“Redesigning Admissions … Through A Racial Equity Lens” – College Admission Counseling Group Rolls Out Agenda
“to develop specific proposals for reimagining financial aid and college admission systems and ultimately eliminating racial inequity in postsecondary educational access”
College and university admissions have always been based on merit. Even after the introduction of Affirmative Action, all prospective students were still expected to submit transcripts, test scores, essays, and recommendation letters.
Now that the entire left is running headlong towards Critical Race Theory, that may be about to change.
This story is from a few weeks ago, but somehow it escaped our attention. The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) is now “reimagining” the college admissions process.
NACAC released this announcement on March 3rd:
NACAC Announces Commission on Redesigning College Admission and Financial Aid Through a Racial Equity Lens
Inequality, access, and affordability are among the most pressing issues in higher education, limiting opportunity across American society. The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) today announced a national panel of leaders and researchers from across higher education, policy, and civil rights to develop specific proposals for reimagining financial aid and college admission systems and ultimately eliminating racial inequity in postsecondary educational access.
The panel is the product of NACAC’s partnership with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) and is made possible through funding from Lumina Foundation.
Priority areas the panel will examine include:
– The college-entrance pipeline, from student recruitment and college advising through the application process and admission criteria.
– Postsecondary financial aid requirements.
– The role of racial equity in postsecondary enrollment.“Our ultimate aim,” said NACAC Chief Education and Policy Officer David Hawkins, “is to go beyond theories of equity for postsecondary opportunity and make specific, actionable recommendations for policymakers that can produce changes at the institutional, state, and federal levels.”
The panel aims to complete its analyses and release three sets of recommendations this summer: a guide for colleges centered around racial/ethnic inclusion, a related guide for postsecondary institutional leaders, and recommendations for federal and state policymakers for an equity-based college transition.
A writer named Dan Freeborn of the Freedom and Liberty blog claims to work in higher education admissions and saw this coming:
Ntl. Orgs. Commission to Reimagine College Admissions and Financial Aid Through Racial Equity Lens
I’ve been working in higher ed admissions and enrollment for eight years now and have been deeply invested in helping students navigate the application and enrollment processes to realize their educational goals. While I’m confident I hit my #wokebreakingpoint a couple of years ago, it’s becoming much harder to watch institutions being drug down into the chaos of the radical progressive agenda. The adoption of this ideology is changing the very core purpose of higher education and transforming campuses into centers of activism. They’re becoming less inclusive, encouraging self-censorship, and are establishing communities that threaten to exclude those that do not conform.
There’s something deeply concerning going on in the college admissions world right now and no, I’m not talking about the prospect that Harvard is discriminating against Asians in the admission process. However, I’ll add that if that is happening, it’s disgraceful…
A reminder that ‘equity’ is not ‘equality’. In the context of the current social justice movement and the meaning championed by the Biden administration, ‘equity’ becomes redistribution of social and economic goods aligning with the subjective characterization of demographics (not individuals). Achieving racial equity hinges on centering around the ideas of structural racism, intersectionality, racial identity development, and anti-racism and how white privilege is embedded in our systems. This is where the issue lies. This change is unequivocally steeped in the radical agenda that is hell-bent on dismantling American systems through the divisive narrative of the Critical Social Justice movement.
Interestingly, some proponents are taking a cue from Democrats and citing COVID to justify these changes.
Scott Jaschik writes at Inside Higher Ed:
Claudia Marroquin, director of admissions at Bowdoin College (who will become senior vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid on July 1), was a first-generation student when she attended the college.
She cited student aid verification as an important issue. “Among the biggest areas of reform necessary is related to federal student aid verification,” Marroquin said via email. “The financial aid process is complicated enough and the verification process places low-income students in a position of having to prove their poverty unnecessarily to the federal government.”
She also cited letters of recommendation as an area in need of reform. “On the application front, enrollment leaders need to continue to work to understand the student’s achievements within context while recognizing the biases and systemic structures that make the components of the application a hurdle,” she said. “While the pandemic has brought about changes to testing requirements, we should also be thinking about the items like letters of recommendation…
Roger Ramsammy, president of Hudson Valley Community College, said policy makers in admissions need to remember the trends by race and ethnicity and gender. “Many studies suggest that COVID-19 has taken a greater toll on people of color, women and other minority groups,” he said. “We are now seeing even greater numbers of students who are underprepared for college as well as a rise in students who dropped out last fall. At the same time, there is a strong need for retraining and upskilling those who are now unemployed, a job that rest solely in the hands of community colleges.
