States that have tried to enroll more Black and Hispanic students in state universities without using race-based admissions policies have seen the numbers of those students slip — especially at elite institutions.

Nine states had affirmative action bans before last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking it down nationwide. Those states and others have tried various strategies to maintain diversity without using race-based admissions. They include costly recruitment drives, guaranteed admission to high-ranking high school students and the elimination of preferences for relatives of alumni.

Those strategies have had an impact. But overall, they haven’t been as effective as more explicit race-based preferences, illustrating how difficult it will be to maintain diverse campuses in the wake of last week’s decision.

Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington had affirmative action bans in place before the high court ruled.

California, the nation’s largest state and one of its most diverse, has received the most attention.

Shortly after affirmative action ended in California in 1998, state universities began guaranteeing admission to most UC campuses to the top-performing students from most California high schools. The state university system also shifted to a more holistic admissions review process that considered students’ academic achievements “

And California also began spending more on recruitment. In total, the state has spent about a half-billion dollars on more comprehensive reviews and recruiting since the ban was put in place, according to UC filed in the Supreme Court case. “But funding for these programs has declined over time, and resource constraints limit UC’s ability to expand these programs,” according to the brief.

At the state’s most elite campuses, Berkeley and UCLA, Black and Hispanic enrollment plummeted in the first years after the ban. But Black and Hispanic enrollment fell less dramatically, and recovered more quickly, in the rest of the UC system.

Today, in the UC system as a whole is 4.5%, compared with a statewide population of about 5%. Hispanics are 22.5% of UC students, compared with about 40% of the statewide population.

At Berkeley, Black students were 3.6% of new undergraduates , while Hispanic students were 21%. , 8% percent of new undergraduates were Black, while 22% were Hispanic.

“California has not identified a silver bullet that maintains racial diversity at the same level as race-based affirmative action,” said Zachary Bleemer an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, who has extensively studied California’s experience.

Bleemer estimates that California’s automatic admission program and its more holistic review process “tend to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment by about a third of what race-based affirmative action would be.”

He added that while states with less-selective schools, such as Oklahoma and Nebraska, have reported that ending affirmative action didn’t have much of an effect on minority enrollment, that’s because “most students were getting in already.”

The Supreme Court ruling will have the greatest impact at “quite selective schools with robust affirmative action programs,” Bleemer said, citing schools such as the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Georgia Tech and the Ohio State University.

Like California, some other states, such as and , have implemented automatic admission programs for top-performing students.

Texas implemented its Top 10% Plan after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996 banned affirmative action in college admissions in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In 2003, the Supreme Court nullified that decision, freeing Texas universities to consider race again. But Texas kept its plan in place.

The idea behind the plan is that since many Texas high schools are mostly Black or Hispanic, offering automatic admission to many state universities for the top 10% of students from every Texas high school would boost diversity at those schools.

But examining 18 years of data from Texas found that the program “did not result in meaningful changes” in which high schools in the state sent students to the flagship state universities, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. As a result, it had little impact on the racial diversity of the two schools.

“The purported high school representation benefits of the policy appear to be overstated and may not go as far as advocates might have hoped in terms of generating equity of access to the flagship campuses in the state,” the paper concluded.

In 2020, the at UT-Austin was 24.2% Hispanic, compared with 40% of the . The Black student percentage was 5.3%, compared with a Black state population of 13.4%.

����ǰ����岹’s , launched in 1999, grants automatic admission to one of a dozen state institutions to students who graduate in the top 20% of their class, regardless of SAT or ACT scores. The data on the success of the program is mixed.

From 1999 to 2007, the share of Black freshmen at the University of Florida increased from 11% to 14%, and the overall percentage of Black undergraduates increased from 7% to 10%. But at Florida State University, the percentage of Black students declined from 11% to 9%, and it dropped from 13% to 12% at the University of South Florida, according to statistics .

In 1999, Hispanics made up 16% of public high school seniors and 14% of university freshmen. In 2008, those numbers were 22% and 18%, respectively.

But in past decades, Black and Hispanic students have become increasingly underrepresented at state universities.

In the spring of 2021, 20% of seniors in Florida public high schools were Black. That fall, they made up 10% of freshmen at ����ǰ����岹’s 12 public universities. From 2010 to 2021, the share of Black freshmen at the University of Florida fell from 9% to under 5%. The percentage fell from 11.5% to 7.2% at the University of South Florida, the Times said.

