Season 3: Bonus Episode Transcript
Bonus Episode: The Supreme Court, Race, and Admissions
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's dean of admissions and financial aid. And this is a special edition of the Admissions Beat.
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Hello everyone. There's been a lot of news happening since we broke from season three, and took a summer leave. And most importantly, and fundamentally, the landscape of American college admission shifted on June 29th, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the twin cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And in both of those cases, the court ruled that race-based affirmative action was unconstitutional.
And for higher ed, this is one of those landmark decisions that really stop us in our tracks and make us reimagine the work we do and how we do it. But it doesn't prompt us to ask why we do it. The fundamentals of a diverse college environment on all of our campuses remain one of the sacrosanct principles of every place where I've worked as well for all of my peers. And I thought it would be important to gather two colleagues to think about the ruling, to think about the way the admissions beat has covered the ruling over the last few weeks, to make sense of what the Supreme Court has said. And how colleges will respond to it. And most importantly, how students and parents should be thinking about an application to the class of 2028 and beyond, with this change in guidelines. So when we come back, we will have an open-ended conversation about the Supreme Court and its impact on college admissions. See you in a minute.
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Lee Coffin:
On this special edition of Admissions Beat, I'm joined by a friend of the pod, Jacques Steinberg, former New York Times reporter and editor on all things admissions, author of The Gatekeepers and The College Conversation: A Practical Companion for Parents to Guide Their Children Along the Path to Higher Education. And joining Jacques is Ralph Figueroa, his sidekick from that seminal book, The Gatekeepers, in the early 2000s. At the time, Ralph was admissions officer at Wesleyan. He has since been the dean of college guidance at Albuquerque Academy in New Mexico for the past 21 years. Interestingly and intriguingly, given the topic, Ralph is an attorney who is still a member of the California bar. And I have a sense, once an attorney, always an attorney, even if not practicing actively. But Ralph and Jacques, welcome to the Admissions Beat, and thanks for joining me for this really timely and important conversation.
Rafael Figueroa:
Thanks for asking us to be here.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah, pleasure to be here, and to have this important conversation.
Lee Coffin:
It is an important conversation. And I wanted to have it with the two of you in-between seasons. I didn't want to wait until the fall when our Season Four premiers. Because I think it's timely as colleges in the U.S., college counselors across the U.S., families, students, the media digests this ruling from the end of June, and starts to move forward. I think I would say up front, the ruling has been issued, response to it and the guidelines required are works in progress, but the Common Application goes live on August 1st. And so the calendar moves on, and we need to be thinking on behalf of the applicants for this next cycle. What should they be thinking and doing? So Jacques, as a former journalist, as an admission expert, what's your take on where we find ourselves?
Jacques Steinberg:
Well, I particularly appreciate the opportunity to speak to the students in our audience, those who are rising high school seniors, but also those who will come afterward. The parents who will be supporting them, but also counselors and other adults in their lives. And even your peers, Lee, in the admissions profession. First of all, there's a lot that is going to remain the same this year, and I hope that audience members will find that reassuring. You talk about the Common Application going live on August 1st. It will include a choice of seven prompts, seven questions for the main essay. Those are, as I understand it, the same prompts and questions as were the case last year.
Jacques Steinberg:
Also, this audience should find reassuring, Lee, that the overarching process that you and colleagues have used for many, many years, the holistic admissions process in which you look at the whole applicant…that process, I would argue, was largely affirmed by the court. And that it will even be possible—the court says this explicitly—for you, Lee, and your admissions colleagues to consider race as a factor in an admissions decision as long as the student ties it to something larger, including their sense of identity and meaning, and what they might bring to campus. But, Ralph, I'm curious whether you think... before we talk about what might change, what do you think of that rendering of what is likely to remain the same?
Rafael Figueroa:
I think that's a really important point to make, and I'm glad that you did that. Since the decision came out, I have been spending a lot of time speaking with professional colleagues, but mostly on the college side, on the admission side, and haven't had much chance to talk to students and families about their fears and their confusion over this decision. But the point you made is a good one, Jacques; much of the process is going to remain the same, especially from the students and the family's perspectives. We don't have to change very much of what we're doing on the high school side. The burden of the decision will rest with the colleges and the college admission offices, and how they interpret the very vague guidelines that have come down in this decision, and how they move forward.