So much of this is said to be based on access to financial aid. One simple solution would be for colleges and universities to lower their ever-rising prices, but of course, that’s not even a consideration.
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And some have called me crazy for years when I said I was not preparing my (homeschool) children for a high-school-to-college pipeline. I was called crazy and uninformed.
Once again, I was ahead of the curve.
Non-merit admissions guarantees that blacks spend all their in college surrounded by whites who are smarter than they are.
They’ll segregate themselves; require useless courses that nobody is better than anybody else at; and develop theories of systemic racism to account for their situation.
Where the problem is that they’re admitted with lower qualifications than the whites at the same school, not that they can’t do well against whites with the same qualifications.
Every leftist program has perverse side effects, because all the problems that respond well to direct action have already been solved. What’s left are the problems we have, that respond to direct action perversely.
To ensure equity, Democrats are pursing a policy of Every Child Left Behind. That said, diversity dogma (e.g. racism) breeds adversity.
The sad, infuriating part is, the white kids are probably not smarter than the black ones, but they definitely will have better educational backgrounds, and will generally look better than the blacks in the same class.
I was a National Merit semi-finalist, and I went to school on a full academic scholarship. I now have a lifetime’s worth of proof that I have outstanding academic ability.
But my high school had limited access to advanced courses: for example, I could not take calculus in high school.
In my freshman year, the people who had already had calculus took all the top scores in my chemistry class, and they also had different math and physical classes. It took me nearly two years to recover from the deficit of a my allegedly “very good” high school education.
“the white kids are probably not smarter than the black ones,”
If that was the case, Affirmative Action would have worked without dumbing down classes or creating new majors designed to allow more blacks to get degrees which are useless, except in schools.
Also, when black and white Bell Curves are plotted side by side, black is shifted to the left , with most of the overlap being comparatively dull whites and marginally smarter, compared to the black average of 85.
I wish this was not the case, things would be some much better for every if a higher percentage of blacks had higher IQ.
I think it is important to note that dull-witted whites have no choice that to accept their fate. No one advocates that they be elevated beyond their innate capabilities.
They would segregate themselves no matter what.
Today, they demand segregation in the form of safe spaces. All integration has accomplished is massive destruction of real estate wealth by devaluing it.
The entire system is perverted to reward those who claim they are being denied something due to some “-ism” they suffer from, or what some “-ist” did to them. If you aren’t smart enough to pass a damn test, you don’t deserve to get into college. It is as simple as that. With the ever-pervasive internet available to anyone, there is no longer am excuse for blacks to claim they can’t succeed due to some made up bias in the testing process. The “cultural diversity” of a college doesn’t do a thing to better prepare a person to find employment. This entire CRT scam is designed to fill the school-to-government-assistance pipeline with people who have gender and women’s studies or African American studies majors once they find there is no demand for that BS in the real world. The position of “cultural diversity officer” at any institution of higher learning should be replaced with a Dept. Of Firing Fake Professors. They could ax professors such as Henry Louis Gates, Angela Davis, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, et al, who should be in prison instead of on campus creating the NEXT generation of Communist wannabes. At one time being on the FBI 10 Most Wanted list meant a person lived in hiding. Now it is a badge of honor amongst the Alinsky-ites of the modern left. The cries of the antifa and BLM crowd about how horrible America is are belied by the 174% increase in illegals entering the nation since Biden stole office. There is never a line to leave, I notice.
Well, this will torque off the rich white suburban Karens who opposed Trump because he had “mean” Tweets! Looks like their privately educated kids Buffy and Kingsley will lose their chance at Haaaaavad because of their skin color.
Of course, the Karens will soon have much more to worry about, such as their husbands losing their jobs because of the coming depression, or their lavish retirement funds getting cleaned out to fund “reparations”. Virtue signaling can be both painful AND expensive!
Unfortunately, these new woke admission rules will not affect the rich., there will always be a way to pay to play. Once again it will be the middle and struggling working classes who will be screwed
Yes, just as “equity” is the code word for communism, “access” is the code word for massive wealth redistribution by the financial aid office based on whatever they feel like.
I guess that the outcome of this study by NACAC will be focused on financial aid. No financial aid for whites. Like the Oakland basic income giveaway limited to BIPOC, whites excluded. No race-blind merit scholarships. I can figure it out in 5 minutes, but they’ll pay a bunch of people and give the appearance of serious analysis to come to the same conclusion, because it’s the only one possible.
I had hoped we had reached peak absurdity in financial aid and the colleges would step back from their role in wealth redistribution. Now there will be a push (I almost mistyped putsch) to “build back better” by doubling down on this trend.