Michigan voters in 2006 approved prohibiting state colleges and universities from granting “preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin.” In an filed in the Supreme Court case, the University of Michigan said that since then it has “discontinued even the limited consideration of race in holistic admissions programs.”

Instead, the university has employed what it described as “persistent, vigorous, and varied efforts to increase student-body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means” — with limited success.

Michigan did not pursue a percentage plan like California, Florida and Texas; except for the Detroit area, there are relatively few majority-minority schools in the state. But it did continue to give a leg up to applicants from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and those who were the first in their family to go to college. It also bolstered recruiting and outreach by, among other things, hosting workshops for high-school counselors, maintaining a recruiting office in Detroit and coordinating campus visits.

Before the ban took effect, underrepresented minorities were about 13% of Michigan undergraduates. That percentage declined to less than 11% in 2014. The current share is about 13.5%, slightly above the pre-ban percentage. However, it is a different story for specific groups, including African Americans.

Black enrollment has declined from 7% in 2006 to roughly 4% in 2021, a reduction of 44%. During the same period, the total percentage of college-aged Black people in Michigan increased from 16% to 19%. And Native American enrollment is down by 90%, according to the university.

“The University’s persistent efforts have not been sufficient to create the racial diversity necessary to provide significant opportunities for personal interaction to dispel stereotypes and to ensure that minority students do not feel isolated or that they must act as spokespersons for their race,” the brief stated.

While affirmative action opponents are cheering last week’s ruling, advocates are now focused on how to boost minority enrollment without it.

Jessie Ryan, executive vice president at the Campaign for College Opportunity, an advocacy group that aims to give all Californians the opportunity to go to college, said the focus must now be on high school preparation for higher learning.

“We will continue to advocate for scaling high-impact practices that result in greater racial equity,” she said in an email, including access to college preparation curriculum, universal completion of financial aid forms, and test-optional admissions policies.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the list of states that have implemented automatic admission programs for top-performing high school students. 

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

When wildfires and smoke swept through Oregon in 2020, Lyra Johnson’s family made plans to evacuate their home near Portland. Johnson, then 14, was told she might have to quickly learn to drive — despite not having a license — in order to get her grandmother to safety.

Thankfully, the danger passed before Johnson was forced to take the wheel, but she came face-to-face with the realities of climate change. Johnson, now 17 and a senior at Lake Oswego High School, was among the student leaders who urged Oregon lawmakers this year to require climate change education across all grade levels in Oregon schools.

“It’s really important to integrate that when you’re young, so you have that knowledge and feel like you can make a difference, rather than having it thrown on you and feel like the world’s ending,” she said.

Johnson serves as president of her school’s Green Team, a student sustainability group, and helped establish a composting program this year to reduce waste.

“It gave me a lot of hope, and it’s important to let students have that kind of hands-on experience,” she said. “When you’re actually doing something and seeing progress, it can diminish a lot of that anxiety. Kids should be able to have that experience wherever they are.”

The Oregon bill did not advance this session, but New Jersey last school year became the first state to incorporate climate change lessons into its education standards for kindergarten through 12th grade. Connecticut will be the second state to do so, starting next month.

Several other states are considering similar measures, while some have provided funding for climate learning opportunities. Most states have adopted standards that include climate change, but education experts say the subject is taught spottily and is usually limited to science classes. Some educators say there’s growing recognition that climate change demands a more comprehensive approach.

“Today’s students are tomorrow’s consumers, workers and voters,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit. “Increasingly, they’re going to be faced with the need to make decisions about issues related to climate change.”

Efforts to require climate change learning have mostly been proposed in progressive-leaning states. Some observers have questioned whether efforts to set learning standards via legislation could clash with the typical multiyear process overseen by state boards of education.

Meanwhile, leaders in some conservative states say mainstream climate science is an attack on the fossil fuel industry, and some are pushing schools to teach “both sides.”

“What I think is controversial is different views that exist out there about the extent of the climate change and the solutions to try to alter climate change,” Ohio state Rep. Jerry Cirino, a Republican, Energy News Network.

The Oregon bill Johnson and others supported would have directed school districts to teach climate change with a focus on local impacts and solutions. Backers said lawmakers were generally supportive but wanted to see a more specific plan with guidance and resources to help schools to meet the new directive. The bill did not get a vote in committee, but supporters hope a new draft will pass in the next legislative session.

