Almost every student who applies to Washington’s colleges and universities is likely to find a spot. Even the state’s two most selective schools — the University of Washington in Seattle and Whitman College in Walla Walla — admit nearly half of all applicants. So, with the majority of K-12 students children of color, it’s perplexing that many of Washington’s campuses are overwhelmingly white.
The Western Washington University student body is 68 percent white. At Washington State University in Pullman, it’s 59 percent. And while the UW’s Seattle campus is more diverse overall, 8 percent of its undergraduates are Latino, though students of Hispanic background comprise 25 percent of the state’s K-12 population.
The push to diversify colleges is not merely an academic exercise. Because educational attainment is closely linked to a student’s future occupation, and often their quality of life, the question of who gets a degree has lasting impact. And it’s receiving renewed scrutiny in the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action based on race.
Washington, however, had already prohibited the practice. The results, 25 years after that voter initiative took effect, show that creating diversity on campus is neither happenstance nor automatic.
The quandary around creating campuses that feel welcoming to diverse populations is hardly unique to Washington. At the University of Richmond in Virginia, former president Ronald Crutcher, who is Black, is ambivalent about affirmative action. Once, he considered it essential. But over the years, Crutcher noticed that it created problems of its own — not least, saddling students of color with the question of whether they were truly qualified to be there.
So, rather than giving applicants points for their racial background, Crutcher urges schools to seek out people in low-income neighborhoods, or students who may be the first in their families to go to college.
There are many ways to achieve similar ends: Texas, California and Florida offer automatic college admission to students who finish 12th grade at the top of their class — regardless of whether their high schools are considered rigorous or not, in affluent areas or poor.
Doing away with legacy admissions — the tradition of offering spots to the relatives of alumni — is yet another way to level the playing field.
But the rubber meets the road at recruitment. That doesn’t mean mailing students a flyer when they’re in the 11th grade. It means starting in middle school and sustaining the connection. The state’s College Bound Scholarship aims to do exactly that by identifying income-eligible students as early as seventh or eighth grade and guaranteeing financial aid if they graduate high school with at least a 2.0 GPA.
That program demonstrates Washington’s intention and commitment to making a college education accessible for all.
