Deciding what to disclose in a personal essay for college applications has plagued students since, perhaps, the essay first became required. How should they present themselves? What do they think colleges need to know about them? Should they try to fit their whole life story onto a page and a half? Should they focus on the worst thing that’s ever happened to them, or their greatest success? 

In the first year after the Supreme Court banned the consideration of race in college admissions, how students chose to present themselves in their essay became of even greater consequence. In years past, students could write about their racial or ethnic identity if they wanted to, but colleges would know it either way and could use it as a factor in admissions. Now, it’s entirely up to students to disclose their identity or not.

Data from the Common App shows that in this admissions cycle about 12 percent of students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups used at least one of 38 identity-related phrases in their essays, a decrease of roughly one percent from the previous year. About 20 percent of American Indian and Alaskan Native applicants used one of these phrases; 15 percent of Asian students; 14 percent of Black students; 11 percent of Latinx students and less than 3 percent of white students. 

To better understand how students were making this decision and introducing themselves to colleges, The Hechinger Report asked newly accepted students from across the country to share their college application essays with us. We read more than 50 essays and talked to many students about their writing process, who gave them advice, and how they think their choices ultimately influenced their admissions outcomes.

Here are thoughts from eight of those students, with excerpts from their essays and, if they permitted, a link to the full essay.

Jaleel Gomes Cardoso, Boston

A risky decision

As Jaleel Gomes Cardoso sat looking at the essay prompt for Yale University, he wasn’t sure how honest he should be.  “Reflect on your membership in a community to which you feel connected,” it read. “Why is this community meaningful to you?” He wanted to write about being part of the Black community – it was the obvious choice – but the Supreme Court’s decision to ban the consideration of a student’s race in admissions gave him pause.

“Ever since the decision about affirmative action, it kind of worried me about talking about race,” said Cardoso, who grew up in Boston. “That entire topic felt like a risky decision.” 

In the past, he had always felt that taking a risk produced some of his best writing, but he thought that an entire essay about being Black might be going too far.

“The risk was just so heavy on the topic of race when the Court’s decision was to not take race into account,” he said. “It was as if I was disregarding that decision. It felt very controversial, just to make it so out in the open.”

In the end, he did write an essay that put his racial identity front and center. He wasn’t accepted to Yale, but he has no regrets about his choice.

“If you’re not going to see what my race is in my application, then I’m definitely putting it in my writing,” said Cardoso, who graduated from Boston Collegiate Charter School and will attend Dartmouth College this fall, “because you have to know that this is the person who I am.”   

 – Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

I was thrust into a narrative of indifference and insignificance from the moment I entered this world. I was labeled as black, which placed me in the margins of society. It seemed that my destiny had been predetermined; to be part of a minority group constantly oppressed under the weight of a social construct called race. Blackness became my life, an identity I initially battled against. I knew others viewed it as a flaw that tainted their perception of me. As I matured, I realized that being different was not easy, but it was what I loved most about myself.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Klaryssa Cobian, Los Angeles 

A semi-nomadic mattress life

Klaryssa Cobian is Latina – a first-generation Mexican American – and so was nearly everyone else in the Southeast Los Angeles community where she grew up. Because that world was so homogenous, she really didn’t notice her race until she was a teenager.

Then she earned a scholarship to a prestigious private high school in Pasadena. For the first time, she was meaningfully interacting with people of other races and ethnicities, but she felt the greatest gulf between her and her peers came from her socioeconomic status, not the color of her skin. 

Although Cobian has generally tried to keep her home life private, she felt that colleges needed to understand the way her family’s severe economic disadvantages had affected her. She wrote about how she’d long been “desperate to feel at home.”

She was 16 years old before she had a mattress of her own. Her essay cataloged all the places she lay her head before that. She wrote about her first bed, a queen-sized mattress shared with her parents and younger sister. She wrote about sleeping in the backseat of her mother’s red Mustang, before they lost the car. She wrote about moving into her grandparents’ home and sharing a mattress on the floor with her sister, in the same room as two uncles. She wrote about the great independence she felt when she “moved out” into the living room and onto the couch. 

“Which mattress I sleep on has defined my life, my independence, my dependence,” Cobian wrote.

She’d initially considered writing about the ways she felt she’d had to sacrifice her Latino culture and identity to pursue her education, but said she hesitated after the Supreme Court ruled on the use of affirmative action in admissions. Ultimately, she decided that her experience of poverty was more pertinent. 

“If I’m in a room of people, it’s like, I can talk to other Latinos, and I can talk to other brown people, but that does not mean I’m going to connect with them. Because, I learned, brown people can be rich,” Cobian said.  She’s headed to the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

With the only income, my mom automatically assumed custody of me and my younger sister, Alyssa. With no mattress and no home, the backseat of my mom’s red mustang became my new mattress. Bob Marley blasted from her red convertible as we sang out “could you be loved” every day on our ride back from elementary school. Eventually, we lost the mustang too and would take the bus home from Downtown Los Angeles, still singing “could you be loved” to each other.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Oluwademilade Egunjobi, Providence, Rhode Island

The perfect introduction

Oluwademilade Egunjobi worked on her college essay from June until November. Not every single day, and not on only one version, but for five months she was writing and editing and asking anyone who would listen for advice.

