.

The CLT has published between CLT scores and SAT and ACT scores. Torres said the study behind that table relied on a sample of about 4,500 students and produced reliable results. He noted that in addition to self-reported scores, the company received some scores from the colleges that accept CLT, SAT, and ACT scores.

But representatives from the ACT and SAT . To establish that one score on the SAT reliably correlated to a score on the ACT, the College Board and the ACT jointly examined the scores of more than 500,000 students who had taken both exams, said Colin Dingler, ACT’s chief policy analyst.

In addition to a smaller, less-representative sample size, there are two other key issues with CLT’s score comparison, Rodriguez said: The students’ SAT scores were self-reported, and that sometimes years had passed between the two tests.

Ultimately, it would be unfair if two tests had different passing scores, and one was easier to pass than the other, but some students only had access to the harder test, Dingler said.

“It’s very important from an equity standpoint to have some scientifically established tool to go from the scores of one assessment to another assessment,” he said.

How the CLT factors into school quality, college readiness

One of the primary uses of test scores is to indicate that a student is ready for college.

A handful of private colleges in Indiana — along with around 300 nationwide — already accept the CLT scores, and the .

But few K-12 schools offer the test right now, state education officials said, and most public universities in Indiana don’t require any test scores for admission, although Purdue University is a notable exception.

Supporters of the CLT, including leaders of private classical K-12 schools in Indiana who testified in support of it earlier this year, said the test is for measuring students’ college readiness — or .

Not everyone agrees. Iowa in 2024 recommended against the use of the CLT for admission to its public universities, about the academic performance of the students who took it.

A key question for assessing college readiness is whether a test based on a prescribed curriculum is gauging students’ knowledge of that curriculum, rather than their general readiness for college-level classes. Even in subjects like science, the ACT is written so that students without a familiarity with a specific scientific concept can figure out the question, Dingler said.

“I don’t think that philosophically, there’s something wrong with assessments that are anchored in content or a specific reading list,” Dingler said. “But I do think that using the results of that test to generalize that any student is ready to succeed or to do well … that’s a really different matter.”

Torres said that while classical schools have embraced the test, familiarity with the texts is not a prerequisite for success on the CLT.

“It merely uses those texts to test reading comprehension and grammar,” Torres said. “We find that to be a rigorous measure of college readiness.”

Test scores also play a role in assessing Indiana school quality.

Students’ SAT proficiency will make up 10% of a high school’s letter grade on the state’s new A-F accountability model. But the state’s decision to let schools earn accountability bonus points through student scores on the ACT or CLT might lead schools to push students to take the CLT, “where it may be easy to get a score that looks high compared to the ACT or the SAT but maybe actually isn’t,” Rodriguez said.

In a statement, the state education department said the school accountability system approach to the CLT balances “personalized pathways” with elevating “real opportunities for students.”

The test’s supporters like that flexible approach, which could play a role if Indiana considers letting students using private school vouchers take the CLT instead of the state’s standardized test.

“Allowing schools to use nationally normed assessments like the CLT that are also rigorous … objective, and publicly reportable, this respects both accountability and also educational diversity,” said Rachel Oren, head of school at the Classic Academy in Indianapolis.

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But considerably less attention has been paid to the decentralized, bottom-up efforts by well-intentioned policymakers and practitioners at all levels that accomplish the same thing — gutting our collective knowledge of how well kids are doing in school. These efforts, which include abolishing testing, undermining accountability, watering down grades and struggling to respond rapidly to artificial intelligence, are making it impossible to understand who’s doing well and who needs support to get back on track. In the long run, it will be harder to run effective education organizations, and children will be worse off for it. 

The latest piece of evidence for this crisis is a from UC San Diego that shows shocking increases in the proportion of students arriving unable to perform anything approaching college mathematics. These are students who have excelled in the K-12 system — getting the As and Bs in allegedly rigorous courses that are necessary to be admitted to a highly selective university. But placement tests upon arrival at UCSD show the incoming students are far behind, forcing them into remedial courses and making it harder for them to complete their degrees. 

While the report has garnered and shocked many, its results weren’t surprising to those of us who have followed the trends over the last decade. From the bottom up, in individual schools and districts, universities and state departments of education, every signal of student readiness has been relentlessly hollowed out.

The clearest cause of this trend is the gutting of testing and accountability. In the wake of COVID, universities made standardized tests or banned them altogether. The University of California system these data from applications. As a result, college admissions officers lack important data that convey key information about student readiness, data that are especially valuable at . At the same time, K-12 testing and accountability have been substantially undermined since the passage of the , and many experts (including me) believe this is at least partially to blame for a . 

Without standardized tests, colleges must rely primarily on grades to gauge student readiness. But these cannot provide the same level of information that tests can. It was that grades and course titles were imprecise measures of what children had learned. But the information gleaned from classroom performance has been weakening as runs rampant. Perhaps well intentioned, policies like or requiring teachers to give at least a for any completed assignment have contributed to upward pressure on grades. But more generally, there is the cultural pressure to be kind and lenient to students by offering them unlimited makeups and refusing to hold the line on high expectations. Many factors contribute, but the result is that grades provide less and less useful information, which is a disaster with so few other data points to use. 

Even other elements of the education system that might be useful for understanding student performance are increasingly losing their ability to signal college readiness. Think of admissions essays and the ways they are easily corrupted by artificial intelligence. As a college instructor, my ability to gauge students’ writing and reasoning abilities is much weaker now than it was even a couple years ago, and this trend may well accelerate. Students increasingly use AI to write college application essays that are then in part by AI — an almost laughable situation, if it weren’t so grim. 

There is potential in this moment, however, to recognize the value of standardized assessments that cannot be undermined by artificial intelligence. Universities should again require prospective students to take a validated standardized test, but in a way that maximizes their benefits and minimizes potential harms. This means states should do things like that all students take college admission tests like the SAT or ACT (and if they are state-mandated, they should also be paid for by the state), while also leveraging free test preparation materials so students can feel ready. Even better would be for states to make sure tests are connected to what students are taught, perhaps building standards-aligned high school assessments that public universities would accept as evidence of readiness. Think of Advanced Placement exams or state end-of-course tests that are standards-aligned. These kinds of policies would make the tests fairer while still providing student-readiness data of high enough quality that universities can make good decisions using them. 

Grades also need to mean something again. This involves rolling back reforms that lower expectations for students. And in the context of AI, it also entails helping teachers figure out how to assess student learning in ways that are trustworthy and valid. Without these kinds of fundamental changes, neither classroom teachers nor universities will be able to make the kinds of decisions that will help ensure student success.

Failure to act in this moment will harm both students and institutions — and ultimately, all of us. 

Stakes are high. that attending an elite college confers big benefits in lifetime income. For example, students who attend an Ivy league school per year than those attending less selective private schools.

As a result, the country’s best schools regularly receive tens of thousands of applications a year and have acceptance rates in the low-to-mid single digits. 

To optimize their chances of being one of the select few, students spend years setting themselves up to have strong college applications. They work diligently to get good grades, cram for standardized tests, labor over college essays and participate in myriad extracurricular activities to show that they are well rounded (or quadruple-down on one to show that they are ). 

Given how hard students work to hone their résumés and applications, it’s striking how many ignore the strategy at play in how to apply. But students make these mistakes — the equivalent of a fumble on the one-yard line — because the market for allocating college slots isn’t well-understood. 

In , I discuss “hidden markets” where allocations are not just based on price and where rules that govern outcomes — and the strategies to maximize success — can be frustratingly opaque. This is true for many markets: everything from markets for hard-to-snag restaurant reservations and live-event tickets to labor markets and dating markets.

And it is true in the market for college admission. Nearly half of students on this market fail to take advantage of applying early to a highly selective college: the easiest way to dramatically increase one’s chance of admission.

of the most popular colleges and universities offer some form of early admissions, allowing students to apply a few months before the regular admission deadline (e.g., on November 1 rather than January 1). “Early decision” comes with a binding commitment: You must agree to matriculate if you are admitted. “Early action” allows you to apply to other schools at the regular admission deadline but often restricts you from applying to any other school early. 

Colleges like admitting students who are very likely to matriculate — or have already committed to doing so — since it improves their yield, the fraction of admitted students who eventually enroll. This rate once entered the calculus of the U.S. News and World Report rankings of colleges and universities. While it’s no longer used that way, it’s still a matter of pride and reputation. People perceive the best schools as the best in part because very few people turn down their offers of admission.

So, schools reward early applicants with a higher chance of admission — often substantially higher. For the incoming class of 2029, Brown University of early decision applicants versus of those who applied at the regular decision deadline. Research has estimated that applying early increases acceptance rates as much as a . Top colleges routinely give away to early applicants.

But while the benefits are large, many applicants do not avail themselves of the opportunity. Analysis conducted by the Common App found that of the 1.5 million students who applied using their application — which serves — did not apply early anywhere. They also found that lower-income students and students from neighborhoods with lower education levels were less likely to take advantage of the chance to apply early. 

Some that lower-income applicants are less likely to apply early because they need to compare financial aid packages before committing to a school. But early action does not require commitment and still gives students an admissions advantage, meaning that even students who are financially constrained can avail themselves of that option. As a result, failing to apply early somewhere is a strategic mistake.

But even the students who do apply early may still fail to do so strategically. Since students who apply early can often only do so to one school, they must be very thoughtful about where to send that application. Many waste it on a dream school that’s unreasonably out of reach.

For many students, that dream school is my employer, the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most selective schools that uses early decision. In a recent year we admitted fewer than 16% of students early and only 6.5% of applicants overall. But while rates of admission are higher if you apply early, doing so will only actually increase your chances if you are close to the admissions cutoff. If a candidate falls well below the school’s high standards, it does not matter whether they apply early: They have no chance of admission either way.

These students should consider applying to a less prestigious school early — one where they are close enough to the admissions threshold that applying early might actually help them get in. 

This strategy, which I call “settling for silver,” may seem counterintuitive, since it requires aiming for something less desirable (e.g., a less-prestigious school that is your second or third choice rather than the dream school you like most). But while counterintuitive, it can be effective when the chance of securing your true first choice is vanishing low. 

Students who have a college they’d be thrilled to get into that might not be their pie-in-the-sky reach school should consider applying early, even if it means foregoing the very long-shot chance at a dream come true. Better to maximize your odds on a silver than to go for gold and end up failing to make the podium.

How can they tell the difference? They can research how their test scores compare to a school’s most recent incoming class, information that is often. They can also ask their guidance counselors or graduates from their high school who were admitted in prior years about their GPAs and test scores.

Thinking strategically is a necessity in markets where you are competing for scarce resources. That’s a lesson students must learn: better for them if they learn it in the next few weeks before early applications are due.

In a ruling denying immediate relief to the student, filed Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson said nothing about the case suggests teachers at Hingham High School were “hasty” in concluding that the student and a classmate had cheated by relying on AI. He also said the school didn’t impose particularly heavy-handed discipline in the case, considering that the students had violated the school district’s academic integrity rules.

An attorney for the family on Friday noted the ruling is merely preliminary and that “the case will continue” with more discovery. But a former deputy attorney general who follows AI in education issues said the likelihood of the family winning on the merits in a trial “look all but over.”

After an Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher last fall flagged a draft of a documentary script as possibly containing AI-generated material, the pair received a D on the assignment and were later denied entry into the National Honor Society. The group’s faculty advisor said their use of AI was “the most egregious” violation of academic honesty she and others had seen in 16 years.

Jennifer and Dale Harris, parents of one of the students, sued the district and several school staffers in September, alleging that their son, a junior at the time and a straight-A student, was wrongly penalized. If the judge didn’t order the district to quickly change his grade, they said, he’d risk not being admitted via early admission to elite colleges.

He has not been identified and is referred to as “RNH” in court documents.

The complaint noted that when the students started the project in fall 2023, the district didn’t have a policy on using AI for such an assignment. Only later did it lay out prohibitions against AI. But in court testimony, district officials said Hingham students are trained to know plagiarism and academic dishonesty when they see it. 

While he earned a C+ in the course, the student scored a perfect 5 on the AP US history exam last spring, according to the lawsuit. He was later allowed to reapply to the Honor Society and was inducted on Oct. 15. Ultimately, the school’s own investigation found that over the past two years, it had inducted into the Honor Society seven other students who had academic integrity infractions, said Peter S. Farrell, the family’s attorney.

In his ruling, Levenson said the case centered around simple academic dishonesty, and that school officials could reasonably conclude that the students’ use of AI “was in violation of the school’s academic integrity rules and that any student in RNH’s position would have understood as much.”

The students, he said, “did not simply use AI to help formulate research topics or identify sources to review. Instead, it seems they indiscriminately copied and pasted text that had been generated by Grammarly.com” into their draft script. 

Levenson said the court doesn’t really have a role in “second-guessing the judgments of teachers and school officials,” especially since the students weren’t suspended. Farrell on Friday said he expected the case to continue, but Benjamin Riley, founder of , a think tank that investigates AI in education, said the judge’s ruling suggests the family’s chance of winning in a trial are slim. Riley, a former deputy attorney general for California, said the issue at the core of the case isn’t “the whiz-bang technology of AI — it’s about a student who plagiarized and got caught. The judge’s decision explains at length and in detail how the school district had academic integrity policies in place, as well as a fair process for resolving any issues arising under them.” 

Everyone in the district, he said, “followed these rules and imposed an appropriate (and frankly light) punishment. As is often the case, few will see the diligent and quiet work of thoughtful educators at Hingham Public Schools, but I do — and I’m hoping they felt good when this decision came down. They should.”

Had the family not sued the district, Farrell said, it wouldn’t have come to light that he had been “treated differently than other students admitted to National Honor Society” who had academic integrity infractions on their record. He also noted that the school admitted the student into the National Honor Society within a week of a hearing in the case last month. “The timing of that action was not a coincidence.”

Hingham Public Schools did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

To others, it’s simply a case of helicopter parents gone wild.

The case, filed last month, tackles key questions of academic integrity, the college admissions arms race and even the purpose of school in an age when students can outsource onerous tasks like thinking to a chatbot.

While its immediate outcome will largely serve just one family — the student’s parents want a grade changed so their son can apply early-admission to elite colleges — the case could ultimately prompt school districts nationwide to develop explicit policies on AI. 

If the district, in a prosperous community on Boston’s South Shore, is forced to change the student’s grade, that could also prompt educators to focus more clearly on the knife’s edge of AI’s promises and threats, confronting a key question: Does AI invite students to focus on completing assignments rather than actual learning?

