"A Trojan Horse for the Affluent: House Bill 3041 and the Resegregation of College Admissions in Texas," by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Friends,

I will always remember that today is the anniversary of the horrific killings in Uvalde, Texas, because it is also mine and my husband's wedding anniversary.

As I contemplate violence against children in our schools, I urge us to also think about the symbolic, institutional violence that H.B. 3041 represents.

I often wonder what bills are getting passed while the advocacy community is focused on other critical fronts—like fighting SB 37, SB 12, and the ongoing battle against vouchers. H.B. 3041 is one of these, and it is VERY consequential to the future of children and youth in Texas.

What concerns me even more is the noticeable absence of critical perspectives or in-depth analysis of this bill in major news outlets or academic circles. Outside of endorsements by pro-homeschooling groups and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, there has been virtually no public scrutiny of its impact on equity, public education, or financial aid. That silence is itself telling—and dangerous.

Thank you for reading,

–Angela

A Trojan Horse for the Affluent: House Bill 3041 and the Resegregation of College Admissions in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 24, 2025

The University of Texas at Austin tower on July 16, 2020. Credit: Allie Goulding/

The Texas Tribune

Well on its way to becoming state law, H.B. 3041 —authored by Reps. Dennis Paul and Terry Wilson—masquerades as a measure to expand college access. In truth, it codifies a deeply inequitable double standard in admissions and financial aid. The bill creates a separate pathway for students from “nontraditional secondary education” backgrounds—such as homeschoolers and those from unaccredited private schools—allowing them to bypass class-rank requirements and qualify for automatic admission based on standardized test scores set by each institution. 

It goes further by amending the Texas Education Code, meaning statute, to make these students eligible for state-funded financial aid programs like the TEXAS Grant—resources already stretched thin. This carveout, cloaked in the language of fairness, opens a back door for students who are disproportionately white, affluent, and well-resourced, while further narrowing the front door for historically underserved students in Texas public schools (Knox, 2024).

This isn’t just unfair—it’s a form of institutional violence. At a time when children of color in Texas schools are already being targeted by book bans, curriculum restrictions, racial surveillance, and chronic underfunding, H.B. 3041 inflicts yet another wound. The violence may not be physical, but its effects are just as real. When the state systematically redirects opportunity away from the vulnerable and toward the already privileged, it signals that some lives—and futures—matter more than others. That, too, is a kind of assault: quiet, calculated, and devastating.

The bill attempts to simulate class-rank-based admissions for students without one by substituting standardized test scores. Although the benchmarks must be recalibrated annually using institutional data, this approach is fundamentally flawed. Standardized tests are not neutral indicators of merit—they mirror access to wealth, tutoring, and stable learning environments. Consequently, H.B. 3041 disproportionately benefits students from nontraditional, affluent backgrounds—many of whom also stand to gain from newly passed school voucher legislation. Together, these measures constitute a systematic redirection of public support toward those already advantaged.

Meanwhile, students in public schools must compete through class rank in an increasingly narrow funnel (Dey, 2024). At UT Austin, for example, automatic admission once applied to students in the top 10 percent of their graduating class; by Fall 2026, only those in the top 5 percent will qualify—due to legislative provisions that cap automatic admissions at 75 percent of the freshman class. The rest are admitted through holistic review. In this context, H.B. 3041 is not just inequitable—it’s egregious. While public school students, disproportionately Black, Latino, and low-income, face rising barriers, nontraditional students gain a separate route designed around their strengths.

As McNeil (2005) and Valencia, Valenzuela, Sloan, & Foley (2001) have shown, so-called “color-blind” policies often obscure structural racism, reinforcing systems that reward those already equipped with social and economic capital. Berliner and Glass (2014) add that standardized test scores track family income more reliably than academic ability. H.B. 3041 reflects what Valenzuela (1999) calls subtractive schooling—policies that devalue the knowledge and experiences of marginalized students while privileging dominant norms. It rewards those in individualized, resource-rich settings while burdening public school students with mounting obstacles. This is not equity; it is privilege masquerading as reform.

The bill’s provision for “equal access” to dual credit courses is equally deceptive. While it requires institutions to treat all students the same in admissions to dual credit, it ignores the reality that many public schools—especially in rural and low-income areas—lack the infrastructure, staffing, and partnerships to offer these courses in the first place. Texas is a deeply rural state, yet rural schools remain underrecognized in policy. This formal equality masks material inequality. As Berliner and Glass (2014) warn, when laws ignore structural disparities, they don’t close gaps—they widen them.