But yes, the bottom line is students will still need to do what they have been doing in the process. They still need to be themselves, and to represent themselves as they truly are in the process. And college counselors like me, on the high school side, need to represent our students for who they are: all of their characters and qualities, their background, whether that includes racial or ethnic identity and background or not.
Jacques Steinberg:
So students in particular, as you listen to the conversation that we're about to have, there are going to be some things that are on you, and they've always been the case in the college application process. Nobody can tell your story the way that you can. And nobody can quite know what the story is that you want to tell and how you want to tell it. And for some of you, this conversation is going to prompt elements of your story that you want to tell to admissions officers. But it's not all on you. Far from it. Hopefully there is a counselor in your life, or a parent, or another adult who can mentor you and help you along, but also you will have supplemental storytellers.
A couple of your teachers will be asked to write recommendations about you. Your college counselor will be asked to write a recommendation about you. It may even be that a peer writes a recommendation about you. So that all becomes part of the story. But the one message I think that's critically important, and Ralph, perhaps you can reinforce this, is that you can't be considered by the admissions committee if you don't apply. And nothing in this decision should deter you from applying.
Rafael Figueroa:
That's really important point, Jacques. We don't want students to think that this means it's limiting their options. It's not limiting your options. It might impact the way that you go about this, but we want you to be really thinking about yourself as being a great candidate for these places. We want you to go out and to apply to those schools that you've been thinking about, that you've been pursuing. Keep your list balanced. The college counselor in me, I always have to say that, make sure that you have good options all around, but do go for your dreams. This is not going to change who you are or what you should be shooting for.
Lee Coffin:
Ralph, as a lawyer who doubles as a college advisor and former admission officer, were you surprised by the ruling? And I agree with Jacques. I think the door remains open to holistic review, and to the storytelling of identity when it's part of a student's lived experience. I mean, did that part of the ruling jump out at you as well?
Rafael Figueroa:
That part did jump out because it was almost like a little bone being thrown by the court to say that there were still things to consider on the college side. I was not surprised by the ruling overall. It was clear that the conservative majority were really bent on removing the consideration of race from the admission process, but nobody knew how they were going to go about it, what the actual wording was going to be. And the part where they admitted that colleges can still consider an applicant's race as it relates to the specific individual's experience. That was a little bit reassuring, that did give us something that we can work with. But it's also very vague, and it's also very unclear exactly what colleges are supposed to do with this ruling and how exactly you're supposed to interpret it.
We're hoping that we'll get some specific guidelines from the Department of Education. Those are expected to come out next month, and I think that might provide some clarity. But as it has been seen in the press, a lot of folks, the Students for Fair Admissions group and others are already printing threats to selective colleges and universities about possible future lawsuits about what they do. So there's still a lot of ambiguity here, which is troubling. But in the end, I think there is some good that colleges can do, some tools that they can focus on, that will still help achieve diversity in their classes.
Lee Coffin:
I have Jacques's mantra in my head, which is, "Assume no knowledge." Which has guided me through the last couple of seasons of podcasting. And so just to the spirit of that idea, assume no knowledge, I mean, the previous legal framework was race could be one factor among many in the way a college considered an applicant. And the current ruling removed race directly as one of those factors. And one of the things I've said to students as I've started to think about this is, many factors continue. The idea of holistic review, that each person is a sum of multiple components, and the application's designed to call those forward, that remains. To Jacques's point, the application has not changed. The student will still use the prompts in an intentional way to introduce herself.
Jacques Steinberg:
So I'll take on the role of the lawyer for a moment-
Lee Coffin:
Go ahead.
Jacques Steinberg:
... and read from Justice Roberts' opinion in the majority opinion, which, Lee, you quoted in a statement that you sent out to college counselors, and that Ralph, you and I have discussed many times. Quote, "Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected the applicant's life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university." So, Lee, you are the dean of admissions at a highly selective institution. This holistic admissions process that you talk about, tick off those factors that you consider in the broad definition of merit. And in the coming admission season, to what extent will race be a factor within these guidelines as set forth by Justice Roberts?