“When it comes right down to it, what do we want students to do?” asked John Warner, a well-known and author of . “What do we want them to take away from their education beyond a credential? Because this technology really does threaten the integrity of those credentials. And that’s why you see places trying to police it.”

‘Unprepared in a technology transition’

The facts of the case seem simple enough: The parents of a senior at Hingham High School have sued the school district, saying their son was wrongly penalized as a junior for relying on AI to research and write a history project that he and a partner were assigned in Advanced Placement U.S. History. The teacher used the anti-plagiarism tool Turnitin, which flagged a draft of the essay about NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s civil rights activism as possibly containing AI-generated material. So she used a “revision history” tool to uncover how many edits the students had made, as well as how long they spent writing. She discovered “many large cut and paste items” in the first draft, suggesting they’d relied on outside sources for much of the text. She ran the draft through two other digital tools that also indicated it had AI-generated content and gave the boys a D on the assignment. 

From there, the narrative gets a bit murky. 

On the one hand, the complaint notes, when the student and his partner started the essay last fall, the district didn’t have a policy on using AI for such an assignment. Only later did it lay out prohibitions against AI.

The boy’s mother, Jennifer Harris, last month asked a local , “How do you know if you’re crossing a line if the line isn’t drawn?”

The pair tried to explain that using AI isn’t plagiarism, telling teachers there’s considerable debate over its use in academic assignments, but that they hadn’t tried to pass off others’ work as their own. 

For its part, the district says Hingham students are trained to know plagiarism and academic dishonesty when they see it. 

District officials declined to be interviewed, but in an affidavit, Social Studies Director Andrew Hoey said English teachers at the school regularly review proper citation and research techniques — and they set expectations for AI use.

Social studies teachers, he said, can justifiably expect that skills taught in English class “will be applied to all Social Studies classes,” including AP US History — even if they’re not laid out explicitly. 

A spokesperson for National History Day, the group that sponsored the assignment, provided ����Ӱ�� with a link to its , which say students may use AI to brainstorm topic ideas, look for resources, review their writing for grammar and punctuation and simplify the language of a source to make it more understandable.

They can’t use AI to “create elements of your project” such as writing text, creating charts, graphs, images or video. 

In March, the school’s National Honor Society faculty advisor, Karen Shaw, said the pair’s use of AI was “the most egregious” violation of academic honesty she and others had seen in 16 years, according to the lawsuit. The society rejected their applications.

Peter S. Farrell, the family’s attorney, said the district “used an elephant gun to slay a mouse,” overreacting to what’s basically a misunderstanding.

The boys’ failing grade on the assignment, as well as the accusation of cheating, kept him out of the Honor Society, the lawsuit alleges. Both penalties have limited his chances to get into top colleges on early decision, as he’d planned this fall.

The student, who goes unnamed in the lawsuit, is “a very, very bright, capable, well-rounded student athlete” with a 4.3 GPA, a “perfect” ACT score and an “almost perfect” SAT score, said Farrell. “If there were a perfect plaintiff, he’s it.” 

While the boy earned a C+ in the course, he scored a perfect 5 on the AP exam last spring, according to the lawsuit. His exclusion from the Honor Society, Farrell said, “really shouldn’t sit right with anybody.”

For a public high school to take such a hard-nosed position “simply because they got caught unprepared in a technology transition” doesn’t serve anyone’s interests, Farrell said. “And it’s certainly not good for the students.”

Ultimately, the school’s own investigation found that over the past two years it had inducted into the Honor Society seven other students who had academic integrity infractions, Farrell said. The student at the center of the lawsuit was allowed to reapply and was inducted on Oct. 15.

“They knew that there was no leg to stand on in terms of the severity of that sanction,” Farrell said.

‘Districts are trying to take it seriously’

While Hingham didn’t adopt a districtwide AI policy until this school year, it’s actually ahead of the curve, said Bree Dusseault, the principal and managing director of the , a think tank at Arizona State University. Most districts have been cautious to put out formal guidance on AI.

Dusseault contributed an affidavit on behalf of the plaintiffs, laying out the fragmented state of AI uptake and guidance. She more than 1,000 superintendents last year and found that just 5% of districts had policies on AI, with another 31% promising to develop them in the future. Even among CRPE’s group of 40 “early adopter” school districts that are exploring AI and encouraging teachers to experiment with it, just 26 had published policies in place. 

They’re hesitant for a reason, she said: They’re trying to figure out what the technology’s implications are before putting rules in writing. 

“Districts are trying to take it seriously,” she said. “They’re learning the capacity of the technology, and both the opportunities and the risks it presents for learning.” But so often they’re surprised by new technological developments and capabilities that they never imagined. 

Even if they’re hesitant to commit to full-blown policies, Dusseault said, districts should consider more informal guidelines that clearly lay out for students what academic integrity, plagiarism and acceptable use are. Districts that are “totally silent” on AI run the risk of student confusion and misuse. And if a district is penalizing students for AI use, it needs to have clear policy language explaining why.

That said, a few observers believe the case boils down to little more than a cheating student and his helicopter parents.

Benjamin Riley, founder of , an AI-focused education think tank, said the episode seems like an example of clear-cut academic dishonesty. Everyone involved in the civil case, he said, especially the boy’s parents and their lawyer, “should be embarrassed. This isn’t some groundbreaking lawsuit that will help define the contours of how we use AI in education; it’s helicopter parenting run completely amok that may serve as catnip to journalists (and their editors) but does nothing to illuminate anything.”

Alex Kotran, founder of , a nonprofit that offers a free AI literacy curriculum, said the honor society director’s statement about the boys’ alleged academic dishonesty makes him think “there’s clearly plenty more than what we’re hearing from the student.” While schools genuinely do need to understand the challenge of getting AI policies right, he said, “I worry that this is just a student with overbearing parents and a big check to throw lawyers at a problem.”

Others see the case as surfacing larger-scale problems: Writing in this week, Jane Rosenzweig, director of the and author of the newsletter, said the Massachusetts case is “less about AI and more about a family’s belief that one low grade will exclude their child from the future they want for him, which begins with admission to an elite college.”

That problem long predated ChatGPT, Rosenzweig wrote. But AI is putting our education system on a collision course “with a technology that enables students to bypass learning in favor of grades.”

“I feel for this student,” said Warner, the writing coach. “The thought that they need to file a lawsuit because his future is going to be derailed by this should be such an indictment of the system.”

The case underscores the need for school districts to rethink how they interact with students in the Age of AI, he said. “This stuff is here. It’s embedded in the tools students use to do their work. If you open up Microsoft Word or Google Docs or any of this stuff, it’s right there.”

Perhaps as a result, Warner said, students have increasingly come to view school more transactionally, with assignments as a series of products rather than as an opportunity to learn and develop important skills.

“I’ve taught those students,” he said. “For the most part, those are a byproduct of disengagement, not believing [school] has anything to offer — and that the transaction can be satisfied through ‘non-work’ rather than work.”

His observations align with recent research by Dusseault’s colleagues, who that four graduating classes of high school students, or about 13.5 million students, had been affected by the pandemic, with many “struggling academically, socially, and emotionally” as they enter adulthood.

Ideally, Warner said, AI tools should offer an opportunity to refocus students to emphasize process over product. “This is a natural design for somebody who teaches writing,” he said, “because I’m obsessed with process.”Warner recalled giving a recent series of talks at , a small, alternative liberal arts college in California, where he encountered students who said they had no use for AI chatbots. They preferred to think through difficult problems themselves. “They were just like, ‘Aw, man, I don’t want to use that stuff. Why do I want to use that stuff? I’ve got thoughts.’”

While applications for federal student aid dropped by double digits across all 50 states this year, those with universal FAFSA completion policies seemed to fare slightly better, with the majority performing in the top half of the country.

Of the 10 states with the highest completion rates, three — Louisiana, Illinois and New Hampshire — have mandatory FAFSA policies for high school seniors. Across all states, Connecticut had the highest completion rate among high school seniors and Alaska had the lowest, according to the

Indiana saw the smallest change year-over-year in its completion rate and Tennessee had the greatest year-over-year swing, with a 44.3% drop — though it still had the second-highest completion rate in the country. Typically, the stronger states were last year, the further they fell this year, according to the network.

Experts attribute this relative success to the mandatory states having supportive infrastructure that provided students with the tools they needed to navigate the submission process in what has turned into a notoriously problem-ridden year.     

But no state has emerged from the process unscathed. 

“While there is certainly some variation across the states, the pattern holds,” said Katharine Meyer, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center of Education Policy. “Where submissions are down, completions are down. There are large gaps between the high-income and low-income high schools and then it’s just the magnitude to which those play out in different states.”

This year marked the release of the new form following the , which was meant to streamline and simplify the historically complicated application for federal student aid, expand access to Federal Pell Grants for low-income students and change the way expected family contribution is calculated. But a botched rollout marred by delays and technical glitches — particularly for students whose parents are undocumented and don’t have Social Security numbers — has led to a dramatic drop in the number of students who have been able to submit the form. That’s left seniors in a lurch and both high schools and colleges scrambling.

Not all students have been impacted equally, though. Among those at higher-income schools — where fewer than half of students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch — about 36% completed the FAFSA this year, while only about a quarter of students at lower-income schools have, according to the college attainment network. The year-over-year drop is also significantly higher for students at low-income schools with an almost 10-point difference. 

“It’s the lowest-income students, the first-generation students, who don’t have additional resources to guide them through this process, who are ultimately paying the price for this rollout,” said Meyer, “which is awful because the entire goal of the FAFSA Simplification Act was to target and support those students and make this an easier process.”

While there have always been gaps between students who have extra support and those who don’t, the added complexities and “minefields to navigate” on this year’s form exacerbated them, she added.
Overall, there’s been a in the number of forms submitted as compared to the same time last year, according to ����Ӱ��’s analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, and a in the number of forms that have been completed without errors, according to the college attainment network, whose members include school districts and nonprofits.

As of April 9, 16% of FAFSA applications still needed student corrections and about 30% of forms were potentially impacted by processing or data errors, according to a released by the U.S. Department of Education.

The completion rates are of particular significance, according to Bill DeBaun, the network’s senior director of data and strategic initiatives.

“Completions remain the target for NCAN and our members, and it’s what we’re encouraging the field to pursue,” he wrote to ����Ӱ��. “Having a college-intending student who was motivated enough to submit the FAFSA, but who did not connect with financial aid because of an error that they didn’t correct, is a tragic outcome.”

Sheri Crigger, a college counselor at the School of Cyber Technology and Engineering in Huntsville, Alabama, said the biggest challenge is for students who still don’t have FAFSA results or aid packages from schools, even as the traditional May 1 decision day deadline quickly approaches. Normally by now, she said, kids would be announcing where they’re headed in the fall and wearing their new schools’ colors. Instead, she said, there’s just a feeling of uncertainty.

“I feel for them because there’s not a fix for that until they have the information they need,” she said. “I like to be able to kind of point them in a direction [but this year] there is no direction.”

Changing the mindset from optional to required

Nationally, seven states — Illinois, California, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Indiana and New Hampshire — have implemented universal FAFSA policies and five additional ones — Connecticut, New Jersey, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma — have passed them, according to the network. Louisiana, which was the first state to implement a universal FAFSA policy in 2018, to roll theirs back this year. State lawmakers said they were reversing course for a range of reasons, including arguments that the policy prioritized college over trade schools — although federal aid can often be used for the latter — and that completion is a for families.

Elizabeth Morgan, the attainment network’s chief external relations officer, disagreed with their line of thinking.

“Universal FAFSA is not about penalizing students or holding students back,” she said. “It’s about changing the mindset from optional to required.”

Students — especially those from lower-income backgrounds — don’t always realize that financial aid is available to them until they submit their FAFSA form, Morgan added. They also might not know that the aid can be used at institutions other than four-year universities, such as trade schools and community colleges. Filling out FAFSA, she said, is important for these students because it fixes these misconceptions.
In states where there are mandates or universal FAFSA rules, schools are more likely to integrate support for completion into the school day and create more of a culture around it, leading to a significant increase in filing, according to Meyer, the Brookings fellow. Events such as FAFSA drives can also help to in a typical year by providing families with the tools they need to navigate the cumbersome, complex process.

When looking at the list of top submitters this year, a lot of them are states that have these mandates in place, Meyer said, suggesting that universal policies may have helped insulate them — and their students — during the messy rollout.

“They still aren’t good FAFSA submission and completion numbers… but it is less bad than in some other states,” she said.

Some experts in the field remain anxious that this will be an ongoing issue in future years. Meyer warned that there are already signs that next year’s form won’t be released on time once again. If the form is delayed but not riddled with errors, she added, students may still avoid this year’s chaos, especially since institutions are staffing up in anticipation.

“I do think long term I am an optimist,” she said. “I’m hopeful that this act will ultimately increase college access for those students, but it’s a bumpy couple of years in the process.”

So it’s perhaps piling on at this point to note that, a century ago, the profoundly antisemitic beliefs of Harvard’s leaders built the cradle that nurtured the much-reviled college admissions essay. Eliminating it now in 2024 would be a concrete and dramatic repudiation of Harvard’s troubled past — and makes even more sense in the wake of last summer’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. Which Harvard also lost.

But first, some history. In the summer of 1922, President Lawrence Lowell told Langdon Marvin, a Harvard Overseer, that “apart from the Jews.” the university’s admissions method was working well. As Jerome Karabel explained in The Chosen, the problem wasn’t the process but the outcome: Too many of the wrong type of men were getting in. By 1925, when 28% of the class was Jewish, Harvard’s leaders feared the environment was so poisoned that Anglo-Saxon Protestants would no longer enroll their sons.

Marvin suggested adopting a “character standard,” like the Rhodes scholarship used, to halt “.”  So in 1926, Harvard added a personal essay that could be scrutinized to assess the applicant’s fit. 

Given Harvard’s prominence and influence, the essay soon became a fixed feature of the application at other Ivies, and eventually, universally. The Jewish population quickly fell to a more manageable 15% where it stayed until the 1950s.

Around 1975 Harvard decided that Asian kids with great grades and elite test scores were the new problem. Thankfully, application readers — like at many other elite universities — could scrutinize prospective students’ essays for additional evidence. When the plaintiffs in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case reviewed 160,000 student files they discovered — who’d have guessed it? — that on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” the University’s application readers gave Asian student of any ethnic group.

In last summer’s affirmative action decision, the court ruled unconstitutional the use of racial preferences in college admissions, putting the personal statement back in the news. In its decision, the court pointed admissions officers to a narrow path they could walk in finding evidence of an applicants’ merit from her essay. But the court’s discussion only served to underline, a century later, the essay’s subjective and fundamentally discriminatory purpose.

