FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Actions to Promote Educational Opportunity and Diversity in Colleges and Universities

It's a really good thing that President Biden didn't hesitate to chide the Supreme Court for their recent, anti-affirmative action decision. Here is a related piece titled, "Biden says Supreme Court ruling should not deter colleges from efforts to diversify their campuses" where he states the following:

"While colleges can no longer explicitly consider a student’s race as part of a holistic admissions review, the court’s opinion does allow colleges to look at how race affected a student’s life, so long as it’s tied to a unique skill or character they’d bring to the school. Discussions like that typically come up in an applicant’s personal essay."

In other words, a student can bring this up in their personal essay or statement of purpose so as to inform the admissions evaluator of their race and how it connects to a personal strength, skill or attribute they'll bring to the university if admitted. While this is a good thing, much more must be done. Do read through President Biden's fact sheet below as it outlines an array of responses by his administration that should prove helpful. It's curious that there's no mention of percent plans like we have in Texas.

-Angela Valenzuela

FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Actions to Promote Educational Opportunity and Diversity in Colleges and Universities

HOME
BRIEFING ROOM
STATEMENTS AND RELEASES


Today, the Supreme Court upended decades of precedent that enabled America’s colleges and universities to build vibrant diverse environments where students are prepared to lead and learn from one another. Although the Court’s decision threatens to move the country backwards, the Biden-Harris Administration will fight to preserve the hard-earned progress we have made to advance racial equity and civil rights and expand educational opportunity for all Americans.

As our nation’s colleges and universities consider their admissions processes in the wake of the Court’s decision, President Biden is calling on them to seize the opportunity to expand access to educational opportunity for all. Our nation is stronger when our colleges and universities reflect the vast and rich diversity of our people. But while talent, creativity, and hard work are everywhere across this country, equal opportunity is not.

Specifically, the President is calling on colleges and universities, when selecting among qualified applicants, to give serious consideration to the adversities students have overcome, including:the financial means of a student or their family; where a student grew up and went to high school; and personal experiences of hardship or discrimination, including racial discrimination, that a student may have faced.

In doing so, colleges and universities can fully value aspiring students who demonstrate resilience and determination in the face of deep challenges.

The Biden-Harris Administration is taking swift action to support our Nation’s colleges and universities so they can continue building pathways to upward mobility and success for all students to thrive in the American workforce and our Nation’s military. Specifically, the Biden-Harris Administration is:Providing colleges and universities with clarity on what admissions practices and additional programs to support students remain lawful. The Department of Education and Department of Justice will provide resources to colleges and universities addressing lawful admissions practices within the next 45 days, as colleges prepare for the next application cycle. The Department of Education will also provide assistance to colleges and universities in administering programs to support students from underserved communities.

Convening a National Summit on Educational Opportunity. The Department of Education will host a national summit on equal opportunity in postsecondary education next month with advocates, student leaders, college and university administrators, researchers, and state, local, territorial and Tribal leaders to share lessons learned and innovative strategies, and develop additional resources for colleges and students to expand access to educational opportunity.

Releasing a report on strategies for increasing diversity and educational opportunity, including meaningful consideration of adversity. Following the Summit, the Department of Education will produce a report by this September, elevating promising admissions practices to build inclusive, diverse student bodies, including by using measures of adversity. The report will address topics including the impact of current admissions practices that may negatively affect the admissions chances of students from underserved communities; strategies to integrate measures of adversity in admissions; outreach and recruitment programs to create diverse applicant pools; strategies for retention and degree completion; and financial and other support programs to make college attainable.

Increasing transparency in college admissions and enrollment practices. The Administration is committed to providing transparent data with respect to admissions and enrollment. The Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics will consider ways to collect and publish more information related to college application and enrollment trends. This includes ways that information might be validly disaggregated by race and ethnicity, first-generation status, legacy status, and other measures. Information in these areas could help higher education leaders, academics and the general public address potential barriers to college recruitment, admissions, and enrollment.

Supporting states in analyzing data to increase access to educational opportunity for underserved communities. The Department of Education will assist states, territories and Tribal nations in marshaling their data to improve college recruitment, admissions, and financial aid practices and devise strategies for increasing access to educational opportunity, such as partnerships to appropriately share and use education data, and direct admissions programs that proactively admit students based on factors such as academic performance and students’ geographic location – without requiring them to apply or pay an application fee.

This work builds upon the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic efforts to ensure all students have the opportunity to access higher education by:Securing a historic increase in the Pell Grants: The President championed the largest increase to Pell Grants in the last decade – a combined increase of $900 to the maximum award over the past two years to benefit low – and middle-income students.

