Even without affirmative action, we can make colleges more diverse. Here’s how | Opinion
Given the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action, as well as the recent Texas law eliminating university initiatives in diversity, equity and inclusion, the challenge for Texas colleges is how to increase diversity in a race-neutral environment.
We must find innovative ways to accomplish this. But first, we must assess how well administrators did in ensuring diverse student bodies using the previously legal tools of affirmative action. While progress was made, Black and Hispanic students remain significantly underrepresented among recipients of doctoral degrees. With affirmative action, these groups make up a smaller percentage of doctoral degrees than their portion of all U.S. citizens in the age range of Ph.D. candidates.
Without more people of color earning doctoral degrees, we won’t have enough minority faculty members. This is significant. Since many underrepresented minority students prefer attending institutions where there are faculty who look like them and share similar experiences, talented minority students are less likely to choose to enroll. And this means perpetuating a lack of diversity across college campuses.
In light of the Supreme Court’s decision, diversifying higher education will be even more onerous. Producing a sufficient number of minority doctoral degrees is tied to the admission process. However, we now must focus on an oft unspoken culprit: the insubstantial minority applicant pool.
At my own institution, The University of Texas at Austin, graduate applicants for the summer and fall of 2022 were low: Hispanic applications constituted 7.8% of all applicants, Black or African American made up only 2.6%.
Why do talented minority students choose not to attend graduate school?
Many prefer to enter law, medicine or business, not only because of money and prestige but also due to an awareness of the societal impact of these pursuits.
Minority students, or those who are the first in their family to attend college, may, as Washington Post columnist William Raspberry wrote, “perceive withdrawal from the rough and tumble of everyday problems as dereliction.” While capable of graduate study, minority and first-generation students feel the tug of social responsibility.
But graduate education need not be devoid of social relevance. At UT from 1997 to 2019, Intellectual Entrepreneurship offered an innovative vision and model of education, challenging students to be citizen-scholars. By engaging students in community projects in which they discovered and put knowledge to work, as well as requiring them to identify and adapt to audiences for whom their research matters, intellectual entrepreneurship illustrated the enormous value to society of graduate study.
What does intellectual entrepreneurship have to do with increasing diversity? The practice was devised to increase the value of graduate education for all students. Yet we discovered that 20% of students enrolled in the Intellectual Entrepreneurship, or IE, program were underrepresented minorities, while this same group made up only 9% of UT’s total graduate student population.
Minorities reported that, by rigorously exploring how to succeed, IE helped demystify graduate school. Students noted that IE provided one of the few opportunities to use their intellectual capital to give back to the community — something motivating many minority students.
IE’s potential was best documented by its pre-graduate school internship. From 2003 to 2019, this initiative paired undergraduates with faculty and graduate student mentors. Interns worked with their mentors on research projects, observed graduate classes, shadowed graduate student teaching and research assistants, participated in disciplinary activities and explored their futures.
About 65% of these interns were underrepresented minorities, first-generation or economically disadvantaged students. More than half went on to pursue a graduate degree. Of the spring 2018 undergraduate IE cohort of 150 students, one-third were Hispanic, compared to a universitywide percentage of 18%. Similarly, although only 4.5% of UT students identified as African American, 18% of IE students were African American.
Interns reported that for the first time, a space existed to reflect upon the role education plays in meeting their goals. IE empowered them to view academic disciplines as tools to realize their goals.
The lesson is clear: To increase diversity in a race-neutral era, we must find fresh ways to expand the applicant pool. One way to do that is to enable students to see the connections between their professional aspirations and education — something at the core of IE’s approach to education for more than 25 years.
In short, there is hope for increasing diversity following the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate affirmative action.
Richard Cherwitz is a professor emeritus at the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.
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