As any parent of a high school senior can tell you, the admissions essay is a nightmare. With the rare exception of the University of Chicago, which puts its prompts to a student vote, the topics are solipsistic and encourage applicants to stretch their experiences to the limits of credibility. Since everyone knows they’re being scrutinized unfairly, writing the personal statement becomes a metacognitive exercise in guessing what College X wants, while being told to “be yourself.” Brilliant advice for stressed out 17-year-olds emerging from puberty and trying to define themselves, by acting just like their peers.

For some the process involves hiring “counselors” who “advise” the student on how best to tell their story. High schools devote class time to helping students prepare their essays. Time that might be spent discussing actual literature, which suggest just six percent of high school graduates can do really well.

Less advantaged children tell of the or oppression to catch the eye of the application reader. Perceval Everett’s 2001 dark satire Erasure — which just netted an Oscar for best adaptation — cleverly captures the zeitgeist.

Evidence that the three data points most predictive of a student’s success in college are their high school GPA, the challenge of their course load, and their standardized test scores. In a misguided effort to increase diversity, many colleges stopped requiring test scores, but seeing the results, are now reversing course.

To the extent that colleges believe a student’s grades in English or history do not confirm his or her writing ability, they could require a graded essay from one of their junior year classes. It would be far more insightful – and less subjective than the recommendations that are the bane of many teachers’ existence. (And yes, Harvard also invented the recommendation letter as another way to ensure their students were “the right sort.”)

As we approach the 100^th anniversary of Harvard’s spawning of a racist tool to discriminate, while not appearing to do so, it would be a real sign of contrition were the leadership in Cambridge to announce they are jettisoning this shameful legacy. Apart from atoning for their own original sin, this would make it safe for other schools to follow Harvard’s example. As Harvard Law grad Joseph Welch once said, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

founded the International Charter School in Brooklyn and writes frequently on education.

Colleges and universities need to relieve students and their families of this added stress and push enrollment deadlines from May 1 until later in the spring or early summer.

Colleges are unable to create financial aid packages for their students without crucial information contained in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — — which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education. At the end of January, the department notified higher education institutions that it could not forward students’ FAFSA forms until the . 

​​That means colleges will receive crucial financial information at least six weeks later than previously announced, and already months later than in previous years. In turn, already short-staffed financial aid offices will have to scramble to put together offers so that thousands of students can make their college enrollment decisions by May 1. 

One of them is Nicholas Onaiwu, a senior at my high school for whom college seemed like a far-fetched dream because his family could not afford tuition. Then Nicholas started visiting some local colleges. We worked with him on his personal statement, helped him prepare for college interviews and made sure he filled out his FAFSA and looked into state grants. College became a reality that he was excited about, and all of a sudden felt within reach. But when he found out about the FAFSA delay, he felt that his dream was in jeopardy. He was anxious about having a smaller window of time to analyze financial aid packages, pursue internships near the college that gives him the most aid and make a thoughtful, well-informed decision. 

The change doesn’t just impact the 19,000 students at the Uncommon Schools network where I work; it affects more than 17 million students nationwide who rely on the FAFSA to determine federal financial aid, Pell Grants, student loans and work-study programs.

The delays are caused by an effort to improve the FAFSA and that would have dispersed less aid to students from mostly economically disadvantaged communities. The new process, revised after Congress passed the makes the form shorter, and 600,000 students with financial need will receive Pell Grants for the first time due to a change in eligibility guidelines. These much-needed modifications to FAFSA are a crucial step toward ensuring that college continues to be a path to the middle class for millions of young Americans.

But the new form didn’t come out until Dec. 30, 2023, and on the department said it was making a last-minute fix so take the latest inflation data into account. This domino effect of delays has put colleges and families in a bind. 

, including the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, are urging colleges and universities to move their enrollment deadlines. In a joint statement, they said, “During the pandemic, many institutions extended their enrollment, scholarship and financial aid deadlines beyond the traditional May 1 date, and we urge institutions to make similar accommodations this year. We all want students and families to have the time they need to consider their financial options before making enrollment decisions.” 

, like the University of Illinois, have already decided to push their enrollment deadline, and others are considering it.

The right thing for colleges and universities to do is to move their enrollment deadlines to at least June 1, so students and their families have time to make reasoned and well-informed decisions about this monumental investment in their futures. 

My students and their families have spent years preparing for this moment, from learning how to read in kindergarten to staying up many late nights working on college applications as high school seniors. They have worked hard and dreamed big. The least colleges can do is give them and their families a few extra weeks to decide what is best for their future.

Legislation banning Virginia’s public colleges and universities from providing special treatment in admissions decisions to students related to alumni and donors is on track to head to Gov. Glenn Youngkin later this session.

On Tuesday, the Virginia House joined the Senate in passing on a unanimous vote. Both bills, which are identical, must now pass in the opposite chambers before they are sent to the governor for his approval.

Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez has signaled the governor is likely to sign the measures.

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“The governor will review any legislation that comes to his desk, but believes admission to Virginia’s universities and colleges should be based on merit,” he said.

The proposed ban comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action at higher education institutions nationwide in June. Since the court’s ruling that race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina were unconstitutional, schools in the commonwealth have begun changing their admissions policies.

by think tank Education Reform Now found “most beneficiaries of legacy preferences are white.” It also identified Virginia as one of five states where a majority of public colleges and universities offer admissions advantages to the children of alumni.

“All that House Bill 48 says is that in considering admissions to college and our public universities here in the commonwealth of Virginia, whether your parents went there or whether your parents are donors to the institution will play no role in deciding who is accepted to the college,” said Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax, who is carrying the House bill, during a subcommittee meeting earlier this month.

Both Democrats and Republicans have supported the change.

“I think it’s absolutely discriminatory to grant special privileges to people based on what their parents did, what they gave, where they went to college,” said Del. Thomas Garrett, R-Goochland, at the same meeting.

Garrett said he’s supporting the proposal to “address discrimination and create a level playing field for all Virginians.”

Last week, the Senate version of the , patroned by Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Richmond, also passed with unanimous support.

Education Reform Now says more than 100 colleges and universities have ended legacy admissions since 2015, but 787 still used the practice as of 2020.

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Maryland will consider joining a number of states that guarantee admission to certain first-year students at one of the state’s four-year public colleges and universities.

Proposed legislation – , sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Malcolm Augustine (D-Prince George’s) — would require institutions to adopt an admission policy and accept Maryland high school students, from a public or private school, who are in the top 10% of their class.

The 10 “constituent” higher education institutions that would be required to accept those students are those in the University System of Maryland: University of Maryland, Baltimore; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; University of Maryland Eastern Shore; University of Maryland Global Campus; Bowie State University; Coppin State University; Frostburg State University; Salisbury University; Towson University; University of Baltimore. Two public schools not in the system would also be required to admit those sudents: Morgan State University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

The bill comes after the that affirmative action in college admission processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The court’s decision effectively ended consideration of race as a part of the higher education selection process.

“That made me concerned because other states that have gone to a race-neutral policy for selective schools immediately saw a drop in diversity of their student body…” Augustine said in an interview Thursday. “I want to make sure that our higher education schools are filled with the talented students from across the state that look like our state.”

There’s no current state law specifically focused on admission standards for institutions, according to the bill’s , which analyzes the legislation. However, schools aren’t permitted to discriminate against a prospective student’s race, sexual orientation, religion and other characteristics to admit that person.

The bill mirrors a law in Texas, which went into effect more than 20 years ago.

Recently, schools in other states, including , began the guaranteed admission program, not only to diversify its student body, but to keep afloat enrollment, which shrunk during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), a coordinating body, noted that 409,075 students were enrolled in the state’s colleges and universities in 2012. That figure decreased to nearly 369,200 in the fall of 2021.

Bob Spieldenner, a spokesman for SCHEV, said in an interview Thursday that the organization doesn’t track the number of schools that offer guaranteed enrollment. He said schools are permitted to choose whether or not to use such a  program.

In Maryland, Augustine had one major supporter speak on the legislation during a Wednesday before the Senate Education, Energy and Environment Committee: state Board of Education President Clarence Crawford.

Crawford acknowledged that not every high school reports class rank, but he said the legislation still would help increase student diversity in higher education.

“The board is encouraged by the steps taken in SB 5 because it emphasizes and signals the importance of GPA [grade point average], grades and student performance throughout high school,” he said. “We like the focus on academics. We like the focus on giving parents, students clear indicators early on that student performance is important and there are positive outcomes for achieving the best possible grades.”

Although two officials with the University of Maryland College Park support a diverse student population, they still don’t agree with the bill.

James B. Massey Jr. — director of undergraduate admissions at University of Maryland, College Park — said the legislation would eliminate the school’s admission philosophy and additional criteria in accepting prospective students.

According to Massey’s written testimony, the school uses about two dozen factors to assess an applicant, including grades in academic subjects, geographic origin, community service and recognition of special achievements.

“We employ a wholistic approach in our evaluation of applications for admission,” he said before the Senate committee Wednesday. “We admit students that have not only excelled in the classroom, but students that have gone far beyond that. We believe that merit is not a singularly defined measure to merit our students.”

Andy Clark, assistant vice chancellor for government relations with the University System of Maryland, wrote a letter of “information” to the committee. One detail in the letter highlights that the non-partisan Education Commission of the States has noted that 12 states have guaranteed admission for eligible students, but that results vary in terms of enrollment impact and demographic composition.

Clark wrote that the system respects the “ambitious” bill, but is concerned that, if the bill gets approved, it would go into effect July 1.

“Admission materials are prepared and distributed over a year in advance of when students enter, and the outreach and communication associated with changes in processes need more lead time,” Clark wrote. “We believe that a bill with so much potential impact on our state and its public institutions requires more time to understand the divergent impacts it could have.”

This was originally published in .

Democratic lawmakers are seeking to ban Virginia public colleges and universities’ practice of providing special admission treatment to student applicants related to alumni and donors.

The proposed legacy admissions ban stems from the recent fall of affirmative action on college campuses nationwide. Since the Supreme Court ruled last June that race-conscious admission policies at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina were unconstitutional, schools in Virginia have already taken action to change their admissions policies, which has commonly favored student applicants who are white and are from higher-income families.

Although the court’s ruling did not mandate colleges to take any action, Democrats want to take another step to refine state institutions’ admissions process and support future college applicants by sponsoring legislation banning legacy admission ahead of the General Assembly session beginning on Wednesday.

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“Teaching in a classroom, every day, I see how hard these kids try to get into colleges, how much they stress over getting into colleges, and having all these things come together — the Supreme Court case, knowing that Virginia has a higher percentage of its universities use legacy admissions and kind of seeing the role it plays day to day in my day job — it was kind of a no brainer for me to put this bill in to try to make the process a little bit more merit based,” said Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Richmond, who is carrying the of the bill.

Del. Dan Helmer, D-Clifton, who is carrying the , said far right groups mistakenly believe that race plays an outsized role in college admissions. An actual problem, however, lies in admission decisions being influenced based on alumni status and donations, Helmer said.

“This is about fighting for working-class families to have access to every opportunity and making sure we support democracy and good jobs by providing pathways to the middle class through a college education, and you shouldn’t just be able to buy your way in,” Helmer said.

According to nonprofit , more than 100 colleges and universities have ended legacy admission preferences since 2015, but 787 still used the practice as of 2020.

State level

It’s unclear how many institutions in Virginia use legacy as an admissions tool. Legacy admissions are often a component of the nation’s most elite schools and top-rated institutions, including Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia.

Virginia Tech leaders the day after the SCOTUS ruling it would eliminate legacy as an admissions factor.

The following week, the University of Virginia it modified its admissions process by no longer asking applicants to identify themselves as relatives of alumni. Applicants have the option of completing an essay question about their “personal or historic connection with UVA.”

Sen. Jeremy McPike, D-Woodbridge, who is carrying similar to VanValkenburg and Helmer’s, said lawmakers need to take action.

“There shouldn’t be other outside influential factors that guide admissions,” McPike said. “We’ve already seen some universities in Virginia start to respond and start to change their policies, which I think is a positive step in the right direction.”

According to the Pew Research Center, a growing number of Americans surveyed state that legacy admissions should not be a factor in admissions decisions, increasing from 68% in 2019 to 75% in 2022.

“Colleges should consider individuals’ life experiences when reviewing their applications, including their socioeconomic status or how poverty has impacted their educational journey,” Attorney General Jason Miyares in the Richmond Times-Dispatch last August. “Higher education must follow the Supreme Court’s lead and end the superficial legacy admissions system so the door to higher education is truly open to everyone.”

Federal level

Lawmakers in Congress are also seeking to ban universities’ practice of giving special treatment to student applicants connected to alumni and donors.

In November, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, who sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, co-sponsored legislation in Congress called the Merit-Based Educational Reforms and Institutional Transparency Act (MERIT Act).

According to a joint statement by Kaine and bill co-sponsor Sen. Todd Young, R-Indiana, the , if passed, would amend the Higher Education Act to add a new standard for accreditation in order to prevent accredited colleges and universities – institutions that are recognized for maintaining a certain level of educational quality – from unfairly giving “preferential treatment” during the admissions process.

Under the MERIT Act, “preferential treatment” is defined as making admissions decisions or providing benefits based on an applicant’s relationship with alumni or donors as the “determinative factor.”

“A student’s acceptance into a college should not hinge on whether their parents attended that school or donated a large sum of money,” said Kaine in the statement. “This legislation would help bring more fairness to the higher education admissions process, and ensure that first-generation and low-income students are not put at a disadvantage because of their parents’ educational histories or incomes.”

If passed, the bill will clarify that the new standard shouldn’t be construed to prevent institutions from considering an applicant’s genuine interest in the institution as part of the admissions process, whether they have a legacy connection to the school or not.

“Many institutions currently consider alumni affiliation in assessing an applicant’s demonstrated interest (DI) in attending the school,” Kaine’s office said in a statement Monday. “The DI section in the bill aims to clarify that the institutions can still consider DI, but that the basis of their DI must be equally accessible to all applicants, regardless of their alumni affiliation. So this provision limits the use of DI as a loophole for alumni preference, but doesn’t eliminate DI, which institutions care about.”

The bill will also ensure that religious institutions can make admissions decisions in line with their faith-based values, preventing infringement on religious freedom. The legislation will also require a comprehensive feasibility study to assess improving data collection regarding the influence of legacy and donor relationships on admissions decisions. The legislation was unclear on which institutions the study would apply to.