Finally, by expanding financial aid eligibility without increasing funding, H.B. 3041 threatens to dilute resources for those who need them most. This is not an expansion of access—it’s a redistribution of opportunity upward: from public to private, from the underserved to the already advantaged.

In sum, H.B. 3041 is not a policy of inclusion—it is a Trojan horse. It offers the appearance of equity while reinforcing race, class, and geographic privilege. With UT Austin and other public institutions narrowing their admissions thresholds, this bill ensures that the gate remains open to the few and closed to the many. Texans must see H.B. 3041 for what it is: a backdoor policy that elevates the already elevated—at the cost of justice, access, and the democratic promise of public education.

References

Berliner, D. C., & Glass, G. V. (2014). 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools. Teachers College Press

Dey, S. (2024, Sept. 16). UT-Austin tightens automatic admission threshold to 5% of Texas’ top high schoolers: The current threshold is 6%, Texas Tribune, https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/16/ut-austin-top-five-percent-threshold/

Knox, L. (2024, Dec. 16), The longhorn long shot, Inside Higher Education

McNeil, L. (2005). Faking equity: High-stakes testing and the education of Latino youth. In A. Valenzuela (Ed.), Leaving children behind: How “Texas style” accountability fails Latino youth (pp. 57–111). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Valencia, R., Valenzuela, A., Sloan, K., & Foley, D. (2001). Let’s treat the cause, not the symptoms: Equity and accountability in Texas revisited. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(4), 318–321, 326. 

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press.

© Angela Valenzuela, May 24, 2024

DEI Attacks Are Widening the Racial Wealth Gap | Bloomberg

Friends:

An expanding middle class is so obviously important to our economy and society. And this is what DEI helps accomplish. This is an excellent opinion piece by Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman that relies on research. I have actually read the research on California that she cites and Opoku-Agyeman is spot on. Please read.

I came across it on BlueSky, a new app that folks are using as an alternative to Twitter. I just joined. My handle is @vlnzl in case you're joining. For lots of progressives, X (or Twitter) has gotten too toxic. I hope this becomes a platform and space for productive conversations.

-Angela Valenzuela

DEI Attacks Are Widening the Racial Wealth Gap

Taking away policies that help qualified Black and Latino people secure economic gains through selective colleges and high-paying jobs is counter-productive.



DEI and affirmative action initiatives shouldn’t be controversial.Photographer: Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images North America

November 14, 2024 at 7:00 AM CST

By Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is a doctoral candidate in public policy and economics at Harvard Kennedy School. She is the editor of “The Black Agenda” and the author of the forthcoming book “The Double Tax.”

Voters have given Donald Trump a second chance and put diversity, equity and inclusion programs in further danger.

The DEI backlash was strong even before Trump won the 2024 presidential election, and he is clearly hostile to most programs that seek to create an even playing field. That’s a shame, and not simply on moral or social grounds. DEI offers a path to real, lasting wealth generation, helps create a bigger consumer class, and it’s good for the economy.

Wealth creation in the US is typically rooted in three factors: education, well-paying jobs and profitable investments. Historically, White people have had disproportionate access to all three of those things, yet opponents of DEI and affirmative action insist, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that it was all achieved through merit.

Again, studies and history books tell us that’s a farce. But the myth persists. That’s not to discount the gains people make through hard work and talent or the financial and social rewards they deserve for their skills. DEI isn’t meant to come at the expense of either of those virtues. In fact, when DEI is thoughtfully implemented, it complements — and doesn’t overshadow — industrious, creative work.

Still, we hear it endlessly: Merit should be the only deciding factor when it comes to college admissions and hiring practices. It’s a compelling sales pitch on the surface. But look a little closer. At its core, attacks on race-conscious policies are a Trojan Horse.

In practice, those biases can push Black and Latino people into career pathways that are divorced from wealth-building. As a result, underrepresented minorities remain a substantial part of America’s permanent economic underclass, even as they comprise an increasingly larger part of the US population.

Opponents of diversity initiatives are surely aware that selective colleges and universities have often served as vital pathways for closing socioeconomic gaps and building wealth through high-paying jobs. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard against the strategic expansion of who gets access to those institutions — and using “merit” as a cover.