Lee Coffin:
What the part you just read suggests to me is, a student can use the application, the essays, the recommendations and interview, if that's still a component, extracurricular involvement and engagement, to showcase the lived experience through the prism of race and identity, when it's part of someone's introductory storytelling. That was always true. Before the Supreme Court ruling, I would've said the same thing. I think now, it is a more intentional element. You have to really take the app and respond to it, and give us a way of saying, "Okay, through the prism of classroom impact or academic engagement, curiosity, extracurricular involvement, talent, your personal considerations, the qualities, your curiosity, your collaboration, your presence in a community, your potential." I mean these are all areas of merit that a college admission officer considers as we read. And I think the opportunity starts with a student being clear about saying, "Hello, this is me."
And I'm wondering from Ralph's seat in the school, what's the best way to counsel applicants to embrace that storytelling opportunity? Some people have the benefit of you in the school with them teaching them how to do it, and a lot of students don't go to schools like that, where they're more on their own to figure this out. So this is where the podcast helps kind of fill in the blanks for people. But how are you thinking about that, Ralph?
Rafael Figueroa:
Yeah, I mean, my students at my school are very privileged from the sense of the services that they get about this process and the attention that we're able to pay to it. And it's one of the things that worries me about other students who don't have someone like me or my colleagues to work with. But ironically, when the decision was handed out, I was participating as a faculty member for a program called College Horizons, which is a college camp for Native American and Native Hawaiian students, and was in the middle of that week in the program. And we had been telling students at the beginning of the week, when you're writing your essay, if you think your native identity is important and should be shared as a theme of your essay, go ahead and write about it. But you do not have to, if there are other things that are more important to you to convey in your college essay.
Then by Thursday of that week when the decision came down, we sort of shifted the advice and said, "You still don't have to write about your native identity or for other students, there are other students of color, their racial or ethnic identity. But you have to be prepared to express it in a supplementary essay in another way. You have to be able to make sure that it does come through in other aspects of your application." And I think that's what's important to know. It doesn't have to be the main focus for you, but it has to be there. And in that way, my colleagues and I, on the high school side, are kind of relying on colleges to ask the right questions to shift your supplements, to give students a chance to express how their race and ethnic background has impacted their character and the qualities that they will bring to the community that you're trying to build on the college side, going back to that language that Justice Roberts put in the majority opinion.
And it was kind of a pretty awkward section in some respects, because what the court I think was trying to say was that, colleges can't use race per se. You can't use a checkbox, the fact that a student is African American or the fact that a student is Latino or Native American, you can't use that fact itself in the decision. But you can use their lived experience, their practical individual, real experiences and how those have shaped their character. The majority opinions and concurring opinions all specifically talk about race-based admissions as if that's a thing. "Race-based" admissions, as if a student is admitted because of their race, and that's what they're trying to convince the public of the... opinion. And that term is in those opinion, something like 133 times if you Google it. But "race-based" is not a real thing. That's never been the way the process worked. It's always been race conscious admission, a race-aware admission where race is a factor, but it's never been based on that.
Lee Coffin:
I think about how "one factor among many" has been the standard. And "race-based" implies it was the factor among many, not one factor among many. I feel like the door remains open to read holistically in a narrative-based way, and meet the students who have shared their story with us. And to your point, Ralph, it's incumbent on the colleges to ask questions to invite the story. So we did that at Dartmouth. Just as an example, we have a question with two options. And it says, "Required of all applicants, please respond to one of the following in 250 words or less." And the first option is, "There is a Quaker saying, 'Let your life speak.' Describe the environment in which you were raised and the impact it has had on the person you are today." And the second option is, "Be yourself. Oscar Wilde advised, 'Everyone else is taken.' Introduce yourself."