She considered submitting essays about the value of sex education, or the philosophical theory of solipsism (in which the only thing that is guaranteed to exist is your own mind). 

But most of the advice she got was to write about her identity. So, to introduce herself to colleges, Oluwademilade Egunjobi wrote about her name.

Egunjobi is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who, she wrote, chose her first name because it means she’s been crowned by God. In naming her, she said, her parents prioritized pride in their heritage over ease of pronunciation for people outside their culture. 

And although Egunjobi loves that she will always be connected to her culture, this choice has put her in a lifelong loop of exasperating introductions and questions from non-Nigerians about her name. 

The loop often ends when the person asks if they can call her by her nickname, Demi. “I smile through my irritation and say I prefer it anyways, and then the situation repeats time and time again,” Egunjobi wrote. 

She was nervous when she learned about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, wondering what it might mean for where she would get into college. Her teachers and college advisors from a program called Matriculate told her she didn’t have to write a sob story, but that she should write about her identity, how it affects the way she moves through the world and the resilience it’s taught her. 

She heeded their advice, and it worked out. In the fall, she will enter the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy, politics and economics. 

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt:

I don’t think I’ve ever had to fight so hard to love something as hard as I’ve fought to love my name. I’m grateful for it because it’ll never allow me to reject my culture and my identity, but I get frustrated by this daily performance. I’ve learned that this performance is an inescapable fate, but the best way to deal with fate is to show up with joy. I am Nigerian, but specifically from the ethnic group, Yoruba. In Yoruba culture, most names are manifestations. Oluwademilade means God has crowned me, and my middle name is Favor, so my parents have manifested that I’ll be favored above others and have good success in life. No matter where I go, people familiar with the language will recognize my name and understand its meaning. I love that I’ll always carry a piece of my culture with me.

Francisco Garcia, Fort Worth, Texas 

Accepted to college and by his community

In the opening paragraph of his college application essay, Francisco Garcia quotes his mother, speaking to him in Spanish, expressing disappointment that her son was failing to live up to her Catholic ideals. It was her reaction to Garcia revealing his bisexuality. 

Garcia, 18, said those nine Spanish words were “the most intentional thing I did to share my background” with colleges. The rest of his essay delves into how his Catholic upbringing, at least for a time, squelched his ability to be honest with friends about his sexual identity, and how his relationship with the church changed. He said he had strived, however, to avoid coming across as pessimistic or sad, aiming instead to share “what I’ve been through [and] how I’ve become a better person because of it.” 

He worked on his essay throughout July, August and September, with guidance from college officials he met during campus visits and from an adviser he was paired with by Matriculate, which works with students who are high achievers from low-income families. Be very personal, they told Garcia, but within limits. 

“I am fortunate to have support from all my friends, who encourage me to explore complexities within myself,” he wrote. “My friends give me what my mother denied me: acceptance.”

He was accepted by Dartmouth, one of the eight schools to which he applied, after graduating from Saginaw High School near Fort Worth, Texas, this spring.

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt: 

By the time I got to high school, I had made new friends who I felt safe around. While I felt I was more authentic with them, I was still unsure whether they would judge me for who I liked. It became increasingly difficult for me to keep hiding this part of myself, so I vented to both my mom and my closest friend, Yoana … When I confessed that I was bisexual to Yoana, they were shocked, and I almost lost hope. However, after the initial shock, they texted back, “I’m really chill with this. Nothing has changed Francisco:)”. The smiley face, even if it took 2 characters, was enough to bring me to tears. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Hafsa Sheikh, Pearland, Texas 

Family focus above all 

Hafsa Sheikh felt her applications would be incomplete without the important context of her home life:  She became a primary financial contributor to her household when she was just 15, because her father, once the family’s sole breadwinner, could not work due to his major depressive disorder. Her work in a pizza parlor on the weekends and as a tutor after school helped pay the bills. 

She found it challenging to open up this way, but felt she needed to tell colleges that, although working two jobs throughout high school made her feel like crying from exhaustion every night, she would do anything for her family.

“It’s definitely not easy sharing some of the things that you’ve been through with, like really a stranger,” she said, “because you don’t know who’s reading it.”

And especially after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, Sheikh felt she needed to write about her cultural identity. It’s a core part of who she is, but it’s also a major part of why her father’s mental illness affected her life so profoundly. 

Sheikh, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, said her family became isolated because of the negative stigma surrounding mental health in their South Asian culture. She said they became the point of gossip in the community and even among extended family members, and they were excluded from many social gatherings. This was happening as she was watching the typical high school experiences pass her by, she wrote. Because of the long hours she had to work, she had to forgo the opportunity to try out for the girls’ basketball team and debate club, and often couldn’t justify cutting back her hours to spend time with her friends. 

She wrote that reflecting on one of her favorite passages in the Holy Quran gave her hope:

“One of my favorite ayahs, ‘verily, with every hardship comes ease,’ serves as a timeless reminder that adversity is not the end; rather, there is always light on the other side,” Sheikh wrote.

