College counselors from 10 peer schools convened at Andover to discuss underrepresented students in the college application process, as part of the semiannual Eastern Independent Secondary School College Admission Professionals (EISSCAP) Conference.
The conference, which ran from Monday through Tuesday, featured keynote speaker Kate Lipper, a policy and legal advisor for EducationCounsel, an education law and advocacy organization. She spoke about Fisher v. University of Texas, the Supreme Court case challenging race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
A ruling against affirmative action could change the strategies of Andover’s College Counseling Office (CCO), according to Sean Logan, Director of the College Counseling. “[The ruling] could have a major impact at the college level, depending on what happens. For us, it’s more [about] how are colleges going to look at our students and how are they representing themselves,” said Logan.
In 2008, Abigail Fisher, a white student, brought the case against the University of Texas, alleging that she had been denied admission due to her race, according to Lipper. The Supreme Court will likely rule on the case later this month.
Lipper said that if the court rules against affirmative action, any educational institution that receives federal funding, including private colleges and universities, would be barred from considering race in admissions.
“Whatever ruling the court gives on Fisher v. Texas will be an across-the-board rule. If they were to go as far as to say you may not consider race in college admissions, that would be as true for the University of Texas as it would be for Harvard or Northwestern or [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology].”
The admission policies of Andover and its peer schools would not be affected by a ruling against affirmative action because the schools do not receive any federal money, according to Lipper.
Logan said, “If you take race and ethnicity completely off the table for colleges and universities and the schools that see diversity as educational value [and] see the educational benefits of having a diverse community… that can certainly affect students’ college admission opportunities at a place like Andover. [Racial diversity] is no longer one of the many factors that schools value. How schools will deal with it? How they will look at their pools differently?”
Logan said that students from diverse communities like Andover’s would still be more “culturally fluent” than students from more homogeneous communities.
“[For] most colleges that are trying to be diverse in a lot of different ways, their students are coming from homogeneous communities. They’re coming from all-Asian communities, all-white, all-black–not what we have here. So for kids [at Andover], you can walk from here to [Paresky] Commons and hear three different languages and not bat an eye,” said Logan. “Cultural fluency really translates well.”
The Supreme Court uses a process of “strict scrutiny” to evaluate race-conscious policies of public institutions, according to Lipper.
Under “strict scrutiny,” the court first determines whether racial diversity is relevant to an educational environment. In the 2003 Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan argued that having a racially diverse campus is beneficial because students are exposed to a variety of perspectives and viewpoints, according to Lipper.
The court then examines the practicality of the race-conscious admissions policy. The court must determine that affirmative action will significantly increase diversity at the school, achieving what Lipper called “critical mass.”
“Critical mass is actually a term from physics that was adapted for examining race in educational settings. It is the point when you have enough diversity in a classroom so that no student feels like a representative of their race, when learning explodes” said Lipper.
Lipper said that the controversy in Fisher v. University of Texas lies in the second portion of “strict scrutiny.”
Under the university’s current admission system, students from public high schools in Texas are guaranteed admission if they graduate in the top 10 percent of their class—a “race neutral” policy, according to Lipper. Approximately 90 percent of the university’s in-state seats go to these students.
Students who do not qualify for automatic admission, like Fisher, are evaluated in a “holistic” process that takes race into account, according to Lipper. Fisher claims that such a small fraction of students are admitted under the affirmative action policy that the policy has a negligible effect on the diversity of the student body.
Following the keynote speech, the counselors broke into smaller groups to discuss methods of helping underrepresented students in the college admissions process. Six “diversity deans” from different schools, including Linda Carter Griffith, Dean of Community and Multicultural Development (CAMD), also attended the conference to facilitate discussion and collaboration between each school’s college counseling office and its equivalent to Andover’s CAMD Office, according to Logan.
College counselors from Deerfield Academy, the Hill School, the Hotchkiss School, the Lawrenceville School, the Loomis Chaffee School, Milton Academy, Northfield Mount Hermon, Phillips Exeter Academy, St. Paul’s School, the Taft School and Andover attended the EISSCAP conference.