And in that question A or B, interchangeable, it's an invitation to any student anywhere in the world to share their story with us as we're building our class. And to me, the wordsmithing of each of those questions was very open-ended. A student from any background can answer that question, and show how a lived experience as a Black person in America, as a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, as a trans student in Alabama. I mean, you can keep going in all sorts of really interesting ways we live our lives. 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.
And to me, it informs community. Like when a class comes together for the opening of school, our president said in her response on June 29th, "Diversity is just a fundamental principle of the place we are. It's part of our curriculum, it's part of our community. It makes the place a richer one." And to me, that's the United States in the 2020s and beyond anyway. But then we also added another... We have a series of questions, and two of them that we wrote with this in mind said, "'It's not easy being green,' was the frequent refrain of Kermit the Frog. How has difference been a part of your life? And how have you embraced it as part of your identity and your outlook?"
Rafael Figueroa:
Yeah, I really like all of those prompts. I think those are really well done, and do provide the window students will need to write about those things. And I love the last one especially—big fan of Kermit the Frog, first of all. And it talks about being different. It's not necessarily about race, or ethnicity or culture. It could be gender identity, it could be anything that students can fit into that. And I really think that is going to help students express what they need to express. I've actually worried about some of the colleges that I see are writing essay prompts that are too hard on the idea of overcoming adversity and challenges to your life, which puts some students off. Even some of my students who will sit there and say, "I haven't really had adversity. I've had a pretty privileged life." And they recognize that, and that leaves them with nothing to talk about, they feel. And so I'm wary about some colleges going too far in the kind of supplements they're going to be proposing. But those that you've written are spot on, and I really like those a lot.
Lee Coffin:
No, I was going to say I share those, and this pod is not to promote Dartmouth, but just as examples of how a student might think about topics that allow him or her to showcase their story. And to my admission colleagues who might still be thinking about questions, play with these in ways that give students permission to think about their experiences, and how those experiences enhance your campus. I think that's still permissible.
Jacques Steinberg:
Lee, can you talk a moment about this point that Ralph raises about adversity? And the applicant who might feel pressure to write about it, when as Ralph says, they haven't experienced it. Can you give us some perspective as a dean of admission on that?
Lee Coffin:
I agree with Ralph and his concern that it frames this question in a very specific way, not an untrue way. And it's very much the story of many students, but not everyone. And I think that the opportunity of these questions has to be how open-ended can they be, so students from lots of different backgrounds and perspectives see themselves in the question, and can introduce themselves through it? And I'm troubled by the idea that diversity and adversity are somehow synonyms, like the Venn diagram totally overlaps on those two things. I think we have to acknowledge that there's a lot of overlap there, but there are also many students and families for whom that will not be the springboard into their introductory narrative.
Jacques Steinberg:
So, I want to pan back for a moment. We talked about the Dartmouth supplement that many colleges will have their own supplements. The Common Application is accepted at more than a thousand institutions, and students who are listening, and parents, I referenced earlier those seven prompts for the main essay of which those who are applying in the coming year will be asked to choose one. I just want to read aloud the first one this year as last year. "Some students have a background, identity, interest or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story." So, Ralph, imagine for purposes of this exercise, that I was a student sitting in your office, a rising senior, and interested in this particular prompt. What sort of perspective and context would you provide?
Rafael Figueroa:
The important thing to keep in mind is that I'm a former member of the board of directors of the Common Application, and I served on their counselor advisory board, and I actually helped write a lot of those prompts. And when we sat down to write them and to revise the former prompts, we specifically thought and talked about wanting to provide a home for every kind of student that we could think of in the group discussion. Every student type— the athlete, the science Olympiad kid, the yearbook kid, the theater kid, the musician, the visual artist—we wanted everyone to have a home no matter what their background, no matter what their talents. And that question was one of the broader ways to get at a background that we can't even think of. And we hope that students would consider racial and ethnic background as one of the things to talk about there, but didn't want to limit it to that either.
But we want to make sure students feel empowered to convey and tell the story that's critical to them. And with a little caveat there, the Common Application essay is not very long. It's 650 words maximum, and we'll literally cut you off after 650 words. It is not your entire life story that you can convey in that application essay. It's one snapshot about your experience, one snapshot about your background, or your culture, or your identity, or your adversity you have overcome. And that's important for students to think about too.