Affirmative Action in financial aid to go with affirmative action in admissions. Why should anyone be surprised. That logically would be followed by income-based forgiveness of student loan debt.
Colleges aren’t redistributing wealth to non-whites, they’re redistributing wealth to themselves. All subsidies are for the benefit of the producer, not the consumer.
Eliminate the middle class and expand the dependent serf class is the Marxist plan. They have a plan. Will it end with Utopia for the ruling class? We will see.
The Democrats continue on their plan to bring back slavery. The only difference between living on a Plantation and living in Utopia is the spelling.
I think the main reason the Dems were so eager to get rid of Trump was that he delivered for minorities something that mattered – record low unemployment. Had that continued long enough, their voting blocs would have evaporated. Poor inner city schools have long facilitated the modern Plantation that minorities could not escape from – why charter schools are so vehemently opposed.
Obligatory observation that the voting blocs did erode a lot already and had to be topped up by vote transfers, dead people, etc.
I wonder if all these illegals will have the desired effect on Hispanic voting for the Dems – given the crime and disease they will bring, low wage competition for jobs and effect on schools in Hispanic communities? In my area, everything to do with home construction is now done with Hispanic labor which gets paid decent wages.
Nowhere near the wages that would be paid if they weren’t here at all, which by rights most of them shouldn’t.
What they are saying is that they will go full speed to promote black racists.
That they will do the same thing to colleges that block breakers did to cities, were one black family moves in and then their kids run wild to all hours, theft and vandalism becomes common, and then violent crimes greatly increases.
The same will happen in colleges. When it comes to our children, we packed up and left cities, when it comes to colleges and our children, we will shun any college promoting black shit.
Now, which colleges are going to pledge to not infuse black racism and racists into the college, and to judge students solely on merit and accomplishments?
This is just more proof of my belief that one of the biggest reasons the whole ‘racial equity’ business continues to grow is that there’s huge money in it. Look at the people who are paid big bucks to peddle BS like “Inequality, access, and affordability are among the most pressing issues in higher education, limiting opportunity across American society. ”
I have an entirely different opinion about what’s important in higher education but no one is going to pay me a dime for THAT opinion.
I’m guessing they will aim for the 13% that blacks make up in the US the population to be given 93% of admission spots and the finanacial aid pot…based on what on what I’m seeing in advertising….cause THAT is what they mean by equity.
I know a major university admission officer who privately said that they were told to target 50% African American enrollment in their Doctoral program for Fall 2021 as this is the first post-Floyd admissions cycle. (This, despite questions about whether Floyd death was even racially motivated.) I’m sure that other top schools have similar goals. “Diversity” (Division) and “Equity” (Socialism) is the mantra and they rule the day – all else be damned. It’s like half the country has joined a brain-washing cult.
How long can this last before resentment and division tear this country apart?
All disciplines at the school? That’s impossible in STEM even if you admit every black applicant, and if you do that you’re unethically taking money from people you expect to flunk out. The only way you get 50% is if the total number is a lot lower.
Clarification = The Doctoral Program referred to was non-STEM.
That makes more sense, but even in non-STEM fields I don’t see how you get to 50% of enrolled doctoral students being black without a severe contraction in the size of the doctoral program. That assumes all black applicants are automatically accepted.
This program must not be Angry Studies, since I would expect that program to already have close to 100% black enrollment.
I suppose the Chinese will give the Uighurs fair and “equitable” school admissions and loans to level the playing field. Even insure safe places and shield them from hurtful thoughts and words.
Good luck USA!
Diversity [dogma], not limited to racism, denies individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value, and normalizes color blocs (e.g. people of color), color quotas, and affirmative discrimination. Lose your Pro-Choice religion.
All I know is, the system that graduates a person with a Masters in Chemistry who has no intuitive grasp that the same number can be expressed in both base 2 and base 10, is useless.
I learned how to convert bast 10 to base 2 this no later than 5th or 6th grade.
Using racist racist social promotions in a disingenuous effort to compensate for a poor-quality educational foundation is counterproductive.
“but they definitely will have better educational backgrounds,…”
Are you sure you didn’t mean to say “parental backgrounds”? Schools are only as effect as a student’s family.
Baring a birth defect, if you see a kid acting like an animal, you can tell more than you need to know about that kid’s parent(s).
JUST posted about this. This has HUGE implications for entire institutions of higher ed. Please watch and share: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaRBDykHMTo&t=384s
The fact that NACAC and NASFAA intend to present proposals for change THIS SUMMER to institutional, state and federal agencies, is a big deal. This has to hit mainstream.