VanValkenburg said he hopes Kaine is successful, but he added that Virginia lawmakers must do what they can to fix the problem in the commonwealth.

“I know he’s got bipartisan support for that bill, but if they’re not able to pass it in Congress, for the country, we can still ensure that Virginia universities are a little bit more fair based and … are giving every kid a fair shake,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

When the Supreme Court in June 2023, it forced colleges and universities to rethink how to maintain and increase diversity in their student bodies. It’s a topic that had been exploring in her new book, “.” Below, Foley expounds on what she sees as the future of diversity in higher education now that college admission officials can no longer consider race.

Is racial diversity in higher education about to suffer?

Yes, the likelihood of admission for racial minority students as a result of the in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. We know this from research done in states with existing affirmative action bans. Courts and ballot initiatives have banned affirmative action state by state in the last three decades. These states include , , , and . In 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in banned affirmative action across its jurisdiction: Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.

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Regardless of how selective a public university may be, if they are located in states that ban affirmative action.

The largest effects are felt at the most selective flagship universities, like and the . All of these schools self-reported dramatic declines in representation, particularly among Black, Hispanic and Native students. According to this data, underrepresented groups declined by 12% across the University of California system. At the University of Michigan, Black and Native undergraduate enrollment fell by 44% and 90%, respectively, in the years following the affirmative action ban.

Affirmative action was a precise tool in that it allowed universities to pay specific attention to specific populations of applicants. Without this tool, universities are left with blunt policy solutions and struggle to maintain and increase student racial diversity.

What lessons does your book offer for colleges and universities?

A ban on the method is not a ban on the goal.

Nationally, universities can as a way to maintain racial diversity among their students. This does not mean, however, that universities will abandon their commitments to racial diversity.

Even in before the Supreme Court banned the practice, universities . They also reaffirmed that they would both comply with the ban and find ways to prioritize diversity.

Still, I believe affirmative action bans could have a chilling effect on the willingness of some universities to explicitly mention race in their discussions and policies regarding diversity and inclusion. Bans on affirmative action discourage university administrators from as a criteria in admissions, even to do so. This research demonstrates how universities that are less selective have adopted broader statements about diversity and student recruitment that do not explicitly mention race.

How are colleges responding?

When colleges use race-neutral strategies to increase racial diversity, that they did with race-conscious affirmative action. There simply are no policy tools as affirmative action at producing racial diversity.

Nevertheless, universities will now seek out race-neutral methods to maintain or increase racial diversity on campus.

One example is . This involves assessment of an applicant’s academic achievements using multiple factors. These factors include socioeconomic hardship, educational disadvantages or other forms of adversity. universities in making demographic factors like the educational backgrounds of parents, the number of students on free or reduced lunch at the schools an applicant attended and the family’s socioeconomic status part of the admissions review.

Other states have tried legislative solutions, such as at state universities to graduating high school seniors in the top percent of their class.

Following the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling, some colleges and universities have pursued creative solutions to comply with the Supreme Court decision. For example, at Sarah Lawrence College, the admissions application when it asks students to comment on the role race has played in their lives.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Now research evidence demonstrates that they face racial isolation simply by entering the classroom. A recent study of wealthy California suburbs finds that white families drift away from public schools as more Asian students enroll in them — and fears over academic competition, rather than outright racism, may play the biggest role in driving the departures. 

Circulated this summer by the National Bureau of Economic Research, offers an unusually granular view of population-level changes in a highly affluent and desirable milieu. It also reveals a stark and somewhat disturbing response to the presence of Asian Americans, one of and highest-achieving ethnic groups in the United States.

In measure after measure, Asian Americans are shown to be America’s top-performing student racial category. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, separating Asian students from their white, African American, and Hispanic peers. Asians achieved similar results on college entrance exams, tallying scoring over 700 on the SAT math section while making up less than 6 percent of all K–12 students. 

Older federal data also show that, apart from testing, Asian high schoolers than students of other backgrounds, and the proportion of Asians earning college credit through Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate coursework that of whites. 

While they’ve ascended to lofty altitudes in U.S. schooling — significantly ahead of whites, America’s most historically advantaged group, and vastly more so relative to other non-whites — Asian Americans have often received a frosty reception from policymakers and communities. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against Asian applicants in order to cultivate more racial diversity on their campuses, a historic blow to the legality of affirmative action. And for nearly two decades, news accounts have highlighted areas (including in California cities ) where white families following an influx of Asian children, with some parents openly complaining of from the new arrivals.

“I would have thought that a school district with a growing number of Asian students would be seen as a positive thing,” Boustan reasoned. “Because we have these perceptions — partially based on real data about the educational background of Asian parents, but also partially stereotypes that are expanded beyond the reality — that somehow, Asian kids would be better prepared, that they would be better peers who would elevate classroom discussion.”

‘White kids are generally falling behind’

Those assumptions may indeed have guided the white parents featured in the research, though perhaps not in a predictable direction.

Boustan and her colleagues collected public school enrollment figures from the California Department of Education between 2000 and 2016, which included demographic information about families’ racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. They focused on a group of 152 school districts that were suburban and comparatively well-to-do, determined by their local average incomes and percentages of students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch (a common measure of poverty in education research).
They also used U.S. Census records to determine the growth rates of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian students within those districts. Over 6 million people of Asian descent live in California, within the United States as a whole, and Asian students make up proportionally larger shares of suburban districts than urban ones. While large divergences exist between Asians of different national origin, on average, households headed by Asian Americans earn 38 percent more than the U.S. median income.

The results of the authors’ calculations were unmistakable: With each arrival of an Asian American student in a high-income suburban district, .6 white students left — mostly departing the community entirely, rather than relocating to a private or a charter school. After adjusting their observations for moving patterns (different sub-groups enrolled at schools at markedly different rates, with South Asian and Chinese populations growing faster than Koreans and Japanese) the effect was even greater, such that each Asian student was associated with the departure of 1.5 white students.

The strength of the correlation between Asian entrance and white exit was clear, even if the motivation wasn’t. The research team considered multiple explanations behind the trend, but found reason to doubt each.

First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics; therefore, white movement was a reaction not to the broader emergence of non-white neighbors, but to Asians specifically. 

But additional qualitative evidence indicates that the movement was unlikely to have been primarily generated by anti-Asian prejudice either. In responses to the , a long-running poll of public attitudes administered by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, highly educated participants were vastly less likely than their less educated peers to say they “feel cool” toward Asian Americans, or to say they don’t trust them. And yet the suburbs included in the study were overwhelmingly populated by high-income residents with college and advanced degrees.

“If we just look at the basic correlations, we don’t see this kind of white flight from low-income suburbs,” said Boustan. “To me, this very clearly rules out basic racial animus.”

But the out-migration could be related to another factor: relative performance in school. According to results from California’s mandated math and reading tests, as well as its high school exit exam, the presence of Asian students in a given school during the period under observation was tied to elevated average test scores in that school — but typically not for white students. In other words, the new Asian American pupils were bringing stronger academic performance to the schools they enrolled in, but also potentially making their white classmates look somewhat worse by comparison.

Boustan said that possibility could be viewed with dread during college admissions season, when high school seniors are often considered on the basis of their class GPA rank. 

“Someone is showing up in the district who scores better than they do. On some of the tests, maybe that pulls the white scores up a bit too, and on other tests, it looks like white scores might even be falling. But in relative terms, the white kids are generally falling behind.”

‘Race at the Top’

The theme of white and Asian families jostling for educational opportunity has been sounded more frequently in recent years, especially in highly educated, middle-class settings. This summer, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard showcased the comparatively superior academic credentials of many Asian applicants to elite universities, as well as the various alternative criteria — including legacy and donor status, racial preferences, extracurricular activities like sports — that colleges use to select their classes.

A similar dynamic plays out during the K–12 years. In 2022, Tufts University sociologist Natasha Warikoo published Race at the Top, an account of fierce academic competition among high schoolers in a wealthy, but unidentified, East Coast community. Some of the white parents she spoke with about the high-stakes atmosphere building in their local schools and fear that their own children would struggle to keep pace with their Asian classmates.

Lurking behind the discourse is the decade-old : a hyper-motivated Asian parent who pushes her child to excel in high-level coursework and seek extra instruction outside of class. Viewed as by some and an offensive stereotype by others, the notion appears to guide how some white parents perceive their Asian neighbors.

It may also reflect some bedrock truths about what different families prioritize in education and child-rearing. In this summer, researcher Ziyao Tian used microdata from consumer surveys for different families across the U.S. to show that white and Asian families differ dramatically in their annual expenditures on K–12 education. Not only did Asian families outspend white families overall, they were also more likely to direct their spending toward tutoring and instruction outside of school. By comparison, whites outspent Asians on sports and cultural activities like trips to parks, concerts, and museums. 

Notably, the gap in expenditures was at its greatest among highly educated families like those populating the California suburbs that Boustan studied. Asian parents with graduate degrees spent 22 percent more on tutoring for their children than similarly credentialed white parents; among parents with a high school education or less, Asians spent just 6 percent more on tutoring. In spite of the escalating disparities in spending, the Asian-white achievement gap is actually greater among families with less educational attainment.

Those findings provide an echo of looking at the incremental growth of private tutoring centers. The number of such brick-and-mortar centers (including many employing the popular ) more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, an explosion that was heavily concentrated in highly educated and high-income cities and towns. They were also disproportionately likely to be located in areas with larger percentages of immigrant and Asian residents.

Eddie Kim, a mathematics professor at Bentley University and one of the tutoring study’s co-authors, said that the purchase of additional learning opportunities outside of traditional schooling might be a partial outgrowth of middle-class status. While the top priority for many striving families is to move to a neighborhood with strong public schools, the same households must pursue alternate routes for their children’s academic development after that step has been taken.

“Once you’ve moved to a particularly good school district, and you see that everyone else is already [academically] good, how do you give your child an advantage? It can’t be through the school system because every child gets the same thing,” Kim posited. “The only advantage is to look outside the school system.”

The findings of the Boustan paper “clicked with” some of Kim’s own instincts about middle-class parents’ strategies around education and admission. If they feared that their children would be outshone in the classroom, they might well change schools — or even move — he said.

“When you say it out loud, it sounds very intuitive: Of course, parents aren’t just going to lie down and do nothing. If they notice something, even semi-subconsciously, they’re going to take action to support their individual child’s success.”

But a survey by ����Ӱ�� reveals the answer is more complex, that while some schools have revised their acceptance criteria based on the availability of rigorous courses, including calculus, others have not. 

Queries sent to 20 top-tier colleges and universities, many of which are recognized for their strong engineering programs, found that 11 do not require it while six strongly recommend or encourage it.

Calculus may not be a must, but it is still expected at many institutions.

looks for some applicants to complete the class if they have access to it. Likewise, , and strongly recommend or encourage at least some applicants to take the course in high school.

was alone among the 20 in still mandating calculus. In fact, the Ivy League school tells incoming freshmen that at least one of their two letters of recommendation must be from a math teacher and they are “strongly encouraged” to make that person their precalculus or calculus teacher.

Caltech dropped calculus, physics and chemistry from a list of required courses while widening students’ opportunity to showcase their abilities through other means, including the completion of online courses through the free .  

Ashley Pallie, Caltech’s executive director of undergraduate admissions, noted it was a significant shift for the STEM-intensive titan. The school had required a calculus course for decades, she said, despite pushback from applicants. 

“Every year, we would get lots of students who would write in and say, ‘I was on track to take it, but the teacher isn’t able to teach us here,’ or, ‘Not enough students signed up for the class,’ or, ‘The class isn’t offered at my high school,’” she said. “And the answer was always, ‘No. We need to have the course requirement.’ ”

But that changed when Pallie and two faculty members, who set admissions criteria, learned at a February conference on equity and college acceptance the extent to which the course is not available, particularly to low-income applicants, students of color and those living in rural areas. 

Pallie credited Melodie Baker, national policy director at , an organization that promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success, for sharing the information at that gathering. Calculus still has merit, Caltech faculty concluded, but should no longer be mandated. 

“So now it’s less about having taken the course and more about, ‘Can you showcase to us that you have proficiency and mastery?’” Pallie said. 

MIT follows a similar model; it wants incoming freshmen to have two semesters of calculus but allows them to place out of the requirement either through outside credits or by taking an Advanced Standing Examination.

Calculus is not required for admission to any school or college, including the College of Engineering and the Ross School of Business. 

And the same holds true at , , , and Johns Hopkins. 

The explanation is simple, according to one school’s spokesperson. 

“We recognize not all high schools have a calculus course available to students, so it is not required for admission to Johns Hopkins University,” said Jill Rosen.

Baker, of Just Equations, said colleges and universities should always seek to widen the opportunities for bright applicants so they can one day help solve the world’s most complex and enduring problems. 

“When math is used as it was intended, to cultivate and develop talent rather than rank and sort students, the future of STEM looks like a microcosm of the larger society,” she said. “It looks very different from what it looks like today: It looks well-represented.”

The doesn’t demand calculus for entry to any of its undergraduate programs. However, the school does prefer that students study the topic at some stage: It’s mandatory for some majors, though it can be taken at the college level. 

Still, a spokesperson for the five-college system said, “Anyone can get in without it.”

For other colleges, the answer is nuanced. Neither calculus nor precalculus is a requirement for first-year admissions at the , a spokesperson said. 

The vast U.C. system, which encompasses 10 campuses and some , does, however, note that those interested in STEM, data science and the social sciences are “strongly encouraged” to consider a math course sequence that prepares them for calculus — either during high school or in their first year at the university.

Sharon Veatch, school counseling department chair at the rural Housatonic Valley Regional High School in northwest Connecticut, follows college admissions criteria closely. Two of her former graduates are now at Harvard and a couple of others have recently graduated from Cornell. 

She said universities have become less focused on calculus in recent years: Their decision to admissions tests from consideration means they are looking at students more holistically, placing less emphasis on any one class. 

But, Veatch said, many top-ranked universities urge students to take the most rigorous course available. For those at her high school, that means Advanced Placement calculus. The campus hasn’t offered AP Statistics for years. 

“In general, when I advise students, I say, ‘You need to max out on the curriculum,’” she said. “Because that’s what I’m being told.”

Maxing out, of course, means something different from one state to another as several are reassessing their mathematics offerings.

California has tried to broaden high school students’ opportunities by providing other academic pathways, not just those that lead to calculus. 