Jacques Steinberg:
Lee, as you look at that prompt sitting where you're sitting as the recipient of some essays in which students will choose to answer that first prompt, what guidance would you give to those who are listening and considering that?
Lee Coffin:
Every essay prompt, short, long, every interview question when you're in that space, is an invitation to introduce yourself. There's no correct answer, there's no wrong answer. So I think the first step for an aspiring applicant is to kind of make an outline of the story you hope to tell through your application. What are the points you hope the reader distills from this file that animates the person who you are that I perhaps have not met, that compliments your transcript and for places with testing, your testing? So that these little Lego pieces all connect into something bigger than that single piece. So, the prompt you're raising or the supplements I shared are all in the same spirit, they're not magic sentences that give you the perfect answer. They're opportunities to poke you into thinking about what is it I hope they know about me? And in knowing that about me, how can they make a more informed decision about my ability to thrive on that campus, to contribute to the conversations in a classroom, in a residence hall, always to be able to do the work and succeed in the curriculum?
But in the selective part of our work, the campuses that are highly or super selective need to sort big pools of quality into much more narrow pools of invitations. And you're using your essays in this example as ways of moving you forward in a competitive, subjective, multidimensional process. So, I think any prompt has the ability to do that. But it requires some forethought from an applicant to not just sit down at the keyboard and start typing, and hope that what shows up on your screen is it. But to say, "What is the point that I'm trying to articulate here?"
Jacques Steinberg:
It's funny we made the point earlier—you did, Lee—that we should assume no knowledge in terms of our audience, and what they know about the admissions process. There's a secondary meaning of it, which is that the applicant shouldn't assume that the admissions office knows about them. And ultimately, a good college admissions essay should answer the question, who am I? What do I value? What makes me tick? What are the signal sort of moments in the course of a life, a few of them that have sort of made me who I am and how I see the world? Since we're talking about essay advice, Ralph, what are some of your top tips in terms of essays, whether short or long for the college application?
Rafael Figueroa:
Yeah, we have used a couple of other broad instructions for students. From one of our admission officers who visits my school, we got a simple phrase that she asked herself when she would start reading an application, she would say, "What's your deal?" That was what she was trying to figure out about the students. And so we tell our students, "You're trying to tell the colleges: what's your deal?" And then we heard another presenter who talked about something that students can relate to very easily. He talks about your origin story like a Marvel superhero. What is the origin story that made you the superhero you are today? Those are other ways of thinking about what you're trying to do in this process. Your job is to convey the information to this school that you're applying to about who you are and what you add to that community. And that can be a daunting thing for a high school student to be thinking about. But we want them to trust their instincts, trust their ability to know who they are, to know what their deal is and to be able to convey that successfully.
Jacques Steinberg:
And I want to make sure that I'm not trying to put too much of a thumb on the scale for the first of the seven prompts. Just in the interest of fairness, two other examples. A prompt number five, "Discuss an accomplishment, event or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others." Again, that could be a prompt to get the applicant in a direction that you are sort of raising, Ralph. And then option seven, "Share an essay on any topic of your choice."
Lee Coffin:
That's called freewrite.
Jacques Steinberg:
We've talked a little bit at various points about the importance of diversity and in a college setting. And Lee, you quoted the new president of Dartmouth, Sian Beilock, in her statement to the Dartmouth community about diversity being a cornerstone. But let's not assume knowledge on that. For you, Lee, as the dean of admission of an American college and university, can you talk about why diversity is important to an institution like yours?
Lee Coffin:
I just said this yesterday in a senior staff retreat, it was reflecting on the value of the liberal arts. And I noted that the applicants to this next class were born in 2004, 2005, and will have lives and careers that stretch into the 2070s, 2080s. And to me, that is a multidimensional, multinational, multilingual experience. And so creating a campus for the undergraduate experience that represents as many kinds of human heterogeneity as we can capture in whatever size class we have is valuable. I think about my own upbringing in a small town in Connecticut, that was not very diverse beyond people from Italian, Irish, Polish extraction. And that was a lovely place to grow up. It was limiting in ways that I didn't appreciate until I got to college, and started meeting people from many different other backgrounds, and points of view and religions. And that continued as I started to work and then after grad school, and I realized the conversations were richer when there were multiple backgrounds represented.
