The decision worried a number of Black students
A number of predominantly white institutions (PWI) are seeing massive drops in Black enrollment following the Supreme Court’s historic affirmative action ruling, NBC News reported.
President of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Danielle Holley, highlighted her experience since the high court’s ruling. She said leadership was forced to rely on outreach programs, personal statements, and other application materials in efforts to reach their diversity goals. Holley called the process “catastrophic.” “The feeling was pretty catastrophic. It fundamentally changed,” Holley said.
“That demographic information that used to be readily available for a student’s file is now masked.”
Months later, Roberts wrote that the school’s selective admissions process “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints.” The decision indicated that these policies “cannot be reconciled by the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause” in the 14th Amendment.
The decision worried a number of Black students, including Flematu Fofana, a freshman at Yale University. She said she cried when the Supreme Court made the ruling, concerned with how it will affect extracurricular activities and awards received by other applicants to top colleges. “Without affirmative action I felt so uncertain about how my college decision was going to go. It made me decide to change my strategy a little bit when I was applying to colleges too,” Fofana said.
“Initially I had based my school list around how much I aligned with the academics, the extracurriculars there. But after the decision, and when I started visiting schools, I started realizing how much I value diversity.”
Leaders at Hampton University in Virginia accredited the end of affirmative action in college admissions for the uprise in enrollment. “I think that many students recognize that this ruling impacted them personally,” Hampton University assistant vice president of enrollment and dean of admission, Angela Nixon Boyd, said.
“And so they, again, want to be in an environment where they feel welcomed, feel safe and that they feel that they will have an opportunity for success.”
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Source: Black Enterprise