Prioritizing college completion: The Biden-Harris Administration has championed efforts to improve postsecondary outcomes, particularly for students who face the greatest barriers to accessing and completing college. In response to the President’s budget, Congress established a new Postsecondary Student Success Grant program to provide direct support to institutions to engage in evidence-based activities that support college re-enrollment, retention, and completion among individuals who are close to graduation.

Supporting America’s Minority-Serving Institutions: President Biden has secured historic investments in institutions that enroll and graduate disproportionate shares of low-income students and students of color, including tens of billions of dollars in funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions and Minority Serving Institutions, including Hispanic Serving Institutions through the Department of Education.

Fixing the broken student loan system: The Biden-Harris Administration has taken action to make the student loan system more manageable for current and future borrowers and reduce the burden of student debt, including by:Cutting monthly payments in half for undergraduate loans. The Department of Education is proposing an income-driven repayment plan that protects more low-income borrowers from making any payments and caps monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income – half of the rate that borrowers must pay now under existing plans. The average annual student loan payment will be lowered by more than $1,000 for both current and future student borrowers who owe payments.

Fixing the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program by ensuring that borrowers who have worked at a qualifying nonprofit organization, in the military, or in federal, state, territorial, Tribal, or local government, receive appropriate credit towards loan forgiveness. These regulatory changes build on temporary changes the Department of Education made to PSLF, under which roughly 616,000 public servants received more than $42 billion in loan forgiveness.

Ensuring targeted student loan forgiveness programs work. Including its reforms to PSLF, the Department of Education has approved a total of more than $66 billion in relief to over 2.2 million student loan borrowers, including many who were defrauded by their college, enrolled in a college that abruptly closed, or are permanently disabled and unable to work.

Testimony for the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan & Against SB 1091 by Dr. Altheria Caldera & Luis Figueroa

Listen to these gems of testimonies delivered before the Texas Senate Higher Education Committee on April 28, 202 this past legislative session. The session is always such a rush that I'm finally posting this.

These are two public testimonies against Senate Bill 1091 that sought to drastically limit the Top Ten Percent Admissions of graduating high school students into our state's higher education system, a policy that in its present form, is critical to rural students, as well as students of color to gain college access. 

In the first video, you can listen to a passionate and resolute Dr. Altheria Caldera, a Policy Fellow at the Intercultural Development Institute (IDRA) and mentee of mine who provides clear reasons and data that point to a need to maintain Texas' Top Ten Percent Plan in higher education admission.  Next, treat yourself to historically accurate and incisive testimony by Luis Figueroa, J.D., Legislative and Policy Director at Every Texan. These were among the more powerful testimonies that contributed to the bill's demise. 

Hats off to Dr. Caldera, as well, for recently securing a tenure-track position at Howard University in Washington, D.C. We'll miss you here in Texas, but know that there's good and important work to get done there, as well. 

I post this as it's important for us to maintain this historical memory on the ongoing struggle over higher education admissions in the state of Texas. I myself and many others were involved in this at an earlier time. It's cool to see how the baton gets passed from one generation to the next over time.

Altheria and Luis, thanks for advancing the cause for equity in college admission in the state of Texas.

 

Y'all make us proud! 

-Angela Valenzuela

UT faces new lawsuit over role of race in admissions policy

Here we go again.  The Asian-American gentleman notwithstanding, they fail to see or admit that so-called "color-blindness" primarily sees in white.

-Angela

 UT faces new lawsuit over role of race in admissions policy

state-government

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz - American-Statesman Staff

 

Updated: 3:35 p.m. Tuesday, June 27, 2017 |  Posted: 11:32 a.m. Tuesday, June 27, 2017

---

Highlights

UT won an earlier challenge to affirmative action at the U.S. Supreme Court, but this one is in a state court.

Once again, UT alumnus Edward Blum has organized a case against his alma mater.

