Written by : Richard Cherwitz

It is was disappointing to witness the Supreme Court’s recent decision to end affirmative action. However, for those who oversee admissions/enrollment planning and strategic enrollment management, there is much that can be done to increase diversity in a race neutral environment.

Why do I say this?

To answer, we must assess how well administrators did in producing a diverse class of students using the legal tools of affirmative action. While progress has been made, African-Americans and Hispaniremain significantly underrepresented among recipients of doctoraldegrees. These two groups comprise a smaller percentage of doctoral degrees than there portion of all U.S. citizens in the age range of Ph.D. candidates.

What is disturbing is that, without more persons of color earning advanced degrees, there will remain an inadequate supply of underrepresented minority faculty, making it less likely that talented minority students will choose to enter college. And this, of course, means perpetuating a lack of diversity across college campuses.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate affirmative action, diversifying higher education will be even more onerous. To be sure, producing a sufficient number of minority doctoral degrees is tied to the admission process. However, we now must focus on an oft unspoken culprit, namely, the insubstantial minority applicant pool.

Less than 25 percent of applicants to graduate school are Hispanic, African-American, or Native American. Nationally, therefore, top-notch graduate institutions often play numbers games, competing with each other to redistribute an already undersized minority applicant population.

At my own institution, The University of Texas at Austin, graduate applicants for the summer and fall (2022) are especially low: Hispanic applications constituted 7.82% of all applicants, Black or African American comprised only 2.57%, Black or African American, two ormore excluding Hispanic were 0.30% and combined were 10.69%.

So why do talented minority students choose not to attend graduate school? Many don’t give serious thought to pursuing graduate degrees, preferring instead to enter law, medicine or business, not only because of money and prestige, but also awareness of the societal impact of these pursuits.

Underlying this preference is the fact that students from a minority community, or those who are the first in their family to attend college, may, as columnist William Raspberry wrote, “perceive withdrawal fromthe rough and tumble of everyday problems as dereliction.” Minority and first-generation students are very intelligent and capable of learning at the highest levels, yet feel the tug of social responsibility.

Ironically, graduate education need not be devoid of social relevance. At the University of Texas at Austin from 1997-2019, Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) offered an innovative vision and model of education that challenged students to be citizen-scholars. By engaging students in community projects where they discovered and put knowledge to work, as well as requiring them to identify and adapt to audiences for whom their research matters, intellectual entrepreneurship illustrated the enormous value to society of graduate study.

What does intellectual entrepreneurship, or IE, have to do with increasing diversity? IE was devised in 1997 to increase the value of graduate education for all students. Yet we discovered that 20 percent of students enrolled in IE were underrepresented minorities, while this same group comprised only 9 percent of UT-Austin’s total graduate student population.

Minorities reported that, by rigorously exploring how to succeed, IE helped demystify graduate school. More importantly, students noted that IE provided one of the few opportunities to contemplate in a genuine entrepreneurial fashion how to utilize their intellectual capital to give back to the community—something motivating many minority students.

IE’s potential to increase diversity in graduate school was best documented by its Pre-Graduate School Internship. From 2003-2019, this initiative paired undergraduates with faculty and graduate student mentors. Interns worked with their mentors on research projects, observed graduate classes, shadowed graduate student teaching and research assistants, participated in disciplinary activities and explored their futures.

Each year, about 65 percent of IE Pre-Graduate School interns were underrepresented minorities, first-generation or economically disadvantaged students. Over half of them went on to pursue a graduate degree. Let me offer one example. Of the spring 2018 undergraduate IE cohort of 150 students, one-third were Hispanic, compared to a university-wide percentage of 18 percent. Similarly, although only 4.5 percent of UT-Austin students identified as African-American, 18 percent of IE students were African-American.

Interns reported that, for the first time in their undergraduate careers, a space existed to reflect upon the role education plays in meeting their goals. IE empowered them to view academic disciplines not as artificial containers for students, but as lenses through which to clarify their visions and as tools to realize their goals.

The lesson learned from this is clear. To increase diversity in a race-neutral era, university administrators who oversee admissions/enrollment planning must find innovative ways to expand the undergraduate applicant pool. One way to do that is to enable students to see the connections between their professional aspirations and education — something at the core of IE’s approach to education in the past 20 years.

And that will require admissions officers to collaborate more strategically and closely with academic departments in order to help flesh out these connections—just as we did at The University of Texas with our IE initiative.

In short, there is hope for increasing diversity following the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate affirmative action.