Many in higher education reacted to the ruling with a collective shrug

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that using Affirmative Action in college admissions was unconstitutional, the national media warned of dire consequences.

But in New Hampshire, many in higher education reacted to the ruling with a collective shrug. In their views, nothing in the ruling will significantly alter the ways they attract minority students.

That’s because the state had already banned its public colleges and universities from using affirmative action policies back in 2012. And even officials from many private institutions in the state affected by the ruling say they either didn’t use affirmative action, or that it only played a small role in their admissions practices.

“The Supreme Court’s decision has not and will not impact Franklin Pierce’s admissions process,” wrote Pierre Morton, the Rindge-based private university’s chief diversity officer in an email.

At Henniker’s New England College, the admissions staff focuses on the quantifiable attributes of prospective students, and not race, according to Brad Poznanski, its executive director of undergraduate admission.

“Unlike institutions with competitive or selective admission profiles, NEC admits all students who we deem as academically prepared to succeed in our curriculum,” Poznanski said. “Our focus is on students’ high school GPAs, curriculum and courses. The race or ethnicity of applicants is never a factor that is considered.”

“Race is not factored into the (admissions) decision,” said Paul Pronovost, St. Anselm College’s chief communications and marketing officer. “To admit students, really our main driving factor is academic qualification.”

One private New Hampshire institution that is changing its admissions procedures slightly in the wake of the ruling is Dartmouth College.

“Our admissions team has been preparing for and discussing on how to best adapt our longstanding holistic admissions process to this new legal landscape,” said Jana Barnello, a Dartmouth spokesperson.

“This year we added two new admissions questions to Dartmouth’s application supplement that invite students to reflect on their lived experience, in whatever way that might manifest itself, and admissions staff will be trained about how to evaluate an application under the new legal guidelines,” Barnello said.

“We have a question with two options,” said Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, on his “Admissions Beat” podcast. “Each of those questions was very open-ended. A student from any background can … show a lived experience as a Black person in America, as a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, as a trans student in Alabama.

“Those two questions are the opportunity in our supplement for someone to talk about the value of their identity, the impact it has on themselves.”

Dartmouth’s approach mirror’s guidance the Biden administration issued in August designed to give universities and colleges ways to “work to lawfully pursue efforts to achieve a student body that is diverse across a range of factors, including race and ethnicity.”

“Although this decision changes the landscape for admissions in higher education, it should not be used as an excuse to turn away from long-standing efforts to make those institutions more inclusive,” U.S. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said at a news conference announcing the guidance. “Race can be relevant to a person’s life or a lived experience, and may impact one’s development motivations, academic interests or personal or professional aspirations. That impact can still be considered.”

“We know what has happened at colleges when individual states have banned affirmative action in the past,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told reporters. “Fewer students of color applied, and fewer students of color were admitted. We cannot afford that kind of backpedaling on a national scale.”

While the numbers of minorities accepted to top schools in California and Michigan reportedly declined after those two states banned affirmative action in their public schools, the results in New Hampshire since its 2012 ban have been less clear cut.

New Hampshire’s universities and colleges have long struggled to increase the number of minorities on their campuses, due in large part to the state’s own lack of diversity. But some progress has been made.

UNH’s Durham campus saw its percentage of students of color increase from only 7.7% in 2013 — the year after the state’s affirmative action ban went into effect — to 9.9% in the fall of 2022, the most recently available data.

Plymouth State’s percentage of students of color increased from 8.7% to 10.8% during that time, while Keene State saw a larger boost of minority students, going from 7.5% in 2014 (the first year of the school’s publicly available data) to 12% in 2022.

According to a report published by UNH Carsey School of Public Policy researcher Kenneth Johnson that relied on U.S. Census data, New Hampshire’s minority population grew from 7.5% of its population in 2010, to 12.8% in 2020.

While much of the discussion since the Supreme Court’s ruling has focused on how admissions staff can and cannot evaluate applications, especially those from minority students, some say the rule impact will be in the applications they don’t get as a result of the new rules.

“We need to find ways to encourage students from underrepresented groups to apply who might feel they could be excluded in our admission process,” said New England College’s Pozanski.

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