Bob Neal

Despite the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth by backers of affirmative action, which the U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed, colleges can make their admissions process even fairer and student bodies even more diverse.

If the colleges are willing to work at it.

On June 29, the court banned considering race in admission to two elite universities (Harvard, the University of North Carolina). The decision affects only 6% of college students, but those 6% are at schools that turn out disproportionate shares of the heavy hitters in politics, business, law and the arts. And, of course, who gets in determines who gets through.

The issue seems thorny, but some fixes are dizzyingly easy. To wit. End legacy admissions. Consider an applicant’s personal narrative. Toughen up academic standards.

While the court ended the practice nationwide, bear in mind that nine states had already banned affirmative action in college admission: Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington. More than a quarter of the U.S. population.

How’d that work out? Not well, if student body diversity is a goal, and it should be for students to experience a bit of the real world. Black enrollment in top state schools in California and Michigan fell to 4% from 7%. It has crept back a bit, at great effort and expense to the schools.

John McWhorter is a scholar of linguistics at Columbia University and a columnist for The New York Times. He wrote, “I picked up (early) … that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges.” So, he could slack and still get by. He cruised through good, not great, schools (Rutgers, New York University) before a PhD at Stanford.

He concedes that affirmative action got him into college and got him his early academic jobs.

Perhaps the easiest step colleges can take is to end affirmative action for rich white kids. That’s what “legacy” admissions amount to, and almost all elite schools use them, including Bates, Colby and Bowdoin. One published estimate is that 45% of the white students at Harvard are legacies, meaning that at least one relative attended Harvard.

Most elite schools admit that legacy is an important element in admission. So far, Maine’s elite colleges have been mute on both the number of legacy students on campus and on their plans, if any, to drop affirmative action for rich, white kids (see “Maine’s most selective colleges say little about their legacy admissions practices” in the Sun Journal’s July 17 edition).

Were Bates, Colby and Bowdoin to drop legacy admissions, they would join at least five elite schools, three of them in New England: Wesleyan, which dumped legacies on Wednesday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Amherst, along with Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon Universities.

It’s a sort of tough love approach, telling rich white kids, “You can do this, but you have to do it on your own, not because Mommy or Daddy did it 30 years ago.”

McWhorter suggests replacing affirmative action with consideration of an applicant’s personal story. A single parent’s child who worked third shift during high school to help pay family bills seems likely to have the work ethic colleges should be seeking.

Finding and nurturing those kids isn’t easy or cheap. But elite schools have the means to do it. Identify kids early in high school, hear their stories and the lessons they have learned from their stories. Guide them in selecting high-school classes and the arcane college-application process. Let them know that tuition won’t stand in the way of the admission decision.

Elite public universities (such as the University of North Carolina, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Virginia and the University of Indiana) could even walk the trail blazed by the University of Texas to offer automatic admission to the top 10% of every high school class in the state, regardless of the quality of the high school. This went a long way toward diversifying UT’s student body after the state outlawed affirmative action.

Hand in hand with ending legacy admissions should come higher academic standards. As a teacher of journalism at the University of Maine (and at Miami University of Ohio before UMaine and at University of Maine at Farmington after), I was known as a “hard-ass” grader. Sometimes, no student earned an A in a class I taught, but not often. Sometimes more than one earned an A, but not often. Except in an editorial writing class at Miami, where the senior students were so good that eight of the 13 earned As.

I remember seeing grades posted at Miami for a chemistry class. Any student scoring 76 or higher got an A. That was more than half the class. When I asked, I was told, “These kids come to Miami for pre-med. If we don’t give them As, they won’t get into the top med schools.”

I occasionally heard of a student who shunned courses I taught because of my grading policy. That’s OK, because even some of my “C” students went on to long careers in journalism.

If elite schools are to land the best from each race and income level, they must show kids that it’s worth the work. Again, tough love. “You can do this. It takes real work, but it pays off big.”

One of the two characters in the word “crisis” in Chinese is said to also mean “opportunity.” If elite schools see the end of affirmative action as a crisis, they can look there for the opportunity to diversify in other ways.

Ways that reward workers over slackers, achievers over heirs.

Haverford College headhunted Bob Neal. Admissions officers called often. But when they got his SAT scores, they sent the Dear John letter. Weak language skills, Haverford said. Go figure. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.