COLUMN: Fewer race-based scholarships and a new culture of fear follow the end of affirmative action

While applying to colleges last year, Hamza Parker became a casualty of one of the more tangible aspects of the conservative Supreme Court’s landmark decision to end affirmative action in college admissions: sudden cutbacks in race-based scholarships.

Parker’s college advisor, Atnre Alleyne, had steered him toward a host of campuses that once provided generous scholarships for Black students, including the College of Wooster in Ohio. Without one, Parker could not afford to leave his Delaware home for college.

Alleyne knew that the court’s decision would have unforeseen consequences for the Black and Hispanic students he works with at his nonprofit advisory organization, but was shocked when he saw scholarships these students had relied on for years simply disappearing from college websites.

“We were working with one student on the list of colleges and we said, okay, go to this particular college because we know they have a scholarship for African Americans,” Atnre told Soledad O’Brien recently. “And then we go to that page and it’s, it’s gone, right? And that was really the first time we started noticing that ripple effect.”

Gone, too, according to Hechinger Report findings, are dozens of public-university scholarships once reserved for students from underrepresented racial groups, amounting to at least $60 million, although the total is likely much higher. Government officials in Missouri, Kentucky and Wisconsin have ordered public colleges and universities in their states to end consideration of race in scholarship programs because of the court’s ruling.

It’s not just scholarships that have disappeared, another Hechinger Report review found. Also gone or under threat of disappearing in the year and a half since the court’s decision are scores of fellowships, pipeline programs and race-based mentoring opportunities, even though they weren’t mentioned in the court’s decision.

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Although several schools are reporting substantial drops in the percentage of Black students entering this fall, we are still awaiting a fuller picture of what enrollment looks like for the first class since the decision, in part because much of the data is still unreported or unverified.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that the upcoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump will constitute a reckoning, as he ushers in a new era firmly opposed to raced-based hiring practices, and promises to address what he calls an “anti-white feeling” in America.

“It feels like a broader attack on truth…we’ve moved backwards,” Natasha Warikoo, a professor of sociology at Tufts who has written widely on affirmative action, told me. She’s among those who believe in its benefits, supported by a large body of research.

Warikoo worries about the disappearance “of all the stuff that makes for a better climate on campuses” — including, of course, underrepresented students. There are fewer of them so far at many Massachusetts colleges, including Tufts, where the percentage of Black students fell from 7.3 percent of last year’s freshman class to just 4.7 percent of this year’s.

The share of Black students also fell at Amherst College, from 11 percent to a mere 3 percent this year, much to the dismay of scholar and author Anthony Abraham Jack. His first book details the difficulty he and many other Black students experienced at Amherst, his alma mater, with a sticker price of close to $90,000 annually, and which felt to him like entering “a new world filled with foreign rules.”

Related: After all the fuss about getting in, how do poor and wealthy students survive on elite college campuses

“I see DEI not just as diversity, equity initiatives, right?” Jack said recently, pointing out that such programs also boost retention. “The more connected a student feels to the school and to the people there, the greater their performance, the greater their mental health, the greater their access to those university resources.”

Anticipating what the racial makeup of college campuses will look like going forward is difficult: Many colleges have not yet released detailed information or specifically broken down the incoming class by race. Here is one snapshot of freshman diversity stats provided by universities that backed Harvard in the affirmative action litigation.

* Black students were a smaller share of the freshman student population at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Dartmouth. Princeton and Yale reported roughly similar percentages for both years. 

* Hispanic students were a larger share of the first-year student population at Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale. But Cornell, Brown, Columbia and Princeton reported drops.

* The percentage of Asian students increased at Columbia, Brown and Cornell, but dropped at Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth. The share of Asian students was flat at Harvard.

Many say a full picture has not emerged because schools fear that releasing specific data will encourage further lawsuits from Edward Blum of Students for Fair Admissions, who has already threatened a number of colleges that he maintains are violating the affirmative action ban.

Regardless, the new landscape is already a game-changer.  Alleyne and his team at TeenSharp have always steered the top students they work with toward elite colleges, because they are the most generous with aid — and because they’ve long served as beacons of hope and economic mobility.

Related: Will the Rodriguez family’s dreams survive the end of affirmative action?

So many of the talented low-income students I’ve interviewed over the years saw their lives transformed when top colleges actively recruited young people from underrepresented groups. They are students like Alphina Kamara, a 2022 graduate of Wesleyan University. In an opinion piece for The Hechinger Report, she described feeling alone in a place with few Black students and hallways lined with photos of white men. That provided “a haunting reminder that while I may have gained entry into this world, Black people generally do not,” she wrote.

Wesleyan reported a rise in Black students this fall to 12 percent from 11 percent the year, and is, like Amherst and several other elite college, ending legacy admissions and pledging to continue admitting a diverse class.

In the course of covering this issue, I’ve also interviewed experts like Richard Kahlenberg, who has consistently made the case that taking into account economic and class disadvantage in admissions would help more students gain a foothold into schools like Wesleyan, which are out of reach for many low-income students without substantial aid.

Other arguments support the contention of Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. And even before the court’s ruling, plenty of Americans were not fans of affirmative action: A 2019 Pew survey found that most (73 percent) do not believe colleges should consider race or ethnicity in admission.

Kahlenberg argues in his forthcoming book, “Class Matters,” that it is now realistic to ask if selective universities “will soon open their doors to meaningful numbers of low-income and working-class students.”

He writes that he finds it “thrilling to think of a future in which a greater number of talented working-class students, including those who are Black and Hispanic, have a chance to attend elite colleges.”

Related: Cutting race-based scholarships blocks path to college, students say

For his part, Alleyne is more concerned that the new landscape means less opportunity for students like Hamza Parker and others seeking scholarships that no longer exist.

“These changes will ultimately mean some of them are no longer able to attend a college that could have been life changing for them,” Alleyne told me.

For Parker, there may be a silver lining. After a slew of rejections and wait-listings last year, he opted to save money by enrolling at the University of Delaware and commuting from his home in nearby Smyrna. He later decided to live on campus and is now finding his way.

“I’m enjoying it much more than I expected,” Parker told me recently. “I’ve met so many new people and have had the opportunity to learn from some truly intelligent professors.”

This story about the end of affirmative action was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Meredith Kolodner, Joanna Hou, Nick Perez, Marina Villeneuve, Retro Report and Soledad O’Brien Productions contributed to this report. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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 While applying to colleges last year, Hamza Parker became a casualty of one of the more tangible aspects of the conservative Supreme Court’s landmark decision to end affirmative action in college admissions: sudden cutbacks in race-based scholarships. Parker’s college advisor, Atnre Alleyne, had steered him toward a host of campuses that once provided generous scholarships
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