It may take several years to see the full trickle-down effects of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to dismantle affirmative action, but data following bans at the state level years prior have already painted a devastating picture.

California, for example, voted to end the measure in its public universities in 1996 with Proposition 209. Princeton economics professor Zachary Bleemer found that it led to a 7.6-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that qualified minority applicants enrolled in selective University of California campuses. Perhaps feeling deterred, these high school students were much more likely to apply and enroll in less selective state schools. Over time, minority applicants, mostly Hispanic, experienced a 5% average annual decline in wages. The pay decrease worsened overall inequality by reducing the number of early-career minority Californians earning over $100,000 by at least 3%. This, in a state where 40% of the population is Latino.

What Bleemer found is further corroborated by the work of economists Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman. They discovered that attending highly selective or Ivy Plus institutions triples a student’s chances of securing jobs at prestigious firms and increases their chances of joining the top 1% of earners. The work of Ellora Derenoncourt, a Princeton economics professor and director of the Program for Research on Inequality, further underscores why this access matters.

Her research shows that, between 1980 and 2020, capital gains on investments — one of the primary drivers of wealth accumulation — have disproportionately benefited White households. Those in high-paying professions usually have access to corporate stock awards, which add to those gains.

This is why legal challenges against programs that create pathways for families from historically disadvantaged backgrounds could have lasting economic repercussions for future generations of Black and Latino individuals. Those populations already have, on average, less wealth than White families. In 2022, the Urban Institute reported that White families had an average wealth of $1.4 million as compared to Hispanic ($227,544) and Black families($211,596).

While much of the racial wealth gap can be attributed to White Americans benefiting from what Michelle Obama has called “affirmative action of generational wealth,” the pervasive attacks on DEI only exacerbate the problem.

Currently, the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the New York University School of Law is tracking lawsuits against companies and schools related to DEI efforts. In every region that the program analyzes, at least one lawsuit has been filed involving anti-DEI initiatives — resulting in more than 100 lawsuits.

Despite widespread calls to shutter DEI efforts across corporate America and higher education, evidence clearly shows that they are needed. They offer counterweights to biases that have led to hiring discrimination and increased turnover and lower promotion rates of qualified non-White individuals. One Harvard University study that analyzed new hires from a professional services firm found that Black employees were 32% more likely to leave positions within two years. The largest gap in that cohort — 51% — existed between Black and White women.


If this was all about “merit,” such findings would likely be less racially stark. The data also raise a question: Who benefits when qualified minorities are systemically shut out from entering academic and career pathways that facilitate wealth-building?

It’s wildly counter-productive. Consumers generate two-thirds of the gross domestic product in the US. An expanding consumer class — the foundation of America’s middle class — has always supercharged the economy and the lives of all Americans, regardless of their gender or the color of their skin. Sabotaging programs that help create wealth sabotages the economy as well.

The ban on affirmative action and the decline of DEI efforts represent a cold and calculated attack on what economic prosperity, well-being and opportunity could look like for all Americans, undermining the very fabric of equity and justice in our society.


More From Bloomberg Opinion:White Men Are Still Kings of the Job Market. Here’s Proof: Sarah Green Carmichael
An Exodus of Black Women in Academia Hurts the Workforce: Anna Branch
‘DEI Hires’ Don’t Lower the Bar. We Raise It: Laura Morgan Roberts

Want more Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN <GO>. Or subscribe to our daily newsletter.


This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is a doctoral candidate in public policy and economics at Harvard Kennedy School. She is the editor of “The Black Agenda” and the author of the forthcoming book “The Double Tax.”

The end of Affirmative Action most definitely results in a loss of intellectual talent. The lack of a diverse environment is costly both to the college classroom and research, considering the power of diversity to illuminate knowledge that aligns and fails to align with race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Gothamist author Arun Venugopal interviews author and professor OiYan Poon, who wrote a pertinet book titled, Asian American is not a Color: Conversations about Race, Affirmative Action, and Family.”

Dr. Poon mentions "repressive legalism," a concept developed by Dr. Liliana Garces at UT Austin where interpretations of policy result in over-each encouraging conservative interpretations that are harmful, in this case, to the goal of diversity.