Breck Foster, one of Johnson’s teachers, serves as a board member for Oregon Green Schools, a nonprofit focused on climate education and sustainability. She’s found ways to incorporate climate learning into her social studies and Spanish classes.

“Kids understand the gloom and doom, and there’s a lot of fatalism in their comments, but they don’t have a lot of the facts,” said Foster, who also serves on the steering committee of Oregon Educators for Climate Education, a group that pushed for the bill. “It was very enlightening to them to connect it to the idea of policies that are being implemented and goals that are being set.”

New Jersey goes first

New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy led the push for the state’s new standards, which were adopted in 2020 by the state Board of Education. She said kids already see the effects of climate change, citing the wildfires in Canada earlier this month that blanketed the Northeast in smoke.

“Our children are seeing this as much as we are,” she said in an interview with Stateline. “To put our heads in the sand and pretend that the sky is not orange — they understand that.”

New Jersey requires schools to incorporate climate change lessons into almost all subject areas, not just science class, because “students have different ways of learning and every student has a favorite class,” Murphy said.

To help schools meet the new guidelines, the state has created lesson plans and professional development for teachers, and is offering millions of dollars in grants to support hands-on learning. The state established those resources in partnership with groups such as Sustainable Jersey, a nonprofit network that certifies municipalities and schools on sustainability standards.

Those tools, said Randall Solomon, Sustainable Jersey’s executive director, were just as important as the standards themselves.

“You can’t just wave a magic wand and expect 150,000 teachers and 2,500 schools to coordinate to teach climate change,” he said. “To really enable them to do it well requires the development of resources and tools, training and a way to track progress.”

Next month, Connecticut schools also will be required to teach climate change to all grade levels, following the enactment of a state law last legislative session.

“Every single kid I talk to and work with, this is what’s No. 1 on their minds, this is the existential crisis of their lifetimes,” said state Rep. Christine Palm, a Democrat who sponsored the measure, which was tucked into a larger budget bill.

Including solutions

Several other states, including California, Massachusetts and New York, are considering bills that would require more climate change learning in public schools.

“This is a very important topic, and I want to make sure this is happening throughout the state and not only in some regions,” said Massachusetts state Rep. Danillo Sena, a Democrat who has sponsored a bill to include climate change in state learning standards.

Sena said he is hopeful that the bill will receive a hearing this year.

Other states, including Maine and Washington, have provided funding to support professional development and training opportunities for educators on climate issues.

The Center for Green Schools, a project of the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council that
promotes and certifies sustainable buildings, released a last week on the importance of climate change education.

Anisa Heming, the center’s director, noted that many youth leaders have become powerful advocates on climate change, and many of today’s students will need to fill jobs in emerging fields such as clean energy.

“Kids have a tendency to disengage if they don’t have a sense that there are solutions, that they have some power in the situation and the adults around them are acting,” she said. “We have to arm them with the solutions, and then we have to act ourselves so they can see that those solutions are serious.”

Climate skeptics

Leaders in some states, though, want to push climate change education in another direction. Cirino, the Ohio lawmaker, has proposed a bill that would “allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions” on issues like climate change.

Cirino did not respond to a Stateline request for comment.

And in Texas, the state Board of Education directed schools earlier this year to provide textbooks that portray “positive” aspects of fossil fuels and suggest rising temperatures are caused by natural cycles, Scientific American . Board member Patricia Hardy, who drafted the rules, told the publication that fossil fuels help fund Texas schools and said teachers shouldn’t “just be presenting one side.”

Hardy did not respond to a request for comment.

Twenty states follow Next Generation Science Standards developed by a consortium of states and education groups, which do address climate change, most often in science classes. Another 24 states have enacted similar standards of their own. But the six outlier states include Florida and Texas, with massive amounts of students.

Branch, with the science education group, said the standards are taught inconsistently, often because teachers themselves have not had courses on climate change. That leaves most students well short of the comprehensive climate change education now required in New Jersey.

Leaders in New Jersey say their first school year under the new requirements has been a success, though some teachers aren’t yet totally comfortable. They hope the state’s standards, along with the resources it’s drafted to help schools adapt, can provide a template for others.

“I am desperate to get other states to join us,” said Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady. “It’s great that the next generation of New Jersey students are going to own this space, but we’re not going to solve climate change on our own.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .