SEATTLE — Washington’s public universities are just as diverse as the state’s private colleges, even though they’ve had to work under a statewide ban on affirmative action for the past 25 years.
Neither public nor private colleges are racially representative of the K-12 school population at large. But the available enrollment data from four-year colleges with more than 1,000 students show both types of colleges are around 50% students of color.
On that macro scale, they are representative of Washington’s public schools, which are also split down the middle between white students and students of color.
As colleges around the country navigate the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling on race-conscious admissions, Washington and several other states with their own affirmative action bans might serve as examples of what happens to college enrollments if more colleges adopt a “race-neutral” doctrine when making decisions on applications.
If Washington’s experience were indicative of the country, minus the most selective of institutions, not much would change — at least in the long term. In the Evergreen State, even the most selective colleges accept more than 40% of applicants. That’s far from the nail-biting admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the court’s recent ruling.
“In the world of most universities, it is a question of who you are recruiting, not who you are admitting,” said Mike Meotti, the executive director of the Washington Student Achievement Council, a state agency dedicated to increasing higher education attainment.
After voters passed a ban on affirmative action in 1998, public universities here did see an enrollment drop among students of color, research shows. But those rates rebounded within a year.
Since the law’s passage, public universities have had to find other ways to ensure racial diversity. Those ways include guaranteed admission programs for high school students and a holistic application review process that looks beyond just GPA and standardized test scores.
Private colleges, which are exempt from the state’s ban, have been free to use affirmative action. The colleges haven’t yet said what they plan to do in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which will affect private colleges. While the ruling does not ban affirmative action, it creates significant legal hurdles.
One good predictor of a college’s racial makeup is its location, said Ruben Flores, executive director of the Washington State Council of Presidents, an association of the state’s six four-year public universities.
The Bothell and Tacoma campuses of the University of Washington have a higher share of Black and Latino students than the Seattle campus. The private Saint Martin’s University and Walla Walla University have among the highest rates of Latino enrollment. Those numbers reflect the demographics of their communities; for example, about 13% of students in the Tacoma School District are Black, and nearly 43% of students in the Walla Walla School District are Hispanic/Latino.
“For most Americans, college is a local thing,” said Meotti.
For all their efforts to recruit, though, private and public colleges are not racially representative of the generation they’re serving. This is particularly true for Hispanic/Latino students, who make up one-quarter of the state’s 1 million public school kids, but only one-fifth of the roster, at the very most, in the state’s four-year institutions.
That fact, combined with a general enrollment crisis at colleges around the country, has colleges bracing for the effect of the court’s ruling. The chilling effect seen 25 years ago could return, even if the status quo here won’t change much at all.
