We know how to bring about greater student body diversity, because some public universities have done it. When the University of Texas, Austin, started admitting the top 10 percent of every high school graduating class in the state in the late 1990s, it created pathways for schools in more historically disadvantaged communities to send students to that flagship university.
Over the next decade, the number of high schools in Texas whose graduates went there rose from 674 to 900. Once on campus, those students graduated at similar levels as all other students. This program increased earnings for these students with no significant harm to those who were “pushed out,” in terms of graduation rates and earnings, according to a 2020 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
I know first hand as a white man that diversity improves the education of every student. I grew up in Houston, graduating from one of the most diverse high schools in America. With no single racial group exceeding 36 percent of the population, students tended to develop a sense of cultural humility, an understanding that their view of the world was but one perspective of many. It is difficult to learn this lesson at some of our elite public universities when the Black population is vanishingly small.
One possible explanation for the sinking numbers of Black students at these institutions is that tuition shot up significantly at many colleges during and after the 2008 financial crisis to compensate for substantial declines in state funding per student. (The pandemic’s toll on state tax revenues poses a new risk to funding for public universities.)
There are ways around this problem. Louisiana State University, which faced deep cuts after the recession, was still able to increase its Black student population. One effective strategy was to recruit students in every parish in Louisiana.
Research has shown that one of the strongest levers for colleges seeking more diversity is offering more need-based financial aid. To that end, the University of Kentucky in 2016 announced a major shift in how it distributed financial aid, pledging to ensure that the majority of the funds would go to need-based aid. This fall, Auburn, which ranks last among the top 50 public universities in terms of meeting its undergraduates’ financial needs, increased its own need-based aid to freshmen by $2.4 million to a total of $3.5 million, along with expanding scholarship opportunities.
The increase in need-based aid was one of the recommendations of a school task force created last year to address racial disparities. Auburn says it has also started using the Common Application in order to reach a wider demographic and has piloted a program that de-emphasizes test scores in admissions. There is some evidence that moving away from standardized test scores may expand racial and economic diversity.
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