I would also underscore that there are absolutely material consequences when affirmative action, a now-defunct policy tool, goes away. This quote by Poon nails it when she expresses: "There's still a lot of opportunity in higher education, but we can't pretend like there's also not material consequences and inequalities, right?"

Poon's own work is enlightening with respect to what race-conscious admissions mean for Asian Americans across the U.S.  Her research shows that Asian American identity is still in flux, caught between individuals striving to align with whiteness at the top of the racial hierarchy and those advocating for a vision of justice and humanity built through inter-ethnic solidarity.

-Angela Valenzuela

Black enrollment falls at Columbia, top schools after affirmative action ruling. Now what?

By 

Arun Venugopal |Gothamist

Published Sep 21, 2024

Some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities, including New York City's Columbia University, have released data in recent weeks on the racial makeup of their newest classes. The handiwork of the U.S. Supreme Court is written all over them.

The share of newly admitted Black students dropped off significantly at the most selective schools, according to the institutions. The enrollment figures are the first since the Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling in June 2023, barred schools from using race as a factor in higher-education admissions decisions.

Some of the reported results: At Columbia, the share of Black students fell from 20% to 12%.

At Amherst College, the share of Black students fell from 11% to 3%.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the share of Black students dropped from 15% to 5% and the share of Hispanic students fell from 16% to 11%.

At the same time, Asian American representation increased at Columbia (from 30% to 39%) and at Brown University (from 29% to 33%), but stayed flat at Harvard (37%) and marginally fell at Dartmouth and Princeton. At Yale, it declined from 30% to 24%.

To help make sense of the new admissions landscape, Gothamist spoke with OiYan Poon, the author of “Asian American is Not a Color: Conversations about Race, Affirmative Action, and Family.” Poon, a proponent of race-conscious admissions, offers advice for students and parents who are at the very center of a college admissions landscape that's very much in flux.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
These results are confusing. But one of the results is that a number of higher-ed institutions have taken fewer Black students. What does this mean to you?

We saw this historically with the University of California, when they ended affirmative action in 1996. It's in some ways communicating to Black students, “We don't want you, as a college.”

We're also seeing, simultaneously, increasing applications to historically Black colleges and universities, which are gems in the ecosystem — underfunded gems. But what we're seeing is really a loss, I think, of intellectual talent among Black students at these predominantly white institutions that are often deemed as pathways to upward mobility.

And I think this is a real challenge for a democracy that claims to be multiracial and diverse. So I just fear that this is going to have adverse effects on science, on economics, on a lot of sectors of life in our country.
By which you mean fewer African Americans getting those pathways?

Yes, absolutely.

We are seeing a decline in the number of Asian Americans at certain colleges and universities, while at others like Columbia and MIT, the Asian American enrollment has dramatically risen. What gives?

There was research that came out of Georgetown by Anthony Carnevale and his team several years ago, before the lawsuit's ruling [the one last year significantly limiting affirmative action in school admissions]. And his team found that without race-conscious admissions, there might be a 1% — give or take — increase in Asian Americans being admitted.

So when you take the ecosystem of all these institutions, it's been a mixed bag. It kind of washes out into what Dr. Carnevale and his team predicted, which was maybe a slight gain. But at the same time, I want to be clear that there are natural fluctuations year to year in admissions.

Depending on things that are happening in the world with each cohort of high school graduates — there might be a pandemic, or there's a debacle with the FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] form with the federal government, right? So things happen that then create these kind of so-called natural fluctuations in enrollment numbers.

The percentages going up and down in the shares of Asian American enrollment may have to do with, again, these institutions perhaps not recruiting in ways that they had before or building relationships with different communities. There's just a lot of things that could go into it. So I'm interested in seeing how this unfolds in the next few years, to see actual trends, because one year does not make a difference.
Is it clear how white students have been affected by the changes?

It's also been a little bit of an up and down, but mostly the picture is not fully clear yet. For now, you've only got a couple dozen institutions, and the actual public reporting data day is Oct. 15, barring any federal government shutdown.
So there's a very strong to-be-determined quality to all of this.

Yes.

What did you feel last year when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action?

I felt pretty devastated when the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions. I just knew it would have ... it was just a continuation of attacks on a multiracial democracy — and who is affirmed and included in spaces of higher education and spaces of learning and engagement in the life of our nation. As a mom of a young child and the daughter of immigrants, I felt really upset. I think there were a lot of tears actually.

