When Affirmative Action Isn’t Enough The New York Times, By DANA GOLDSTEIN SEPT. 17, 2017

Despite the continued debate and legal wrangling over whether college affirmative action efforts are too aggressive, black and Hispanic freshmen were more underrepresented at the nation’s top schools in 2015 than they were in 1980, the Times analysis found. That may come as a surprise to some skeptics of affirmative action, including those in the Trump administration, who see such efforts as having remade the admissions landscape to the detriment of Asian-Americans and whites. But on campuses across the country, many admissions officials say that affirmative action as it is traditionally understood — taking race into consideration when assessing applications — falls short as a diversity strategy, and that farther-reaching efforts are needed to recruit a student body that even comes close to reflecting the country’s demographics. Nationwide, 15 percent of 18-year-olds were black and 22 percent were Hispanic in 2015, according to federal data. At the elite colleges examined by The Times, 6 percent of noninternational freshmen were black and 13 percent were Hispanic. (…) Critics of affirmative action, however, say focusing on enrollment numbers is the wrong goal. Because race-based discrepancies in academic achievement emerge in early childhood, “college is way too little, too late to source the pipeline” said Amy Wax, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. Aggressive affirmative action policies lead to “trouble down the road” for admitted students, she said. “When you put people in who are struggling to compete, that’s very hard on them.” (…) Some public universities, though they have smaller endowments, are also making big efforts in recruitment. At the University of New Mexico, where more than half of incoming students were Hispanic in 2015, admissions officials drive as far as the United States-Mexico border to help students and parents fill out financial aid forms. The University of Oregon advertises on Spanish-language television and sponsors an annual Mexican culture festival. The college’s Hispanic student population grew to 14 percent from 5 percent between 2009 and 2015. It hasn’t been cheap. Pathway Oregon cost $5 million for the 2016-17 school year, of which $3.9 million came from the university and the rest from philanthropic sources. Harvard, which is facing legal and federal scrutiny of its affirmative action practices, declined to comment on the gap between its black and Hispanic enrollment and the overall black and Hispanic college-age population. Princeton also declined to comment. At both universities, 8 percent of noninternational freshmen in 2015 were black and 13 percent were Hispanic. At the University of South Carolina, just 6 percent of freshmen were black in 2015, compared with 31 percent of the college-age population statewide. Scott Verzyl, the associate vice president for enrollment management, questioned whether colleges should be held to account for mirroring the demographics of the larger community. “Students from impoverished backgrounds tend to also attend high schools that are not preparing them for college,” he said in an email. “As a result, their graduates are less prepared academically.” In California, elite institutions have struggled to recruit black and Hispanic students since a 1996 ballot referendum outlawed the use of affirmative action in public college admissions. A guaranteed-admission program reserves places at one of the nine University of California undergraduate campuses for students who are in the top 9 percent of their high school class. Still, only 3 percent of University of California freshmen were black in 2015, compared with 7 percent of the state’s college-age population, while a third were Hispanic, compared with half the statewide population. “State law says we can’t make the kinds of outreach that is seen as favoring one group over another,” said Stephen Handel, the system’s associate vice president for undergraduate admissions. “We try a variety of race-neutral strategies,” such as recruiting students at low-income high schools and community colleges.

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