The use of racial and ethnic preferences in admissions at the University of Texas violates state law and the Texas Constitution, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a group whose leader who took a similar case to the U.S. Supreme Court twice and lost.
This time, Edward Blum has set his sights on the state courts of Texas rather than making another run at the federal courts. The Supreme Court upheld UT’s use of affirmative action by a 4-3 vote in June 2016.
Blum’s nonprofit, Students for Fair Admissions, which says it has more than 20,000 students, parents and other members in Texas and elsewhere around the nation, contends that UT grants preferences to African-American and Hispanic applicants at the expense of white and Asian applicants. The suit, filed in state District Court in Travis County, seeks a permanent injunction barring UT from using racial factors in admissions decisions.
“It is our belief that the Texas Constitution unequivocally forbids UT-Austin from treating applicants differently because of their race and ethnicity,” said Blum, the group’s president.
Maurie McInnis, UT’s executive vice president and provost, said in a statement that “diversity is central to our pursuit of excellence” and that all students and other members of the campus community reap its benefits.
“The policy is narrowly tailored,” McInnis said. “It complies with state and federal law and the Texas and U.S. Constitutions and has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
UT considers such factors for a relatively small fraction of its entering class. Under state law, UT reserves 90 percent of its freshman slots for state residents, with the remainder for out-of-state and international students. And at least three-fourths of its freshmen from Texas get in under a state law that grants automatic admission based on their high school class rank.
Only the remaining applicants, including those from other states and abroad, are considered under a so-called holistic review that takes race and ethnicity into account along with grades, essays, leadership qualities and other matters. In last year’s Supreme Court majority opinion in Fisher v. UT-Austin, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “that race consciousness played a role in only a small portion of admissions decisions,” asserting that this was “a hallmark of narrow tailoring, not evidence of unconstitutionality.”
But Students for Fair Admissions contends that the Supreme Court’s ruling has no bearing on its lawsuit, which relies on two passages in the Texas Constitution’s Bill of Rights and one provision of state law.
Section 3a of the state’s Bill of Rights, approved by voters in 1972, says: “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin.” This amendment provides “more expansive protection against discrimination” than the U.S. Constitution, rendering UT’s use of racial preferences “patently unconstitutional under the Texas Constitution,” the lawsuit claims.
Blum’s group says its case is also bolstered by Section 3, which says in part: “All free men … have equal rights, and no man, or set of men, is entitled to exclusive separate public emoluments, or privileges.”
The state law cited by the lawsuit is the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, which includes a provision declaring that an employee of the state “may not, because of a person’s race, religion, color, sex, or national origin … refuse to permit the person to participate in a program owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of the state.” The lawsuit claims that this creates “a broad statutory right to be free of official discrimination.”
Steven Schwinn, a professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who teaches and writes about constitutional law, said he was “a little puzzled” that the suit wasn’t filed sooner.
“I understand why they challenged the program under the federal Constitution — I’m sure they thought the time was right for bringing the federal challenge,” Schwinn said. “It just smacks of politics to me, but maybe the Texas Constitution and statute give them a little bit more traction than what they got under the federal equal protection clause.”
Mishell Kneeland, a lawyer in Austin with the Culhane Meadows law firm who worked on the Fisher case as an assistant attorney general in Texas, said the new case appears to be designed to wind up at the state Supreme Court. She doubts that the plaintiff will succeed, in part because the state’s constitutional standards are “relatively similar” to the federal version. “The University of Texas’ admissions process is very thoughtfully crafted,” she added.
Blum, a former stockbroker and onetime candidate for Congress who majored in English and government at UT, isn’t a lawyer, but he has made something of a cottage industry out of lining up lawyers, funding and plaintiffs in a 20-year quest to end the use of racial and ethnic considerations in college admissions, voting rights and other aspects of public policy. He has ushered cases into the marble-and-mahogany chamber of the nation’s highest court six times.
His Project on Fair Representation, another nonprofit group, underwrote the lawsuit by Abigail Fisher, a white woman denied admission to UT. In its first opinion in that case, a 7-1 decision written by Kennedy in 2013, the Supreme Court set aside a lower court’s approval of UT’s use of affirmative action and told that court to conduct a “searching examination” of whether such considerations are really necessary to obtain the educational benefits of diversity. The lower court concluded once again that UT’s program was legal, after which the high court took the case a second time.
Blum has also organized lawsuits in which Students for Fair Admissions is the plaintiff against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Those cases, filed in federal courts in 2014, contend that well-qualified Asian-Americans are routinely denied admission solely on the basis of race.
No other state has admissions laws precisely like those governing UT.
A 1997 state law offered automatic admission to UT and other public colleges and universities to students ranking in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school class. In 2009, the law was modified for UT, allowing it to cap automatically admitted students at three-fourths of its freshmen from Texas.
Each fall, the university notifies Texas school officials of the class rank that current high school juniors need to attain by the end of their junior year to be automatically admitted; the cutoff is 7 percent for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years.
Blum’s latest lawsuit against UT doesn’t come as a surprise. In March, he began inviting students who were rejected by UT to provide grades, test scores and a list of outside activities to help build the new case.