Did the ruling fundamentally change how colleges and universities do their work?

I think there's been a lot of changes. People are still trying to figure out what they can do.

I think what we're finding, like my colleague Liliana Garces at the University of Texas — she's a professor there, and a trained lawyer — she has really put forward this idea of "oppressive legalism." In other words, lawyers are telling their colleges and universities to back off of things that are still very legal.

And so schools are moving away, and they're really driven and leading through fear, which I think is not a good way to lead principled and mission-driven organizations.
What does this mean for an institution that sees a very exciting application from, say, a Black student, but who is objectively less impressive because of some numerical score?

I think they're second-guessing. I think some of these colleges are so afraid of getting sued, they have really rolled back their target recruitment efforts to visit and build relationships with communities, with talented Black and brown students, low-income students.

If you're in the business of finding talented students, then you should be doing that. But I think because this lawsuit and the makeup of the court is what it is, that fear is really driving these institutions to say, "Well, I don't know if we can do this."

Do you think that Ed Blum — the legal activist who founded a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which won the Supreme Court victory against Harvard and the University of North Carolina — and this movement is ultimately about increasing white student representation in institutions of higher education?

Yes. [laughs] I mean, the simple answer is yes. I think at the end of the day, what Ed Blum's movement is about is really shutting down and decreasing who's at the table in this country in various sectors. He started out in voting rights. It's about power and who gets to have it in this country.

There are students across the country, high school juniors and seniors who are just trying to make sense of this. What advice would you give them?

Be yourself. Really, just be yourself and know that you've worked hard. And lean into your interests and curiosities and know that there are over 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. And we forget that sometimes, right? We think that there's only like 50.
So how to reconcile that with what you said earlier, which is that Black students are being denied spots in some of these more prominent institutions?

There's still a lot of opportunity in higher education, but we can't pretend like there's also not material consequences and inequalities, right?

There's an economist, Zach Bleemer, who studied the University of California and what happened there in relation to who went to the University of California campuses, versus the California State University campuses and community colleges. After the ban on affirmative action, there was kind of this cascading effect where fewer Black and Latino and Indigenous students were going to the UC's but were going more to the Cal States and the community colleges. And, as a result [for] white and Asian students, he said, there was no economic gain.

But there was an economic decrease, there was harm done to these other students of color who were cascading downward.
So it sounds like what you're saying is that there are material gains for the most disadvantaged communities...

When you go to the most prestigious institutions.
Less so for white and Asian students.

Right.

Do you have specific advice for the parents of students whose anxieties are probably supercharged right now?

I am very sympathetic to those concerns as a mom. My daughter's in Chicago Public Schools. We have magnet high schools. This is not about college, but it's still a selective process.

And I have told my daughter since she was entering kindergarten just very casually, "Hey, isn't this a beautiful neighborhood high school? Someday you can go here, right?"

And last year in third grade, she came home and said, “Mom, if I don't go to Lane Tech High School” — which is, I guess, like a Stuyvesant here in New York, we have about 10 or 12 of those kind of magnet high schools — she said, “If I don't go to Lane Tech High School, my life is over.” And I was just like, “Té Té, you're in third grade!” What is happening here?

It just was confounding. I guess in some ways, I'm the anti-stereotypical Asian parent. There's lots of possibilities, but I recognize that this is actually a privilege that she has.

My daughter has a privilege as a daughter of two highly educated professionals. So when I think about middle-class and educated parents, I really want to tell them, "Let's calm down here." But I think about my daughter's classmates and their parents, and a lot of their children, if they go to college, this will be their first person in their families to go to college.

And so that anxiety I recognize and respect.
How about institutions themselves? Do you think they need to be changing course in some manner or are they at the mercy of larger political and legal forces?

I mentioned there's over 4,000 colleges and universities, right? The great majority of them are at the whims of their financial situations.

Historically, if you look at how colleges and universities developed, they've been financially precarious institutions. The majority of colleges and universities are driven by financial considerations. So admissions decisions have so much to do with the calculus [around] what percentage of my incoming students can pay full or close-to-full tuition? So that I can also then cover those who need financial aid, because I only have X amount of dollars in next year's fiscal budget in the university to cover financial aid. Here's my limited financial aid budget. And how do I leverage Pell Grants or state aid, right? And so there's this prediction there, but it does create a privilege for wealthier students.

