Anshul Patel started his first year of college at the University of Connecticut in Storrs last month. He’s making new friends, signing up for clubs and rushing from his f biology lab class to his calculus lecture. He said he is having an amazing time.
But this time last year, UConn was the very last place he imagined himself,
“UConn was my, like, last decision possible. I got their full package, like the honors, STEM scholar, the scholarships,” he said.
As a high school senior in the Wallingford, Conn. school district, Patel worked tirelessly on his college applications. He was hoping to go to a challenging school that valued a diverse student body. His family is from India, and he wanted to go to a college where he could also embed himself in his cultural heritage – something he said wasn’t available to him in high school.
He had his sights set on schools like Columbia, Harvard or Yale. But when the spring of 2024 rolled around, he said it felt like nearly every letter he opened was giving him the same response.
“I was getting rejections, rejections, rejections,”he said. Almost none of his reach schools, where he felt he had a shot at getting into, had worked out for him.
“There’s a possibility I would have gone into, let’s say, an Ivy or top-hitter school if I put my demographic [down].”
A historic decision
Patel is part of the first class of incoming students in the United States who went through the college application process without the addition of affirmative action – the consideration of racial identity – as an admissions tool. The ability to take ethnic or racial background into account when deciding on college admissions had been upheld by the Supreme Court since the late 1970s.
That changed when affirmative action was overturned in Supreme Court cases filed by conservative activist group Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, respectively.
Legislators were worried that the loss of affirmative action would put students of color behind, like what Patel thinks could have affected him. Months after the decision was released, Connecticut’s higher education committee held a special meeting to address concerns about the diversity of the class of 2028 onward following the Supreme Court’s decision.
“Bottom line, we are dealing with a new legal landscape,” said Art Coleman, who co-founded the consulting firm EducationCounsel, at the Oct. 2023 meeting. “[There are] implications in various facets of enrollment policy and practice, certainly on admissions.”
Unclear outcomes
Just over a year after affirmative action was overturned, it’s still unclear what the decision’s effects are.
As anticipated by Connecticut legislators, some colleges across the country did see a drop in the diversity of their student enrollment. At Amherst College in Massachusetts, the proportion of Black students that make up the incoming class dropped from 11% to 3%. At Harvard, also in Massachusetts, the proportion of Black first-year students enrolled this fall fell four-percentage points, down from 18% last year.
Other schools saw little to no change. At Yale University, the percent of first-year students identified as African-American stayed the exact same year-over-year, at 14%. Hispanic or Latino students increased one-percentage point, now 19%. The percentage of white students did increase by four points while the proportion of Asian-American students dropped six points, from 30% of the class makeup to 24%.
Similarly, UConn said approximately 27% of the incoming Storrs students come from races or ethnicities traditionally underrepresented in higher education, compared to nearly 30% last year.
So, whether the loss of affirmative action is what caused Patel to receive an overwhelming number of rejections is still unclear.
“It may be quite early to sort of make those broad and deep conclusions,” said Richard Sugarman, then-president of Connecticut college success program Hartford Promise. “I think it’s a mixed bag in the first year, and I think that shows in some of the results.”
State Senator Derek Slap (D-West Hartford), who chairs Connecticut’s higher education committee, said he doesn’t plan to wait for a post-affirmative downward trend in diversity to emerge; he’s hoping to get ahead of the issue.
“You’re going to continue to see a push for addressing legacy admissions at the state. We’ve expanded debt free community college,” he said. ”Improving access — whether it’s at a community college, a four year college, an elite school — is something that we all need to be thinking about. We can also say that it’s finally time to get rid of legacy admissions.
Banning legacy admissions at universities – public or private – in Connecticut was considered in the last legislative season, but the bill didn’t move forward.
Damage dealt post-affirmative action
Patel was crushed when he didn’t get into almost any of his dream schools. He was so shaken from the rejections that when he finally received an acceptance from the University of Toronto – one of his top choices – in late May, his confidence in his own abilities had diminished. He went with something closer to home, where his brother had gone. Something safer.
“Yeah, I got accepted into my dream school, and I’m not going to that school,” Patel said. “I don’t know if it was a mind trick… I feel like getting rejected from so many colleges does something to you psychologically. Like, ‘Oh, am I not good?’
“It makes me question things.”
Sugarman, from Hartford Promise, said the damage from the removal of affirmative action has already been dealt, even if there isn’t a consensus on its impact on college diversity.
“I am concerned about students, that they will lower their sights,” Sugarman said. “What will this do to students, aspirations, expectations, pursuit of dreams, recognition of their own talent?”
Sugarman said he’s worried that without the institutional support of affirmative action behind students of color with fewer resources than their peers, they won’t feel compelled to apply or attend their reach schools/
For Patel, going to UConn is a choice he said he’s happy with. He feels challenged with his classes, and sees diversity in every classroom he walks into. He’s signed onto the mailing list of nearly a dozen clubs.
“I joined literally every [Indian] dance team I saw,” he said. “Everyone was so welcoming when I joined, they were like, “You do not need to know how to dance at all. You’ll get the hang of it in maybe two months.””
Every new day Patel spends at the school, the more sure he is that he made the right choice, even if it wasn’t what expected when he started his college journey.
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Publish date : 2024-09-12 05:21:00
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