But there’s been a push and pull between , with the state recently backtracking on a key issue for college applicants: The faculty committee that sets admissions requirements for the U.C. system that data science could no longer be a substitute for Algebra II. The state Board of Education, which oversees K-12 and is looking at reframing math statewide, soon after removed its endorsement of data science as a substitute for that subject. 

, a crown jewel in higher education in that state, recommends four years of rigorous mathematics — including algebra, geometry and trigonometry.

“We also welcome additional mathematical preparation, including calculus and statistics,” its website advises.

Calculus is not necessary for entry to the University of Wisconsin. But spokesman John Lucas said direct admittance to the engineering program is highly selective, “so, it’s rare for a student to not have taken calculus.”

Georgia Tech is a bit more explicit. Laura Simmons, an admissions counselor there, said in an , that students should take the most challenging courses available to them. If that means seeking out a dual enrollment math class at the local college, they should choose wisely.

“We’re never going to pretend that college algebra is the same as a calculus class,” she said. 

The , published in late September in the journal of the American Educational Research Association, effectively tests the usefulness of what its authors call “contextualized” indicators of academic performance: a university applicant’s grades, test scores, and course selection compared not just against those of his fellow applicants, but also the rest of the students in his own high school. Advocates say that this additional nuance allows admissions officers to view applicants with a more informed sense of the instruction available in their classrooms and the academic results that typical students see there. 

“I don’t think there’s any way to fairly evaluate a student from an American high school without knowing what opportunities are available to them at that school, because we have such a highly stratified high school system,” said study co-author Michael Bastedo. “We have schools that offer 26 APs [Advanced Placement courses] and schools that offer zero APs.”

Bastedo, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, has studied the huge divisions separating American schools along lines of spending levels, demographics, and academic achievement. Given those disparities, simply weighing aspects of one student’s college resume against another’s could yield “manifestly unfair” effects, he said.

That basic argument underlies admissions criteria that have been used for decades. University administrators have long focused on where applicants fall in their class GPA rankings, and states like Texas grant college slots to all high school seniors who place into the top 10 percent of their graduating classes. A few years ago, the College Board (the highly influential testing organization that administers the SATs) released , which provides colleges with background information on prospective students’ schools and neighborhoods. 

To analyze the success of the practice, Bastedo and his collaborators gathered an enormous bank of data from the education department of an unidentified Midwestern state. The figures included academic records from all public high schools within the state between 2010 and 2015, including student grades and course selection; individual scores on the ACT exam, which students in the state were required to take during the period under examination; and grades and enrollment status for all of the state’s 15 public universities. The team eventually developed a sample of over 77,000 subjects, amounting to more than three-quarters of all first-year, in-state students at each university. 

In the end, they found that high schoolers’ contextualized academic profiles were significantly correlated with their freshman-year GPA, retention (i.e., their likelihood of still being enrolled in college in the fall of their second year), and college graduation, with high school grades being a particularly strong predictor. College GPA was the outcome most reliably predicted by high school factors, with graduation and retention somewhat less associated.

Measuring applicants’ high school grades within the context of other students at their high schools proved to be an especially powerful approach. The authors found that applicants who earned grades that were significantly better than the median student at their high school ended up receiving an average GPA that was .66 points higher in their first year of college. 

ACT scores — both contextualized by high school and “raw,” or uncontextualized — were also correlated with college success, though less than high school grades. At one university, students with relatively higher high school GPAs were five times more likely to graduate within four years than former classmates whose grades fell at the median of their high schools; by comparison, students whose ACT scores were measurably higher than their high school’s median performance were just 1–2 times more likely to get their degree on time. 

Of all three factors measured, rigor of high school coursework (how many honors-type classes applicants took in high school) were the least predictive of success in college; whether or not it was placed in the context of applicants’ high schools, their choice of courses was not consistently related to later academic performance across 15 universities. 

The findings gesture toward one possible road for colleges to follow after the Supreme Court’s move this summer to disallow race-based affirmative action. With schools forbidden from relying on strict racial preferences when constructing their student bodies, many are looking toward novel means of assessing applicants’ backgrounds and experiences overcoming life obstacles. 

Consider two 18-year-olds with roughly identical GPAs and test scores: One might place directly in the middle of the pack at her well-resourced high school, while the other dramatically outpaces the rest of his class at a school that enrolls many more low-income pupils and employs far fewer high-quality teachers. By revealing the relative performance of each, colleges might gain a better sense of which is most likely to excel at the next level.

Bastedo, who has previously conducted fieldwork to study how admissions professionals consider applicants, said that contextualized indicators could help identify strong candidates who might otherwise be overlooked. 

“This is a good opportunity to evaluate students’ credentials contextually and hopefully provide some level of equity,” Bastedo said. “It’s very unlikely to fill the gap left by the elimination of race-conscious admissions, but it is a positive step toward equity.” 

The rankings backlash

David Hawkins, the chief education and policy officer for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, said that he had observed admissions practices transform over nearly a quarter-century, with an increasing number of competitive institutions attempting to take a holistic view of their applicants rather than simply admitting or denying them based on raw test scores and grades. Some have always attempted to gain a contextualized perspective on applicants through measures like GPA ranking, which indicates where a particular student falls within the rest of their high school class. 

But colleges and high schools have both on such metrics in recent years, partly because competition among students over highly public rankings has produced hurt feelings and unhealthy jostling. In some cases, families to contest their children’s ranks.

Hawkins said that admissions offices had to strike “a delicate balance” between conducting acceptable scrutiny of their applicants and encouraging invidious comparisons between young people.

“You might have to give something up in transparency so as to not provoke the negative behaviors that come with a class ranking scheme,” he said. “But at the same time, you have to be invested at some level in understanding how a student stacks up against their peers in high school.”

The balance can be extremely difficult to achieve. In 2019, the College Board an “adversity score” that would distill the degree of environmental advantage or disadvantage that prospective college-goers experienced in their families, neighborhoods, and high schools. Though hailed by its backers as a step towards leveling the playing field between students of different backgrounds, the idea provoked a backlash from both left and right. It was eventually withdrawn Landscape, which has since been adopted by dozens of colleges.

Hawkins said that tools like Landscape would likely grow in acceptance with the passage of time, particularly as schools look for alternative paths to socioeconomic and racial diversity.

“Holistic review will be with us for as long as we’re doing admissions. And yes, it will remain an intrinsic part of ensuring that there are opportunities available to people who may not have the same advantages as their more privileged peers.”

The average ACT test score was 19.5 out of 36 from the class of 2023, compared to 19.8 last year — the sixth consecutive drop, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test.

New shows Black students scored 3.5 points below this year’s average, continuing the growing trend of historically marginalized students being unprepared for college-level courses.

“These systemic problems require sustained action and support at the policy level,” said ACT chief executive officer Janet Godwin in a . 

“The hard truth is that we are not doing enough to ensure that graduates are truly ready for postsecondary success in college and career,” she added.

Here are four key takeaways from the :

1. Black students had the lowest ACT test scores in nearly every category.

Black students had an overall ACT test score of 16 out of 36.

In English, Black students were more than three points below the average scores of 18.6 for English, 19 for math, 20.1 for reading and 19.6 for science.

American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander and Latino students also scored below average in every category.

Stephen Barker, director of communications at , said the scores point to the systemic barriers minority and first-generation students face as they apply to college.

“There isn’t the generational support or knowledge to push kids and prepare them to take these tests,” Barker said. “Kids are throwing their hands in the air and saying ‘I’m gonna take it but I’m not ready’ and it’s stressful for them and bears out in these numbers.”

2. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students experienced the greatest ACT test score declines in the last five years.

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students saw the largest overall ACT test score decline in the last five years, scoring 16.3 out of 36 — a 1.6 point decrease compared to 2019.

The decline was followed by Latino and white students who decreased 1.3 and 1.1 points, respectively.

“What you don’t see in these numbers are all of the environmental challenges that are stacked on,” Barker said, adding how students, often women, are caretaking for families or working multiple jobs.

“We’re just throwing tests at kids and are surprised when it comes time to enroll them and they aren’t ready,” he said.

3. Male students scored higher in math and science compared to females.

Male students scored 19.4 in math and 19.8 in science compared to female students scoring 18.8 and 19.6, respectively — a difference of 0.6 and 0.2 points.

Female students scored 19.2 in English and 20.6 in reading compared to male students scoring 18.2 and 19.7 — a difference of 1 and 0.9 points.

“I can tell you that I definitely see this disparity,” Medha Kukkalli, a first-year student at the University of Houston, told ����Ӱ��.

Kukkalli, who’s currently studying human development and family studies, said most of her classmates are women and her peers in STEM courses are predominantly men. 

4. Fewer students have taken the ACT test in the last five years.

Nearly 1.4 million students took the ACT test compared to last year — an increase of 40,000 students.

But there’s been a dramatic decline from the nearly 1.8 million students who took the test in 2019 — a decrease of about 400,000 students.

This comes as several universities have made standardized admissions tests optional, including the that doesn’t even consider ACT or SAT scores.

Kukkalli opted out of taking the ACT test because she said it wouldn’t reflect how successful she could be in college.

“It’s more about time management skills, having resilience, support systems and mental fortitude rather than solely whether you have a high ACT score,” Kukkalli said.

Barker said Kukkalli’s thinking is not surprising as the ACT and SAT tests experience a “brand crisis,” with the number of students taking standardized tests declining.

To Syrita Steib, the University of New Orleans denied her first application for admission in what seemed like lightning speed.

With equal speed, though, the university accepted her second application. The difference? The second time around, Steib didn’t disclose her criminal history.

“I checked the box, I was denied within 24 hours,” said Steib, founder and executive director of . “When I reapplied and didn’t check the box. I was accepted within 24 hours.”

The box she refers to affirmed that she’d been incarcerated, serving 10 years for burglary and arson of an auto dealership.

With that prison sentence and her 2016 graduation from UNO behind her, Steib, a member of the Louisiana , launched her organization. Through it, she researched, helped shape and lobbied for legislation resulting in Louisiana becoming the first in a list of what Operation Restoration lists as  banning questions about criminal history on admissions applications to public colleges and universities.

That question, however, isn’t the only barrier to college for formerly incarcerated people. Others include such things as application fees and lack of understanding of college financing such as student loans.

“There are structural factors and inequalities in criminal justice, such as poverty, that can shut out individuals from getting an education,” said Wanda Bertram, spokesperson for the .

“It’s a really large lift to attend college and work,” said Patrick Rodriguez, co-executive director of the . “It takes a lot of dedication to get to the point of even being able to apply. It just takes a bit of extra help to get across the application line.”

Here are some helpful resources and strategies for overcoming some of those hurdles.

Get College Application and Admissions Test Fees Waived

The  provides the how-tos of getting fee waivers for the  accepted by more than 1,000 institutions and what the College Board says are roughly 2,000 colleges and universities that issue those waivers.

Fees for  and tests measuring academic competency also may be waived by those testing companies. Once applicants get either an application waiver or test waiver from one school or testing center, they’re in a better position to get other waivers because they’ve started gathering information about income, whether they receive food stamps or other public assistance and such.

Before applying to college, of course, applicants must have a high school diploma or .  from the Prison Policy Initiative estimates that roughly 25% have not.

Some of those individuals were incarcerated before age 18 and need help finishing high school by passing the  test, in lieu of earning a diploma, and eventually, with college admissions, said Bertram, of the policy initiative. Those individuals also may seek waivers of the GED tests fee waivers and enroll in free tutoring programs, she said.

Tap Into Peer-Run and Other Re-entry Organizations For Former Prisoners

“Don’t limit yourself to groups and resources in your state,” Bertram said. You can contact an array of groups and individuals across the country for guidance.

The  is a national organization partnering with ,  and similar organizations.

Additionally, as examples, California State University’s  is expressly for formerly incarcerated students on that campus.

(Some examples of projects offering accredited college instruction to people who begin their education while still behind bars are Tulane University, which partners with Operation Restoration, and the City University of New York, which runs its  program. Also, the )

Searching online for “formerly incarcerated education” and the name of a state will yield such programs and ones that, for example, review applicants’ essays and personal statements, aiming to increase their chances of being admitted to college.

Target colleges that don’t require disclosure of criminal history — and ones that do

Those choosing to include their prison experiences and related background in their college essays may target colleges that openly state that they welcome former prisoners or that don’t require applicants to disclose their criminal backgrounds. Though New York State, for example, has no law banning disclosure of criminal history on applications to public colleges, applicants to the State University of New York’s 64 campuses and the City University of New York’s 25 campuses don’t require such disclosure.

Nevertheless, it may not be necessary to limit oneself to schools that either openly embrace former prisoners or that don’t make them disclose their criminal history. Formerly incarcerated people have been admitted to schools requiring disclosure of their criminal backgrounds. Rodriguez, of the Georgia Coalition for Higher Education in Prison, was one of them.

He submitted to Kennesaw State University, his Georgia alma mater, a 14-page essay detailing the dates and circumstances of his crimes and how he had grown beyond those experiences.

He sought help in crafting his story. “I don’t know if I would have gone to school if Bill Taft from  weren’t there,” Rodriguez said. “It was really nice having somebody hold me accountable and have an honest conversation about what the next steps are in the application process.”

But New Orleanian Steib took a different approach.

“When I applied to medical school, I didn’t apply to any school that said they consider incarceration in their admissions process,” said Steib, now a hospital lab supervisor. “I wasted some application fees on schools that did discriminate, but didn’t list [that reality] on their site.”

Apply for scholarships expressly for former prisoners and federal Pell grants

Income-based , funded by the U.S. Department of Education, are available to the formerly incarcerated and, after being revoked in 1994, .

In addition, several private organizations and colleges themselves give scholarships to formerly incarcerated. They include the , ,  and the .

Dozens of colleges, including ,  and  in California, offer scholarships for those who were formerly incarcerated.

Youth Today is a nonprofit news site for people who care about and work with children and youth.

Ten of Michigan’s 15 public universities have committed to admitting high school graduates with a 3.0 cumulative grade point average or higher during their fall 2024 admission cycle.

Central Michigan University, Eastern Michigan University, Ferris State University, Lake Superior State University, Northern Michigan University, Oakland University, Saginaw Valley State University, University of Michigan-Dearborn, University of Michigan-Flint, and Wayne State University each agreed to participate in the Michigan Assured Admission Pact, and will work to promote the initiative to high school students, parents, secondary school partners and college access organizations throughout the state.

This initiative is aimed at supporting the state’s goal under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for 60% of working-age adults to have a college degree or other post-secondary credential by 2030.