Disproportionately white.

Yes. Disproportionately white.

As an Asian American, how do you explain the centrality of Asian Americans to this particular issue? Is it simply about equity?

Asian Americans are so complicated. We are an extremely diverse community — socioeconomically, ethnically, culturally, linguistically, you name it. There's all kinds of Asian American experiences. There's folks who are incredibly wealthy and folks who are incredibly poor and everyone in between.

But at the end of the day, there are these flattened racial stereotypes about Asian Americans — as crazy, rich Asians, as extremely intelligent but only at math and science, really docile, quiet, hardworking, not complainers, overcoming adversity and so on — unlike these undeserving minorities, posing against the stereotypes of undeserving Black, undeserving Latino communities.

This is all flattening all of us, and it's a divide-and-conquer tactic that Ed Blum has played into very well, unfortunately. And so you use these stereotypes to say we don't need policies or practices to recognize these inequalities in our education system. And so then you can keep these inequalities in place and those who are most privileged continue to benefit.

And so Asian Americans get used, and that's what I talk about in this book and how different Asian Americans are making sense of all of that.

Test-Optional Policies Now Dominate Higher Ed, by Jacquelyn Elias, Chronicle of Higher Education

Many colleges and universities have prolonged their test-optional policies for this past year's 2023-24 admissions cycle, and in certain instances, for an extended period. Harvard applicants have posted this related notice on application requirements website:

"For the College Classes of 2027-2030, students may apply for admission without standardized test scores."

From College Curators, 2022-23

Similarly, UT-Austin is test-optional as are and many other highly selective institutions that you can learn about here.

It's so interesting, if not aggravating, to ponder why so many of our nation's universities are increasingly test-optional but our K-12 schools are not. What we do know is that increasing the numbers through diversity is a need for higher education institutions increasing drops in enrollment numbers (see previous blog: The Shrinking of Higher Ed In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.) 

Clearly, higher education is different from K-12 public education such that we can all surmise what's going on here. I have looked at high-stakes testing over the years and land on the view this agenda is not about truly providing our children and youth with opportunity, but about profits for the test companies, while disempowering our youth who test poorly so that they don't grow up to be critical and threaten the incumbencies of those in power. Tests are also about reproducing white privilege in society and serving the neoliberal ends of privatizing, marketizing, and corporatizing public schools. 

If you know anything about how the Houston Independent School District (HISD) got taken over by Mike Miles' charter management organization, test scores are key. Accordingly, read this piece in Texas Monthly titled, "Welcome to Houston’s No-Longer-Independent School District." 

What about "test-optional?" It actually sounds patronizing to me. How about grasping the bigger story here on how these tests are anti-democratic. To be clear, I totally believe in assessment, just not these offensive mind-numbing, disempowering, reductive, and objectifying tools we have to hurt some kids, while providing others with a false sense of superiority. 

Eyes wide open. It all connects.

-Angela Valenzuela

Test-Optional Policies Now Dominate Higher Ed

By  Jacquelyn Elias

NOVEMBER 16, 2022

Admissions policies that give applicants the option of whether to submit their standardized test scores have been growing steadily over the years, sparked by long-running concerns about how the tests can contribute to racial and socioeconomic inequality and more-immediate pandemic-driven logistical challenges.

Lately, a sea change has overtaken higher education: Over 800 institutions shifted to test-optional policies between the fall 2019 and fall 2021 admissions cycles, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Education. Only about 160 institutions still classify themselves as requiring test scores.

The change has become sufficiently widespread that the Education Department will incorporate choices for test-optional, test-blind, and test-required in its data collection, the first update to this part of its admissions table since it was created seven years ago.

Which institutions have made this change, and what effects has it had? See below.

What happened to test scores at test-optional institutions?

To see how submission rates and test scores changed from 2019 to 2021 at institutions that went test-optional, search below. (Go to link search 850 organizations).

Methodology

This analysis looks at over 1,400 institutions that reported their admissions data to the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Ipeds) for the fall 2021 admissions year. The data set does not include institutions with an open-admissions policy. Only Title IV, degree-granting, four-year institutions that admitted more than 50 students in the fall of 2021 were included. For-profit institutions were excluded.

