As the class of 2027 arrives on college campuses, higher education leaders are grappling with a new challenge: how to maintain — and increase — the diversity of future classes, after the Supreme Court’s wrong-headed decision to bar race as one of many factors in admission, even as it allowed schools to continue considering other background characteristics, including gender, sexual orientation, geography and financial wherewithal.
Colleges must now work harder to ensure the diversity of their classes, including by increasing outreach to high-performing low-income students and admitting more of them, rather than penalizing them because of their financial status. One of the main reasons I made a gift to enable Johns Hopkins University (my alma mater) to become permanently need-blind was to guarantee that no applicant is ever discriminated against because of financial status. Since the gift, diversity on campus has continued to increase.
While selective colleges must do more to improve the diversity of their student bodies (an effort Bloomberg Philanthropy is helping to lead), the Supreme Court’s decision is hardly the only obstacle standing in the way of increasing the number of Black and Latino college graduates.