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According to a news release, universities participating in the pact believe a uniform, widely communicated admission standard will help reduce uncertainty and anxiety in the admissions process and help empower students to meet their educational goals.

College attendance among Michigan high school graduates has declined each year since 2013 with 52.8% of graduates attending college in 2022.

“Higher education is the surest path to prosperity for our state and its residents, yet college enrollment has been declining each year over the past decade,” said Daniel J. Hurley, chief executive officer of the Michigan Association of State Universities.

“[The Michigan Assured Admission Pact] aims to counter this trend by assuring that every high school graduate in Michigan with a 3.0 or higher will be admitted to all ten participating public universities across the state. Combined with the new Michigan Achievement Scholarship, this collaborative effort will send a powerful message that a public university education in Michigan is more accessible than ever before,” Hurley said.

The five public universities that aren’t part of the agreement are: the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Western Michigan University, Michigan Technological University and Grand Valley State University.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

That’s the question confronting university administrators, faculty, applicants and their families in the wake of in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The 6-3 ruling by the Court’s conservative majority at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, overturning the decades-old model of affirmative action in higher education.

That system — in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case — allowed schools to include race as a consideration in offering university acceptance, but only as a means of cultivating the benefits of a diverse student body. But after a series of failed legal challenges over the past 20 years appealing to the bench’s increasingly rightward tilt, a group of Asian plaintiffs prevailed in arguing that they were unconstitutionally disadvantaged by affirmative action as currently practiced. 

“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. 

But if the status quo of college admissions has been cast aside, a replacement hasn’t yet been offered. According to Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale, the future remains murky.

Carnevale is the longtime director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and one of America’s most-cited economists on the intersection of schools and the labor market. A former member of multiple federal panels on employment and technology, and a passionate advocate for additional K–12 funding and policy experimentation, he has long pondered the question of what might follow an abrupt end to affirmative action.

His observations and proposals fill published in June, which may help shape colleges’ and policymakers’ response to a new landscape of socioeconomic mobility. If elite schools can no longer act as an access point for historically disadvantaged groups to enter the middle and upper classes, he and his co-authors argue, the logic of broad-based education reform — including both dramatically boosted resources and an overhauled approach to college and career counseling — becomes inescapable.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Carnevale discussed the legacy of the Bakke case and multiple generations of racial preferences; the plausibility of class-based selection metrics replacing the vanished system; and the future of a higher education sector that could increasingly come to be seen as elitist. While lamenting the end of affirmative action as we knew it, he argues that colleges should step up efforts to become truly egalitarian.

“One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites,” he said. “If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What’s your perspective on this ruling and the legacy of race-conscious admissions?

Basically, affirmative action has been a Band-Aid that’s been used by politicians and the rest of us, so that we have a little racial access to elite colleges. And it’s stopped us from truly reforming education. Now the Band-Aid has been ripped off, and race is a gushing wound in America.

In the end, what disgusts me most about this outcome is that they’re demanding that minority applicants humiliate themselves. The best way for a minority to get into Harvard now — it’s allowed in this opinion — is to write an essay about the hardship you’ve suffered; that your parents abused you, that your neighborhood abused you, that you got beaten up going to school every day, and that was good for your character. I find that humiliating, to turn on everyone you know and care about so that you can get into Harvard. Telling your story in this way is kind of like racial porn: “Let’s see who’s got the sorriest story to tell, and we’ll let them in!” 

There are definitely going to be fewer African American, Latino, and Native American people on campus, no doubt about it. That’s what’s going to happen here. The question is, how does everybody respond?

How do you think they’ll respond? Are college admissions officers freaking out right now?

I’m not sure about “freaking out.” I go to meetings of college officials where this topic is the center of the discussion, and people basically don’t know what they’re going to do. In one of those meetings, a lawyer opened the conversation by saying, “The first question you have to answer is, do you want to get sued?” I thought, “Boy, that’s a good question.”

If you want to make your name in higher education, you can disobey this ruling and let them sue you. If you’re Harvard or Georgetown, and slaves helped build the buildings, maybe you should do that and make a point. But I don’t see any way out of this because the anti-preferences side is committed, and not all of them are racists — a lot of them are just idealists. They’re well-funded, they’re well-organized and they’re always three steps ahead. They’re already changes to Gifted and Talented programs, and if anyone’s wondering whether they’ll persist [in those challenges], I think the answer is yes.

If I were as rich as Harvard, I might simply disobey the ruling. What are they going to do? They’re like the pope — they have no army. Maybe they’ll sue you.

Deliberately contravening a Supreme Court order seems incredibly risky, though. I wonder if universities are entering a particularly dangerous period with respect to the law and public opinion.

It is risky because people’s feelings are easily aroused on this issue. One of the things that will happen is that the ACE [the American Council on Education, a nonprofit advocacy group representing 1,700 institutions of higher education] will take a beating. 

I think the [legislation re-introduced this spring, which aims to modernize data collection from universities and give families a fuller picture of schools’ enrollment, completion, and post-completion earnings statistics] will pass when there’s an opening for it. It has strong, bipartisan support, and one of the things you can do to whack higher education is to make them more transparent in terms of their employment and earnings effects. There’s also a push for expanding funding for workforce training, so we’re going to get transparency on degrees and accountability on training. All of that stuff will move now.

I worked on the Hill a long time, and higher education annoys politicians because they think it’s arrogant and ungrateful. Higher education leadership tried to stop the GI Bill, and they lost. They tried to stop student aid because they wanted that money to go to institutions, and they lost again. They lose at every turn when it comes to issues going beyond higher education. Whacking the elites is a common American sport that appeals to both parties for different reasons. 

So if I’m a lobbyist for higher education, I’m looking for another job.

What has been the final legacy of race-conscious standards of college admission since the Bakke case?

The importance of Bakke was that it saved race-conscious affirmative action just in time. There were questions even then about whether it could survive, and it’s . 

If you ask the American public straight-up, “Do you agree that we should give racial preferences in admissions to selective colleges,” a majority will say no — and that includes a majority of African Americans, Latinos, etc. If you ask them, “Do you think there are fundamental problems in the American system that are racist and need attention,” they’ll say yes. But if you give them anything specific, they’ll reject it.

So Bakke saved the day by deferring to the expertise of educators, the notion being that educators understood higher education better than judges do. What has now happened is that the deference is over, and they’re no longer going to defer to American education institutions on race. The argument is that race is too much; even if diversity is a good thing, we can’t base admissions decisions on it because that would be racist. 

Could there be any replacement measures for racial preferences? 

The courts have been chipping away at preferences in admissions for a long time, and we’re now at the point where they’re saying it’s the end. But it’s not clear that it is. In many people’s judgment — lawyers and others — courts will begin to defer to class instead. Many decent people argue that the real issue of concern here, across all our diverse peoples, is class. We believe strongly in striving and Horatio Alger, and we want to reward that. The polls make clear that the public still believes that, and it’s part of our culture. 

The classic story is Poor Kid Makes Good. Everybody likes that, you want to give that kid a break. But for some reason, we don’t recognize the connection of race to American history and the disadvantages that are still there. It’s a failure to deal with American racism, and it has been since Bakke. The hope among some people is that we’ll use class as a proxy for race, but class and race are not the same thing. They are two very different forces in disadvantaging people’s lives, though a lot of people notice that they often go together. 

We’ve done a over the years and discovered that, no, you don’t also get race when you screen for class. You can claw back a bit of the racial diversity you had before affirmative action was banned, but not much of it.

Nevertheless, a lot of people are celebrating a potential switch to class-based affirmative action, saying, “Finally, going to Harvard isn’t just going to be for rich minority kids anymore.” The truth is, it never was. Most of the African Americans and Latinos who go to the top 193 schools are from the bottom half of the income distribution. A lot of them aren’t poor in the classic sense, but they’re not a bunch of rich kids. 

The thing people don’t talk about when it comes to class-based admissions is this: A basic problem for people who are poor is, obviously, that they don’t have money. And with the exception of places that are filthy rich, like Harvard and Yale — they can do whatever they want, and their concern is prestige rather than money — colleges just can’t afford class-conscious affirmative action. There have been efforts, but what people forget about colleges, whether they’re selective or not, is that they’re businesses. What they’re always trying to do is find as many kids who can pay full tuition as possible, and if they’re lucky, more than 50 percent of your families will do that.

There’s a bargaining process that every middle-class family is familiar with, where families visit eight colleges and strike the best bargain they can within their kids’ preferences. The colleges will give them “merit aid,” but what it is is a bargain. You get all the full-pay parents you can get, and you haggle with the parents you have to haggle with. Then, whatever you’ve got left over, you can use it for athletes, legacies, the trombone player you need in the band. But you really don’t have room for many poor kids. 

You might say to these schools, “You’ve got an endowment of something like $2 billion. How the hell can you not afford it?” Well, if a college president takes money out of the endowment, the alumni are going to get him fired. 

How did this whole focus on diversity get started?

As a practical matter, this has always been about white kids. James Conant, who was the president of Harvard after World War II, determined that we needed 5 percent of kids to go to college. He that we should build a certain kind of high school nationwide, the “comprehensive” high school. It was comprehensive because it offered a college pathway to a small share of the kids; it offered vocational education, mostly for boys; and it offered home economics and typing for women. 

But one of the big moments in the history of education came in 1983. After A Nation at Risk, we decided to do away with the comprehensive high school and provide every American child a full academic education through high school. And the real political reason behind that reform was the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the disability movement. Basically, anti-tracking sentiment killed the comprehensive high school and, in the end, created an academic curriculum that assumed everyone would go to college. Since Obama, the battle cry has been to make every kid college- and career-ready, but of course, high schools don’t. A lot more kids are graduating high school and going to college, a lot of them are dropping out, and a lot of the kids who don’t make it are the ones you’d figure wouldn’t make it. 

Underneath all this, there’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between education and the economy. We needed an elite to run our military, our businesses, every institution in American life, and most of these people were going to be white males. We realized that if you’re going to run a diverse economy and be the global leader in a diverse world, you need to have some understanding of demographic diversity. The reason we did affirmative action was for them — they needed it! If you’re going to run a company in America, you need to have a diverse workforce, or Reverend Al’s going to show up. 

The way this will work out is that employers will need to have diversity in their leadership. They’ve got to “look like America,” as Bill Clinton used to say. So irrespective of what the court’s done, they’ll go to UMass instead of Harvard to recruit, and they’ll find plenty of talented minorities there. They’re serious about this, and they have no choice — you can’t run a company with an all-white leadership team. 

What about the political consequences?

It will be hell for the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court has effectively put a Band-Aid on racism for years, and now we’re ripping it off. If minorities are a core part of your coalition, you’ve got to come up with something for them. 

Joe Biden’s answer is: We’re going to go back and do what we should have done in the first place. We’re going to have preschool for everyone, we’re going to increase spending for Title I, we’re going to increase funding for low-income schools, and we’re going to make community college free. In other words, now that you can’t just mess around with the elite schools, you’ve got to focus on the whole damn system. That’s not very satisfying because you’re talking about 40 years of work. There’s going to be much more focus on making the education system produce minority elites who aren’t from rich families. 

This changes the conversation on education reform, which has run out of gas at the K–12 level. That discussion is about to get revived because there’s nothing else to do except go back to the beginning and get it right.

That sounds refreshing, but also potentially impossible.

In the end, K–12 has caused this problem, so we’ve got to go back to court cases in the states. There have been a lot of those, and they’ve been reasonably successful over the last few decades. But it’s a big, big deal. Politically, it’s going to be awful because what you’re talking about, in part, is screwing around with the local control of schools. 

The education system is now the primary pathway to a good job in America. That wasn’t true back when I was young. If you had an uncle working at Chrysler, he could get you in. 

You didn’t need to go to college; truthfully, you should drop out of high school instead of waiting. But in all the research — OECD [the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] was the first organization to start saying this, in the ’90s — the education system is now the primary institution that ensures the reproduction of advantage from one generation to the next. It’s a machine where you go to a good grade school, a good high school, a good college, and you get work-based learning and internships. Then you marry a college graduate, move to a neighborhood with good schools and the whole thing starts right over again. 

The thing is, it’s hard to argue with. And if we weren’t a diverse nation, it would be an ideal system. But we are a diverse nation, and diversity clearly matters in terms of who wins. Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to reform the K–12 system, and they did good things, but it wasn’t nearly enough. 

What I’m hearing is that this change to college admissions is occurring in an economy with an increasingly ossified relationship between higher education and success in life.

The endgame now is much clearer than it used to be. According to , which run out to 2031, we’re going to have 171 million jobs. Forty percent will require a B.A. or more, and about three-quarters of those jobs will be good jobs. Meanwhile, 30 percent of all jobs will be middle-skilled, and maybe 40 percent of those jobs will be high-paying and secure. And then there’ll be jobs for high schoolers, only about 20 percent of which will be good jobs — largely . 

That said, there’s still quite a bit of variability. That’s why, in the United States, 40 percent of people with B.A.s make more than people with graduate degrees, and 30 percent of people with A.A.s make more than people with B.A.s. It’s a system, more and more, where what you study really matters. If you go to a community college and learn about HVAC, you’re going to get a good job. There’s movement here.

Why wasn’t affirmative action ever popular? You mentioned the fact that polling around it is terrible, but it was also striking that a ballot measure to bring back race-conscious admissions failed — in , of all places — a few years back.

Think about it: Every family has that guy — in my family, it’s a couple of immigrants — who came over and worked hard with a pick and shovel, and by the third generation, we all went to college. Everybody’s got that story about themselves and their families, and we’re almost neurotically tied to hard work and individual success. The idea that somebody who worked less hard or was less qualified could get the job over my grandfather, which they did, was anathema. The striving, the upward mobility, is what we reward.

Now, if you recognize racism in America, you ought to question that perspective somewhat. That is, in America, there were people who weren’t allowed to strive. But it’s a tough American problem because it creates the cultural contradiction of rewarding people based on the color of their skin. You put that to the average guy in a bar, he’ll say, “Hell no! Whoever works the hardest and does his homework should get the job.” To my mind, it’s a very superficial understanding of the United States and its history, but we are who we are. 

If I’m a Republican, I’m standing up to make a righteous speech about how the people who deserve advantages are now going to get them. Even if you look at Democrats, they tend to agree with that, so you’ve got to find a Plan B. I’ve worked for a lot of politicians, and boy were they happy that the Supreme Court handled abortion and affirmative action. Now it’s falling into their laps.

If you’re a Democrat, the abortion ruling last year was very advantageous. On affirmative action, not so great.