Ipeds presents four categories for universities to choose from when reporting their admissions considerations: “required,” “recommended,” “considered but not required,” or “neither required nor recommended.” Test-optional is defined as any institution that did not report that test scores were “required.” This includes all institutions that listed test scores as “recommended,” “considered but not required,” and “neither required nor recommended.”

A version of this article appeared in the December 9, 2022, issue.

Now Let's Make College Free by Dr. Denisa Gándara, Newsweek #CollegeForAll

So happy to run into my colleague, UT Educational Leadership and Policy Asst. Professor Dr. Denisa Gándara, with whom I had the chance to discuss yesterday's blog post, The Shrinking of Higher Ed, that signals a major crisis in college enrollment that I encourage all to read. She shared with me her just-published, Newsweek article on how we can, as a country, make college free. 

Why not? K-12 is free. College could also be free for all the important reasons that Dr. Gándara lists—not the least of which is saving higher education itself.

In terms of how to fund College for All, here is a proposal: 

H.R.2861 — 117th Congress (2021-2022)

Congrats, Dr. Gándara on getting published in Newsweek, too!

-Angela Valenzuela

#CollegeForAll

Now Let's Make College Free | Opinion 

by DENISA GÁNDARA , ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

ON 9/8/22 AT 8:00 AM EDT

After much anticipation, the Biden-Harris administration recently announced that college-student borrowers will have up to $20,000 of their student debt forgiven. Student-debt forgiveness is an important first step in addressing societal inequities caused in part by structural barriers to wealth-accumulation, labor-market discrimination, and the predatory practices of many private, for-profit colleges. Now, we have to make sure no one is crushed by student debt in the first place.

We must reinvest in public higher education.

The benefits of higher education are well documented. Higher levels of education lead to better jobs, healthier lives, a stronger economy, and a more civically-engaged society. But we are poised to miss out on many of these benefits, both individually and collectively. In the last few years, we have seen precipitous drops in college enrollment. These declines are especially pronounced at community colleges, which mostly serve low-income students. This is a warning sign that inequities in educational opportunity could grow. Even worse, higher education is about to get more costly, which could further restrict access for students with the greatest financial need. Fitch, a credit ratings agency, projects that tuition is set to increase as inflation strains college budgets. This means even more students will have to choose between skipping out on college or taking on burdensome debt.

In addition to making community college free, we need to increase public support for these institutions. Community colleges have significantly fewer resources than their four-year counterparts. Four-year universities spend considerably more per student than two-year colleges, even when you ignore expenditures related to research and other activities that are less central to the community college mission. This is partly because community colleges have less access to other sources of cash than many four-year universities. Community colleges earn less revenue on average from residence halls, dining halls, bookstores, and other so-called "auxiliaries." Moreover, because community colleges usually have open-access missions, they charge lower tuition and fees, which means they also generate less income from these sources.

These funding inequities across higher education institutions are compounded by the fact that community colleges serve the students with the greatest needs (those who come from lower income and wealth backgrounds and who may not have had access to rigorous K-12 curricula).

We have it exactly backwards.

If we are to fulfill the promises of higher education, we must invest in community colleges. Greater investment in community colleges will enable them to offer student supports that will improve student outcomes, including transportation, access to books, personalized advisement, and emergency financial aid. By making community college free and investing in these institutions, students will have greater access to—and be better served by—them.

Student-debt forgiveness is just the start of the structural changes needed to realize the promise of higher education, including social mobility and enrichment for individuals and economic and civic prosperity for society. We must now tackle the barriers that lie ahead. We are in a critical moment that can define the future of higher education and its ability to fulfill its promises. Powerful forces like pandemic-induced struggles, inflation and rising tuition prices, and growing distrust of higher education, stand to rob opportunities from the students who could benefit the most from higher education, those who are least likely to go to college in the first place. If we fail to act, existing inequities will continue to deepen. Now is the time to reinvest in public higher education.

It is time to make college free. Research shows that free-college programs increase college enrollment, especially among students who have been historically underserved in higher education. To be sure, financial aid that is targeted to those who need it the most seems more economically efficient than making college free for all. But free-college programs have much larger effects on college enrollment than other forms of financial aid or reductions in college tuition alone. This is partly because the simple and straightforward "free college" message is a strong motivator to attend college, especially for those who don't otherwise think they can afford it.

