Dive Brief:
- The American Council on Education’s latest report examines the intersection of race, class, and college access following a national survey of undergraduate admissions and enrollment management leaders at four-year nonprofit institutions.
- While many colleges have strengthened recruitment of community college transfer students as well as low-income students, and they have worked harder to enroll admitted minority students, few have actually changed their “admissions calculus,” the report says.
- The report argues that the least-employed strategies across higher ed get the most attention from policy makers and the press — these include test-optional admissions policies and percentage plans like those used in Texas, where high school graduates in the top 10% of their class are guaranteed a spot in the state's public universities.
Dive Insight:
The most common techniques for increasing diversity on campus involve recruitment and outreach efforts. More than three-quarters of responding institutions spent time convincing minority students to apply and tried to recruit community college transfer students, giving them special consideration in admissions. Nearly that many had targeted recruitment of low-income and first-generation students.
The ACE report criticizes policy makers, researchers and the press for focusing on the little-used strategies. Survey respondents indicated a hunger for additional research following the Fisher case. They want to know about the educational impact of campus diversity, what constitutes a “critical mass” of diverse students and how to get it, effects on campus diversity of banning race-conscious admissions practices, and effects on diversity of alternatives to such practices.