My own sense of self evolved as I was able to test my own beliefs and identity in comparison to other beliefs and identities. And I was thinking about the Kermit question after I introduced as a topic. And I thought, "I could have written an answer to that, and said I was the only nerd in a family of jocks. And my identity as the non-athletic boy in the family, I was different." And it was informative to who I was then and who I became. And I think all of this adds up to a richer tapestry of people. And Ralph, when you hear diversity, what rings true for you? Whether it's a legal construct, or just you're someone who's in a school with a diverse community of teenagers?
Rafael Figueroa:
Yes, I hear it in two ways. I hear it in the way that you're talking about the role that it does play and the good that it does do in building a community at a college or university. But I also hear it in the legal context and in the legal history, and what that term has come to represent. And again, assuming no knowledge, it puts me in sort of history teacher mode to talk a little bit about how we got here and how diversity got to this point. All of these cases, all of this affirmative action discussion is based on a history that goes all the way back to the beginnings and the origins of this country. Back to the year 1619, when the first slaves were imported into the U.S. territories. But the important things are that there was a lot of reaction after the Civil War, and a lot of segregation and segregated schools, that was dealt with in a very famous case in 1954, Brown versus the Board of Education, in which the court said that "Separate but Equal" has no place, and outlawed discrimination in public schools.
The history was built upon that. But in 1978, a white man named Allan Bakke sued, saying that the diversity program at the University of California Davis Medical School discriminated against him, a white man, by not letting him be admitted to that medical school program. Some of the opinions in Bakke said that allowing the use of race to be considered in admissions was an appropriate thing to do to address past discrimination that students of color had faced. But the decision that became the ruling said, "No, we're not going to consider that. That's not a good reason to use race in admissions. But diversity of the student body is a compelling interest that can justify the use of race in admissions." So because of the Bakke case, diversity became what was the narrowly tailored interest that legally allowed colleges to use race in this admission process. But that's what this [current] case has done, it's said that diversity is no longer a compelling interest, no longer allows the use of race in admissions, and that's what the court struck down in these cases here this year.
Jacques Steinberg:
So, let's bring the conversation back perhaps, as we prepare to draw it to a close, to our original audience: students, including those who may be applying this fall, parents and counselors supporting them. Ralph, as they hear an important history lesson like you've provided, the context we've provided throughout this conversation, how do you help them to then at a certain point sort of tune out the noise, look within to tell their story, and then tell it?
Rafael Figueroa:
Yeah, I think it's really important that students take a deep breath, realize that who you are does matter greatly to these colleges and universities. Who you are is important, and you need to express who you are. And the applications that you're interested in making. The schools that you're interested in applying to, need to reflect your interests and your dreams, and it's still okay to apply schools that you think might be harder than ever to get admitted to. It's still okay to be ambitious, to try to get that dream, and get those highly selective schools. Still have a balanced list. That's what I tell my students, we want to see that you have a balanced list of colleges, that you will have realistic choices as well.
But you need to not let this decision have a chilling effect as it were, on your choices, on your plans for your college admission process. Be who you are. We trust the colleges to admit you or not for who you are, and to look at you or to see you for who you are. But you're going to be the one to have to tell them who you are, and tell that story as effectively as you can.
Jacques Steinberg:
Lee, before you bring us to a close, one of the things that gives me confidence, that gives me hope as we head into this sort of altered landscape, is the people you work with in the admissions office. And the hundreds, the thousands of people that you and Ralph, and I know professionally who do this work, who are committed to access, who are committed to finding a way to ensure that they can stay within the bounds of the law as currently defined, while still committed to the values you articulate. What sort of charge will you be giving your staff, or have you already given your staff as they head into this period, this application season?