Is it possible that colleges will effectively ignore this ruling? They can just jettison the use of admissions exams, which were a big part of the evidence in this case, and admit whomever they like, right?

If you look at the data, test-optional [admissions] has increased the recruitment of high-income kids. White kids. If you take the test away, colleges and universities can admit more legacies, the quantity of whom is growing all the time. After this decision, they can admit anyone — except African Americans and Latinos. 

In an ideal world, if you’re talking to a student who wants to go to your college, you should be talking about the whole kid, not just their grades. There’s something to holistic admissions. But it also frees up colleges to do whatever they want, and what they want is not to admit poor kids. The flip side is that in American politics, elitism is not a good look. Americans don’t like elites, even if they themselves are elites. There are in Congress that would prevent colleges from admitting legacies. That won’t go anywhere, but we’ll get transparency on legacies; they’re going to have to report to the Department of Education how many legacies and donor kids are in their freshman classes. You can call it grievance, or revenge politics, but it’s going to happen. 

One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites. If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with. If you don’t have any African American or Latino students on campus, people aren’t going to like it. Resentment politics might become stronger in higher education because the class differences and race differences will get even more real.

Class has always been real — elite colleges have always done better with race than with class. If you walk around on a college campus, you can’t tell what a poor kid looks like. But you’ve got a much better chance of bumping into an African American or Latino kid than a poor kid on an elite college campus. They just don’t go there.

Combined with the decision to overturn the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness program, we’ve now seen big reversals for universities as engines of social and racial equality. It seems like higher education will increasingly come under some skepticism from the political realm.

Yeah. We’re going to get a big emphasis on training and career education because it’s a program that can reach the working class in a way that Harvard and a lot of four-year schools never could. The Democrats need it to shore up their working-class voters, and the Republicans need it to retain white working-class voters as well.

So higher education is going to get some competition from training. That’s good for two-year institutions, but not four-year institutions. now allow you to get bachelor’s degrees at community colleges. Higher education is being rebuilt, in other words. Pretty soon we’ll have a mandate to force higher education institutions to tell their applicants what happened to all the other students who took the program they’re in, whether they got a job, and how much money they made. The data is there for that.

Transparency and accountability is about to come to higher education. You can’t stop it now.

Is it possible this judgment will affect a school like Harvard much more than one like UNC? My guess would be that the types of students who are currently benefiting from racial preferences at the most selective institutions will just apply, and gain acceptance to, slightly less selective institutions. But the more elite the institution, the more challenging it could be to find top nonwhite students.

Yeah, it’s not a choice for these kids between Yale and jail. It’s a choice between Yale and Dartmouth, or Colby, or Bates. But it should change the demographics at the top, say, 40 institutions, and people will be pissed off about it. The newspapers will write headlines about the shrinking number of minorities enrolled at their local colleges, and that will get noticed politically. The decline in the number and shares of minorities at elite colleges will be a constant topic. The people who fund me already want me to get in and start tracking this.

Did affirmative action save America from racism? No, that’s pretty clear. But it allowed elites to operate in a way that made them seem like they were progressive and honoring America’s racial history. So the reputational effects are real. Parents are going to want their kids to go to diverse schools, and there might not be many.

“The single biggest barrier to adoption of the mastery transcript is that it’s perceived as risky, and kind of unfamiliar,” said Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a national group that wants students to learn at their own pace and be rated continually on their progress, not just by snapshots when the calendar says a grading period ends.

Schools keep joining the consortium because they back the concept in theory, but few have been ready to throw out traditional transcripts and pin students’ college acceptance chances on a strange new transcript with no grades or grade point averages.

So the consortium has created a half step that it is piloting this school year — a Mastery Learning Record that can be sent to colleges along with traditional transcripts in college applications but still offers some of the depth and nuance of the mastery transcript.

“It can be used as a bridge or an on-ramp,” Flanagan said.

Eight-five high school seniors at nine schools used the new Learning Record in college applications this year, including seniors applying to state schools at Park City High School in Utah.

Principal Roger Arbabi said making the full shift to mastery grading right away “wouldn’t go well, even though Utah embraced the mastery concept and is encouraging schools and colleges to train staff in how it works.

“As a traditional public high school, we have a long way to go to be able to offer the full Mastery Transcript Consortium transcript,” Arbabi said. “Our stakeholders have not been educated on the model, but The Learning Record will allow us to … do a soft rollout.“

The mastery learning movement, and the transcript and learning record coming out of it, calls for schools to recognize that all students don’t learn academic and other skills on the same timeline. While some students might grasp a math concept quickly, for example, others might take longer and even until the next grading period or school year to master it. 

On a standard report card, that could result in a poor grade even though a student is on the way to mastering a skill later. The new mastery transcript instead shows how far a student has progressed toward learning that skill, instead of assigning a low grade at a calendar-based cutoff.

The mastery report card also breaks from tradition by rating students in more than just a course or broad subject, but by many specific skills. Math, for example, includes evaluation of students’ statistical reasoning and scientific experimental design skills.

And the mastery report card includes broad, multi-disciplinary skills like “self-direction”, “generating solutions” or “synthesizing information.”

The Mastery Transcript Consortium keeps adding schools and districts as members, more than doubling from less than 200 schools in 2018 to more than 400 today. Some are using mastery approaches to help students recover from pandemic school closures. But most are just endorsing the concept or still learning it: Only 30 have made the full leap to the new style transcript. Almost 250 seniors at those schools applied to college this school year using it in place of the traditional transcript.

Flanagan said he’s seeing pushback from members about moving too fast and possibly jeopardizing student chances.

“(They’re) saying, ‘I don’t know that we’re ready for that kind of change. I don’t know if it’s worth it. Why don’t we just sort of play by the rules, because that’s what we need to do to get kids into Stanford?” he said.

The Learning Record is a scaled down version that skips listing courses and credits, but uses the same model of showing progress toward mastery of skills like cultural competency, critical thinking and academic mindsets. The Learning Record is also useful, Flanagan said, to show what students have learned in non-course programs, like after school or summer sessions, workshops or capstone projects.

The ability to show a well-rounded look at students is what drew John Clements and Mary Anne Moran, co-principals at Nipmuc Regional High School in Upton, Mass., to the transcript, then later the Learning Record. The school has six non-course goals for all graduates like being a “solution seeker,” “skilful collaborator” and “effective communicator,” that the Mastery Transcript can capture.

“The idea that an A in English 10 can only tell you so much about a student really resonates with us,” Clements said. “They have a larger story to tell than can be told simply through traditional metrics.”

The school gives traditional grades for its courses, they said, but 10 students were willing to help build a full mastery transcript this year for their applications. But the Learning Record avoided that need and six ended up using it along with their traditional grades.

“Without any negative consequences for our kids… it only provided a value-added additional look into who they were, as learners, community members and individuals,” he said.

Whether the full transcript is helping or hurting student chances is still unclear. The consortium says 285 colleges have accepted at least one mastery transcript application so far, including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke.

Colleges are gaining familiarity with them, but still view them as an alternate form of application, like those of students from overseas or at other alternative schools, said Michelle Sandlin, interim associate director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. But she said colleges know they will have to adapt as they gain popularity.

“Yes, the concern by high schools is real for now, but competency based records are already well known at the college level,” Sandlin said. “The universities will develop admission requirements appropriately as they always have.”

The entry point is likely to be the college essay, a task many young people find immobilizing. Anyone who works in college admissions must familiarize themselves with ChatGPT and begin to grapple with how the tool might enter into student work in the very near future.

If you haven’t given ChatGPT a try, you should. When asked to write a 500-word essay suitable for college admission, the computer produced a piece in seconds about a student’s interest in science and technology, work on the high school robotics team and desire to be part of a college community. It was a decent response to a basic prompt.

A more complex prompt left no question about the program’s strength: “Write a 500-word college admission essay that tells a dramatic story of a high schooler overcoming something significant in their life. Include references to places in their hometown of Philadelphia and a quote from a famous Philly artist.” The response was well-rounded and intriguing. It described the student coming out from behind an older brother’s shadow through community service using a quote from Will Smith and talked about learning and growing. Any counselor would have believed this was a well-written, human-authored essay.

This nuance is unprecedented, and already, . However, the use of this technology is unavoidable. ChatGPT is on a path to shake up college admissions, and whether schools like it or not, students, admissions professionals and high school counselors must prepare. 

While the college application is full of basic demographic and academic questions, the essay is one of the few areas where students are expected to express aspects of themself they feel are important and let their voices be heard. The stress of conveying the right set of values, or telling a good story, or sharing something deep and heartfelt in 650 words can be paralyzing. Students can spend months on just this one task. 

ChatGPT can help. The program can write an outline to remove writer’s block and offer suggestions for building on students’ existing work. Used responsibly, it functions as a powerful writing companion.

But plagiarism is a serious risk, and educators must send a loud and clear message that it is wrong. ChatGPT adds a new variable to the equation because stealing from a computer may seem less harmful than stealing from a human. However, the program is built using input from countless writing samples from real humans. Passing off the work of ChatGPT as one’s own is plagiarism, plain and simple. This is where the conversation among students, teachers, counselors and parents needs to start.

High school educators should engage students in discussions about the ethics of using artificial intelligence and what constitutes plagiarism. AI has implications in a wide variety of subject areas, so counselors could partner with teachers to discuss its potential use in careers students may pursue. Counselors should also reiterate the importance of students telling their own, original story in their essay and should introduce ChatGPT to students’ family members so they can discuss it at home as well.

Admission offices that rely on the essay might expand their use of interviews, video submissions and/or writing samples that show a student’s response to teacher feedback. While these practices are time-intensive for application readers who are already stretched thin, they get to the heart of who a student is. At the same time, each college’s website should mention ChatGPT with a blurb from the admissions team about how they believe it should be used. 

None of these are perfect solutions. But banning ChatGPT or trying to avoid the topic by downplaying AI’s impact will not change the reality of the new college admissions or technology landscape. High school and college stakeholders must work together to build on existing admissions practices and address the inevitability of ChatGPT directly. 

This is an opportunity for college admissions stakeholders to collectively brainstorm novel approaches to this novel issue.

In a post-affirmative action America, students who are already hesitant to pursue a degree from elite institutions will be even more reluctant to apply. Already, a National Bureau of Economic Research found that high-achieving, low-income students routinely look to less-selective schools than they qualify for, even when these institutions provide less financial aid and have lower graduation rates. 

I was almost one of those students. I grew up in a working-class, middle- to low-income community with immigrant parents from El Salvador. I was a top student in my high school, active in sports and in my community. But when I told a coach of my intention to apply to an elite college, the response I got was less than enthusiastic. 

The message was clear: Students like me don’t get into elite schools. 

I had one of the highest averages in my class yet wasn’t seen as Ivy League material. Millions of talented students of color receive these implicit and explicit messages every day. Those messages will only be amplified if the highest court in the country decides against affirmative action. 

Despite these messages, I persisted and enrolled at Cornell University. There, I participated in a summer bridge program designed to help first-generation, low-income, primarily students of color transition to student life at the elite institution. Cornell understood that merely opening the door to more diverse students was not enough, because despite our achievements, the high schools we graduated from left us woefully underprepared for college. Though exceptional, many of us still struggled.

But 25 years later, as I scroll through my LinkedIn connections, I see the high levels of professional achievement my peers have attained: corporate counsel for a tech giant, vice presidents, executive directors of nonprofits, professors and so on. Our excellence as students carried us into adulthood, demonstrating that affirmative action was never a handout. We were always meant to succeed and thrive, if given a chance. The generations of young students of color following in our footsteps may not have those opportunities if race is no longer a factor in college admissions.

I wish the country no longer needed affirmative action or support programs like the one I participated in at Cornell. I wish all students had access to high schools with the necessary resources, where they are affirmed and encouraged to pursue their greatest postsecondary ambitions. I wish the postsecondary attainment gap had been closed long ago, with full economic parity across populations. But this is not reality — and the pandemic exacerbated these long-standing inequities. for Black and Latino students at colleges and universities has fallen almost 20% since 2020.

A decision striking down affirmative action would mean colleges and universities would have to find new, creative ways to ensure students of color have a fair shot at securing a seat and thriving. Establishing admissions pipelines through formal agreements with high schools in counties where underrepresented minority students reside is one solution. Colleges could also ask applicants outright: Do you work part time in high school? Do you care for a younger sibling or family member during the summers? Were you raised as part of a single-parent household? Are you the first in your family to attend college? These questions are race-neutral but reflect the reality of many students of color and could inform selection alongside academic profiles and other traditional criteria. Such a multipronged approach will be essential for achieving diversity on college campuses In the event of a negative Supreme Court ruling.

At , an organization whose mission is to close the postsecondary degree divide — — we work with students to create “” lists of institutions of higher learning. The formula includes personal and financial compatibility, academic match and graduation rates for underrepresented minority students at colleges and universities around the country. We often have to ask or go digging for this data, because these numbers are not often published. If institutions prioritized transparency about completion rates for their Black and brown students, it would attract applicants interested in enrolling where the rates are highest.

Those working in high schools must also do better by their students. They must affirm students’ postsecondary ambitions and help them explore their options to decide which schools are the best fit. Most importantly, students must be encouraged to see how their racial identities have positively shaped them. These identities are very often the source of their superpowers, and a big part of why they deserve a seat at the table.

Some young people might interpret a negative decision by the court to mean that race, ethnicity, background and culture no longer matter. District leaders, guidance counselors and teachers need to send a counter-message to ensure that students lead with their identities in every part of a postsecondary application process, centering the beauty and rich histories of their communities.

Advancing equity in society still falls on those of us in communities that are already marginalized, a burden that we, as people of color, are all too familiar with carrying. But we are resilient. We figure out ways to circumvent inequitable systems. It is part of our legacies as Black, Indigenous and people of color to fight our way into positions of influence and economic security. We will continue to do this for as long as we must.

The , and are among the dozens of schools in the commonwealth that have changed their policies to relax admissions exams requirements.

The test-optional trend is growing as more than 1,800 accredited, four-year colleges and universities nationally have committed to offering ACT/SAT optional or test-free testing policies for fall 2023 applicants, said Harry Feder, executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), which promotes the fair and reasonable assessment of educators, students and school systems.

“I think it’s a recognition by four-year institutions that they don’t get that much additional benefit from administering this test,” Feder said.

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FairTest has been as the number of test takers declines.

In Virginia, 194,909 test takers completed the SAT or a PSAT‐related assessment in 2022, below the 238,500 test takers recorded in 2019.