People walk on a university campus.JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Because of its effectiveness, making college free is a public investment that would pay for itself.

We can start by making community college free, which is less costly than including four-year universities. Free community college would also channel public dollars to institutions that serve all students, regardless of their backgrounds. While there is some concern that free community college could steer students away from four-year colleges, which have better outcomes on average, we have evidence that making community college free can increase not just associate's degree completion but also transfer to a four-year university and bachelor's degree attainment. What's more, increases in these outcomes appear larger for Hispanic and Native American students. This can happen when two-year colleges and four-year universities work together to improve transfer pathways for students who wish to continue their education.

Denisa Gándara is an OpEd Project Fellow at UT Austin. She is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and policy at The University of Texas at Austin.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

The Shrinking of Higher Ed In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.

Higher education is in crisis. This is not hyperbole. This is real.

"In many ways, the pandemic’s effects on enrollment have been specific and unique. Higher education is typically countercyclical; that is, people enroll in college when the economy goes south, to get skills or because they can’t find a job. Despite a small recession in 2020, enrollment has fallen throughout the pandemic, bucking that tendency."

Demography, combined with increasing costs, appears to hold college's destinies. Another way to think about this that is obliquely referenced herein is that this is an after effect of our country's historic and ongoing lack of underinvestment in educating people of color, particularly Latinos, its largest demographic (Contreras, 2019).

We were reminded of this in my Foundations in Education Policy class yesterday evening with the viewing of Stolen Education that I highly recommend viewing. It documents a horrible, decades-old practice in Texas of retaining children in first grade for up to three years in school as a unique feature of segregation in Texas schools that you can also learn about in this story, "Oct. 30, 1956: Texas School District Found Guilty of Discriminating Against Mexican-American Students." 

The community successfully challenged this discriminatory practice in Hernandez v. Driscoll CISD. It represents the first case where the Brown v. Board of Education decision was applied to Mexican American students. Not unlike segregation and educational malpractice for the Black community, this was a horrendous practice that oppressed our community for decades too numerous to bear. Hence, both the short and long arms of discrimination haunt the viability and future of higher education today.

As thorough as this piece is, it still needs to look more deeply into our history's discriminatory past and present. Reviving Affirmative Action and Free college for all (Kelderman, 2021) strike me as ways to stimulate college-going for the masses, especially considering the clear, consistent positive economic returns to education to individuals that represent a key, consistent finding in the research literature. After all, we won't stop needing the skills that the economy and a rapidly-changing world need.

This is a long, but very worthwhile read.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Contreras, F. (2019). Becoming “Latinx Responsive”: Raising institutional and systemic consciousness in California’s HSIs. Publication of the American Council on Education and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, 1-9. Retrieved: http://www.equityinhighered.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Conteras-Essay_FINAL.pdf

Kelderman, E. (2021, November 3). Free College Is Dead in Congress, but It’s Alive and Well in the States, Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved: https://www.chronicle.com/article/free-college-is-dead-in-congress-but-its-alive-and-well-in-the-states

The Shrinking of Higher Ed In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.

• 
  Twitter
• 
  

by Karin Fisher | AUGUST 12, 2022 | Chronicle of higher education

Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising alarms that the enrollment emergency projected to arrive a few years from now is already here.

High-school seniors uninterested in studying online chose to defer. Working parents strained by the demands of full-time pandemic child care put their studies on hold. International students couldn’t get visas. Those in majors with hands-on practicums or lab work found they couldn’t register for courses required for their degrees.

Enrollment numbers continue to look bleak as the pandemic drags on, even though in-person classes have become the norm and consulates have reopened. College attendance among undergraduates has fallen almost 10 percent since Covid emerged in early 2020; this spring, enrollment dropped 4.7 percent from the year before, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a deeper-than-expected decline.

The persistence of the enrollment contraction has sparked fears that many students are not simply missing but gone for good. Research shows that if students stop out, or take a leave of absence, they may not continue with their studies, and that’s particularly true for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We have to act now,” said Courtney Brown, vice president for impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. “This is a crisis moment.”

The pandemic enrollment slide has heightened worries at colleges about finances, especially among those dependent on tuition revenue to meet their bottom lines. Even before the Covid outbreak, the financial resiliency of a third of American colleges was poor, according to a new report from Bain & Company.