Lee Coffin:
My charge is kind of two-pronged. One is, this ruling is weeks old at this point, and still being assessed. So, some of the implementation, some of the strategic adjustments we need to make, are still being reviewed. And I think that's not always a very satisfying answer in a very transactional kind of contemporary moment, but it's the truth. I think colleges, Dartmouth included, is taking time to be thoughtful about reading the ruling, understanding its guidelines, adjusting ourselves to be in compliance with the new guidelines. It is the law of the United States now. So someone could disagree with it, it is the legal framework under which we must do our work, and so that's not negotiable.
But what's also not negotiable is this idea that a policy was changed. The policy was called affirmative action. The principle of access has not changed. That is the fundamental, that's the reason I started doing admissions all those years ago, was to help students find their next adventure in this academic space. And broadening that pipeline in lots of different definitions is exciting in what we do, and the way we select the class will now be adjusted to be in compliance.
There was a headline right after the ruling about, "The Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action", and there was a lot of huffing and puffing about college admissions as we know it is gone. And I said, "Bull." The fundamentals of the work are still the fundamentals of the work. A factor embedded in a policy has been adjusted. I don't want to understate it, but one of us made the point earlier that much remains, and that's the advice I've given my colleagues is, as we recruit and as we tell the story of this next class and the opportunity it represents, and when we get to reading and selection, we will do our work one by one as we always have. And there will be certain statistical tools I don't have at my disposal anymore as the class comes into being, but the class will continue to come into being. And you have to look forward. We have to find a way to do our work to counsel students, to fill our classes with the student body we hope to have that is legal.
Jacques Steinberg:
Before we bring things to a close, Ralph, I made the point earlier that the Common App is accepted at more than a thousand colleges. There's actually more than 2,000 four-year colleges, I believe, in this country. We've talked a lot in this conversation about a relatively small number of highly selective colleges in this country. What about some of those schools that are less selective, including in-state public institutions? Are there some concerns that you have, Ralph, and some things that students, and parents, and counselors in particular should bear in mind?
Rafael Figueroa:
Yeah, that's a great question, Jacques. Because this decision is aimed at those colleges and universities that have been using race as part of the factors in their decision. There are a lot of colleges that don't use race. There are a lot of colleges and the majority of colleges aren't selective at all. They admit the majority of the students who apply. Nonetheless, this decision could have an impact on scholarship programs, on the guidelines set down by state and public institutions. And so students should be aware that things can be shifting in other places too. The story there will still be the same. They're going to want you to apply anyway. They're going to want you to put yourself out there. And they are going to be able to adjust their processes to stay within the law and to still be as proactive in getting the students that they want.
It all goes back to Lee's question, because they're still doing what they do for the reasons they've always done it, because they want the students to be part of their campus. They want to serve students in their state or in their applicant pool. And so in the end, it's going to work out and colleges are going to figure it out. But don't let this decision scare you students from applying to those big state schools either. Those might be good options for you, and keep that open.
Lee Coffin:
I agree. I think the peril here is people taking themselves out of the college admission sequence because they misinterpret what the ruling means. Stay present. I thought I might end this conversation with a paragraph from the statement I made July 5th, from the dean of admission at Dartmouth to our prospective applicants in the class of 2028, explaining what the ruling meant, by emphasizing we remain committed to holistic review. I said, "That means we will continue to consider someone's academic achievements as well as passions and curiosity. We will value a student's accomplishments inside as well as outside the classroom, and we will note evidence of challenges someone may have overcome. Creativity, leadership, and impulse toward collaboration, independence, determination, and kindness, among many other attributes that shape a person's narrative and identity, all count.
That was true before the court ruling, and it remains true today. The Supreme Court established limits for how we can consider race in our admission decisions. But remember, each of you is indelibly more complex than just one factor."
Jacques, Ralph, thanks for joining me on the Admissions Beat for this really important conversation about the role of race in college admissions, and how students from diverse backgrounds can continue to make their way towards higher education, and its promise. For those of you just discovering Admissions Beat, we will be back in mid-September for Season Four, picking up the story from the senior in high school point of view, and guiding those lovely little seniors through the application deadlines later this fall. For now, mid-summer, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thank you for listening.