ACT test-taking also has declined in Virginia to 9% in 2022 compared to 21% in 2019.

Feder said schools that have instituted test-optional policies are seeing an increase in applications and minority applicants.

According to the American Educational Research Journal, from a study of nearly 100 private institutions is that the policy change was connected to a 10 to 12% increase in enrollment of first-time Black, Latinx and Native students, and a 6 to 8% increase in enrollment of first-time students who were women.

Feder also said taking away the admissions exams remove the need for students to be coached and prepared for a test with “absolutely no educational value.”

A pandemic turning point

Colleges and universities for years faced criticism over their admission processes, but the pandemic was a turning point.

After a year or more of learning loss, low-income students and some students of color were scoring low on admission exams and being rejected by colleges despite having performed well in school.

Facing criticism for turning away students on the basis of ACT and SAT scores, colleges began taking a more holistic look at applicants, said Joe DeFilippo, director of academic affairs for the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia.

But the pandemic wasn’t the only factor, he said, noting that studies have shown there will be fewer high school graduates over the next decade and competition is increasing from out-of-state institutions.

“Colleges were a little more desperate for enrollment, and I think that accelerated the thinking of ‘what do we get out of these standardized tests anyway,’” DeFilippo said.

James Madison University changed its admissions exams policies before the pandemic after finding that admissions scores were not a consistent factor in predicting potential academic success, according to Director of Admissions Melinda Wood.

Instead, the admissions exams were potential barriers for prospective students to consider the university.

She said grades in core courses were more relevant for identifying potential academic success. The institution decided to become test-optional in 2018.

“The move to test-optional opened doors for students who may not have otherwise considered applying to JMU,” Wood said.

Since JMU adopted the policy, she said fewer students have elected to submit test scores for consideration. The director said 27% of this year’s applicants provided a test score with their application materials.

Northern Virginia Community College does not require admissions exams, but instead encourages students to seek testing options they see fit for various class levels.

NOVA said admissions exams, including the SAT and ACT, are applied to assess college readiness instead of determining college acceptance. The General Education Development and Virginia Placement Test are other placement options.

“NOVA is an open access institution, which means any person 18 years of age or older who holds a high school diploma or equivalent can enroll in classes,” the school wrote. “We’re proud to offer equitable access to our associate degree and certificate programs.”

Members of the higher education community recommend students research admissions requirements because they vary between colleges.

For example, if a student’s grade point average or class rank meets the minimum requirements at some schools, then SAT or ACT scores are not required to be submitted. Homeschooled or international students, however, are required to take admissions exams regardless of their GPA.

Challenges still loom

Higher education institutions have studied the impact of test-optional policies.

Kelly Slay, an assistant professor of higher education and public policy at Vanderbilt Peabody College, researched how the changes have affected admission officers, who told Slay they are to place students without scores from admissions exams.

Slay did not respond to a request for comment but told the Hechinger Report that admission officers described the experience as “chaotic” and “stressful.”

“One of our key findings were the tensions that were emerging around these test optional policies,” Slay told the Hechinger Report. “There’s a struggle on how to implement them.”

Feder said there are other ways to determine a student’s acceptance based on his conversations with admission officers. , interviews and extracurricular activities are some ways schools look beyond exam results.

“I don’t think they’re a great reflection of what students are ready for and what they’ve already studied because, for one, it’s easy to bomb a test, no matter how much you’ve studied,” said Grace Madison, a homeschooled student in Alexandria.

Madison, who wants to be a teacher at a time when Virginia is to hire more educators amid a teacher shortage, found a school that meets their requirements of affordability and proximity, but traveling to take in-person tests remains a challenge.

The 18-year-old has two blind parents, is fearful of contracting the coronavirus while living with family members who are immunocompromised and suffers from a chronic pain disorder known as fibromyalgia while walking on a limited basis with a cane.

Madison said it’s a challenge for students in situations like theirs to be admitted into college.

“If it were easier to get into college, we’d all like to be teachers and we’d love to do that,” Madison said. “It would mean the world to me if some of those schools dropped those testing requirements because they’ve been a hurdle for a lot of marginalized students like myself for years.”

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, part of a series of studies conducted in the wake of high-profile litigation against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, shows that Hispanic and African American applicants to both colleges enjoy substantial advantages relative to whites and Asian Americans. Their chances of acceptance are drastically higher than they would be in the absence of affirmative action, but with a somewhat counterintuitive addendum: preferential treatment is relatively weaker for minority applicants from poor and working-class backgrounds than it is for their peers from more affluent families.

Those findings, and those of the preceding papers, are built on data that was made publicly available during the discovery phase of two lawsuits — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — that were before the court. Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and the studies’ lead author, has provided expert testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim that the storied institutions have systematically discriminated against Asian applicants. In an interview with ����Ӱ��, he said he hoped his work would help clarify the public debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

“So much of the debate about affirmative action is happening in this binary where you’re either for it or against it,” Arcidiacono observed. “But there’s a large range of possibilities, from just [using] race as a tiebreaker to fully equal outcomes. So in order to get a sense for whether affirmative action has gone too far or has not gone far enough, you have to understand the role that race plays currently, and you can’t do that without the data.”

Those questions are becoming more concrete by the month. in the case, which will be heard in the 2022-23 term. With plaintiffs asking the nation’s highest court to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in the college application process, and Republicans in Congress that would force colleges to publicize their use of non-academic characteristics in admissions, the stage is being set for a major rollback of affirmative action as it has been practiced for half a century. According to Arcidiacono’s latest study, a significant reversal could shrink the percentage of African American students admitted to Harvard by more than two-thirds.

Georgetown economist Harry Holzer finds those projections plausible. A proponent of race-based affirmative action, he signed (alongside multiple Nobel laureates) defending Harvard’s policies that was filed in a lower-court iteration of the suit. Arcidiacono’s line of research “makes reasonable points,” Holzer said, while arguing that it does not invalidate the use of racial considerations by admissions officers. 

“It doesn’t change my support for affirmative action to see his numbers, though I certainly don’t disagree with the research findings. It shows that when very elite schools practice affirmative action in admissions, which they do, it does effectively raise the admission rate for people of color — especially African Americans — by a lot.” 

Race & class

Arcidiacono and his coauthors dug into admissions records for over 300,000 domestic applicants to the admissions classes of 2014–2019, of which roughly 142,000 applied to Harvard, 57,000 applied to UNC as in-state candidates, and 105,000 applied to the same college from out of state. Applicant-level information included demographic attributes such as race and socioeconomic status, as well as richly detailed academic records covering high school grades, standardized test scores, and individual ratings from admissions officers across a range of academic and non-academic indicators. 

Combining high school GPA, SAT scores, and scores on SAT II subject tests, the research team created academic ratings for each applicant and ranked them by decile (a statistical measurement dividing data into 10 equal parts). The lowest-performing students were grouped into the bottom 10 percent and the strongest performers grouped into the top 10 percent. Most African Americans fell into the bottom 20 percent of all applicants to both Harvard and UNC, but they were admitted at the highest rate for almost every performance decile, followed by Hispanic, white, and Asian applicants.

The acceptance gaps between categories are largest around the middle of the spectrum for academic qualifications, with African Americans applying to Harvard being accepted at a rate double that of Hispanics — and 12 times greater than Asian Americans — at the fifth decile (i.e., between the 41st and 50th percentile of qualifications). For out-of-state applicants to UNC, African Americans at the fifth decile were almost 33 times more likely to be accepted than Asian Americans and 14 times more likely than whites. 

Overall, Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood that an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. For out-of-state applicants to UNC, the force of racial preferences multiplied African Americans from 1.5 percent of admitted students to 15.6 percent, a tenfold increase. Black applicants applying in-state to Chapel Hill gained a smaller advantage from affirmative action, becoming 70 percent likelier to win admission.

Beyond these general calculations, the authors noticed a peculiar interaction between race and class. While white applicants from lower-income families appear to receive an advantage in admissions relative to wealthier whites with similar academic profiles, disadvantaged African Americans and Hispanics do not. Affluent applicants of color therefore receive a comparatively larger boost over affluent white applicants than poor and working-class students of color enjoy over poor and working-class whites. 

Holzer said the substantive arguments in favor of affirmative action — particularly the educational value of maintaining a racially diverse campus — “don’t require that the specific recipient face bias or barriers in the past.” Still, he asserted that low-income students of color deserve “extra credit” not only for their race but also their class background.

“If the bump for just being African American is really large, you could imagine that maybe [admissions officers] think, ‘We’re already taking care of that problem,’” Holzer said. “But for someone like me, who thinks that class really matters a lot, you want to make sure that lower-income students of color get consideration.”

Arcidiacono argued that the large edge claimed by some wealthy students, even if they come from historically excluded groups, risks eroding public faith in the fairness of admissions altogether. Disillusionment already exists not only due to long-running patterns of underrepresentation, he added, but also newer blots such as the Varsity Blues scandal, which saw moneyed parents conniving with college employees and private admissions counselors to game the system.

“This is in the context of a system that completely favors people who come from richer backgrounds,” Arcidiacono said, listing the factors already favoring upper-class applicants: ready access to college counselors, special weight placed on extracurricular activities, and recruitment for sports like sailing and golf.

“To me, one of the arguments for affirmative action would be that you’re trying to build trust in the system for a group that has been traditionally disenfranchised. But the way you do that matters, and it’s not really hitting the poorer African Americans — they’re not the ones benefiting the most.” 

The ‘narrowly tailored’ standard

The Supreme Court will consider Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard this fall, eight years after it was first filed in federal district court. When a decision is finally reached, the case could fundamentally alter the practice of affirmative action in college admissions and, with it, the racial composition of some of the country’s most prestigious schools.

Existing Court precedent was set in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case, in which a plaintiff alleged that preference systems at public graduate schools — in that instance, the University of Michigan Law School — illegally disadvantaged white students on racial grounds. A majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor found instead that “the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions” was constitutionally permissible, while adding that the issue would be ripe for reexamination within 25 years. That deadline has nearly elapsed, and the Harvard litigants seek to reopen the question of whether affirmative action has been “narrowly tailored” to begin with.

The case, along with the corresponding UNC suit, centers on the accusation by a group of Asian American students that Harvard’s policies unfairly disfavored them relative to applicants from every other racial group. Although the admissions candidates with the highest GPAs and test scores are disproportionately Asian American — showed that about one-quarter of Asian high school graduates scored above a 1400 on the SAT, compared with 8 percent of whites, 2 percent of Hispanics, and 1 percent of African Americans — they were consistently graded lower according to Harvard’s personality scores. A released by Arcidiacono and his colleagues suggested that, absent the subjective penalty that Asian applicants face, they would be admitted at a rate 19 percent higher than currently prevails.

The findings instantiated a theory that first gained widespread attention a decade ago, when one right-wing commentator that Asian Americans were tacitly being held back by admissions quotas lest they grow to dominate Ivy League campuses. Although Asian high schoolers were routinely among the top-performing students in the United States, their numeric presence on elite campuses peaked around 1990 and remained roughly the same over the next 20 years.

Trends in Asian American college enrollment were the focus of by the Manhattan Institute. Author Robert VerBruggen, a journalist and fellow at the conservative think tank, noted that the unmistakable stagnation in representation — which occurred even as Asians were continually growing as a percentage of all college aspirants — began to lift about about a decade ago. Whether that was connected to the growing focus on apparent discrimination is unclear.

“It’s an interesting question why that’s happened, but it’s certainly consistent with the narrative that everybody started making a stink about it, lawsuits were filed, and schools got a lot more careful about what they were doing,” Verbruggen said.

The release of the schools’ data allowed researchers to investigate trends in admissions beyond purported anti-Asian bias. In a widely covered , Arcidiacono and his co-authors calculated that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard between 2014 and 2019 were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of university faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (i.e., relatives of potential high-dollar donors). Another postulated that the school, which has its efforts to diversify, may African American students who stand virtually no chance of gaining admission. 

“In some sense, there’s this uneasy compromise that works to the detriment of Asian Americans and poor whites,” Arcidiacono said. “You’ve got the racial preferences helping underrepresented minorities get into certain colleges, and you’ve got the legacy and athlete preferences helping rich, disproportionately white kids get into college.”

A Supreme Court ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could leave that system profoundly changed, upsetting the demographic mix that elite schools have worked hard to cultivate. By Arcidiacono’s accounting, the proportion of African Americans admitted to Harvard over the period he studied would have been less than 1 percent if acceptance was offered on the basis of academic qualifications alone; those admitted to UNC in-state or out-of-state would sink to 4.3 percent and less than 2 percent, respectively. At the same time, the percentage of Asian Americans would have risen substantially — to over 50 percent of all admitted students, in Harvard’s case.

While oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t come for months, the recently announced recusal of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a promising sign for the plaintiffs. With the departure of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has lost two members who had previously ruled in favor of race-based affirmative action in postsecondary education.

Whatever the legal outcome, VerBruggen said that Arcidiacono’s work offered considerable value simply by shining a light on the internal admissions processes in two highly competitive universities.

“Schools are so tight-lipped about their affirmative action policies that we don’t have a lot of data on them,” he remarked. “If you want to know what’s going on in a school, you basically have to sue them.”

Earle-Sears signed the anti-affirmative action brief along with North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, noting it represents the views of two Black Republicans elected to statewide office in southern states that “not only formed part of the Confederacy, but also enacted and then enforced Jim Crow laws until the 1960s.” The brief was filed by lawyers for the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal group.

The 18-page document, which advises the court but has no binding legal weight, takes aim at what it describes as a “toxic ideology that is increasingly dividing American society based on race” and argues “the dream of a colorblind nation continues to be opposed under the pretense of making that dream real.”

“Students, whether in college or kindergarten, should be educated to engage with an idea’s merits, not the race of an idea’s proponent,” the brief says. “Unfortunately, students are taught the exact opposite lesson by the actions of the government itself when it discriminates on the basis of race.”

The suit against Harvard could lead to the overturning of longstanding legal precedent allowing institutions of higher education to consider race as a factor in admissions to achieve the goal of greater student diversity. The plaintiffs in the case claim Harvard’s policies have systematically denied equal treatment to Asian-American students by disfavoring them in the admissions process on personal scores to counteract strong academic scores.

Harvard has denied that its policies amount to discrimination, arguing all students benefit from a diverse campus.

“If the lawsuit against Harvard succeeds, it would diminish students’ opportunities to live and learn in a diverse campus environment—denying them the kind of experiences that are central to Harvard’s educational mission and critical for success in our diverse society,” the school says on .

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