Her perseverance paid off, with admission to Princeton University.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

Besides the financial responsibility on my mother and I, we had to deal with the stigma surrounding mental health in South Asian culture and the importance of upholding traditional gender roles. My family became a point of great gossip within the local Pakistani community and even extended family.  Slowly, the invitations to social gatherings diminished, and I bailed on plans with friends because I couldn’t afford to miss even a single hour of earnings.

Manal Akil, Dundalk, Maryland

Life lessons from cooking

Manal Akil explores the world’s cultures without leaving her family’s kitchen in Dundalk, Maryland. 

“I believe the smartest people in all of history were those who invented dishes. The first person who decided to throw tomato and cheese on dough, the first person who decided to roll fish with rice in seaweed,” Akil wrote. “These people experimented with what they had and changed the world.” 

For Akil, cooking is about much more than preparing a meal. It’s about knowing when you have to meticulously follow directions and when you can be creative and experimental. It’s about realizing when you make a mistake, and being mentally flexible enough to salvage your ingredients with a positive attitude. And it’s about marveling at the similarities and differences of humanity across cultures. 

Akil’s parents are from Morocco, but she chose not to mention her cultural identity in her essay. Because she didn’t choose where she came from, she feels it doesn’t reveal much about who she is. In supplemental essays, Akil said she did write about her experience growing up with immigrant parents. In those essays, she wrote about how she understands her parents’ native language, but can’t speak it, and how she had to become independent as a young child. 

But the life lessons Akil has gained through cooking are so important to her that she chose to focus on them in her primary essay instead of sharing a personal narrative. When comparing essay ideas and drafts with her classmates, she realized that most of them were writing much more directly about their identities and experiences. 

She felt her nontraditional approach to personal essay writing was risky, but it worked. She was admitted to eight colleges, and in the fall she’ll enter Georgetown University. 

“​​I have never, nor will ever, regret any time spent making food; all my work in the kitchen has paid off,” Akil wrote. “I enter with ambition and leave with insight on myself and the world. Each plate served, each bite taken, and each ‘Mmmh’ has contributed to my growth.”

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

In the comfort of my own home, I have been to many countries from all around the world. Throughout this world travel, I have picked up on different quirks unique to each region, while simultaneously connecting the dots between the world. South Asia with its warm taste profile, East Asia with its wholesome flavors, and North Africa with its savory delights. Thousands of miles apart and all so distinct in regard to culture, yet sharing similar foods, just under different names: Paratha, Diao Lu Bing, and Msemen — all flaky pancakes. I love discovering such culinary parallels that make me say, “This reminds me of that!” or “That reminds me of this!” These nuances serve as a powerful reminder that regardless of our varied backgrounds, we as humans are one because at the end of the day, food is the heart of every civilization. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

David Arturo Munoz-Matta, McAllen, Texas

If I’m honest, will an elite college want me?

It was Nov. 30 and David Arturo Munoz-Matta had eight college essays due the next day. He had spent the prior weeks slammed with homework while also grieving the loss of his uncle who had just died. He knew the essays were going to require all the mental energy he could muster – not to mention whatever hours were left in the day. But he got home from school to discover he had no electricity. 

“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’” said Munoz-Matta, who graduated from Lamar Academy in McAllen, Texas. “I was panicking for a while, and my mom was like, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna drop you off at Starbucks and then just call me when you finish with all your essays.’ And so I was there at Starbucks from 4 until 12 in the morning.” 

The personal statement he agonized over most was the one he submitted to Georgetown University. 

“I don’t want to be mean or anything, but I feel like a lot of these institutions are very elitist, and that my story might not resonate with the admissions officers,” Munoz-Matta said. “It was a very big risk, especially when I said I was born in Mexico, when I said I grew up in an abusive environment. I believed at the time that would not be good for universities, that they might feel like, ‘I don’t want this kid, he won’t be a good fit with the student body.’”

He didn’t have an adult to help him with his essay, but another student encouraged him to be honest. It worked. He got into his dream school, Georgetown University, with a full ride. Many of his peers were not as fortunate. 

“I know because of the affirmative action decision, a lot of my friends did not even apply to these universities, like the Ivies, because they felt like they were not going to get in,” he said. “That was a very big sentiment in my school.”    

– Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

While many others in my grade level had lawyers and doctors for parents and came from exemplary middle schools at the top of their classes, I was the opposite. I came into Lamar without middle school recognition, recalling my 8th-grade science teacher’s claim that I would never make it. At Lamar, freshman year was a significant challenge as I constantly struggled, feeling like I had reached my wit’s end. By the middle of Freshman year, I was the only kid left from my middle school, since everyone else had dropped out. Rather than following suit, I kept going. I felt like I had something to prove to myself because I knew I could make it.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Kendall Martin, Austin, Texas

Between straight hair and a hard place

Kendall Martin wanted to be clear with college admissions officers about one thing: She is a young Black woman, and her race is central to who she is. Martin, 18, was ranked 15th in her graduating class from KIPP Austin Collegiate. She was a key figure on her high school basketball team. She wanted colleges to know she had overcome adversity. But most importantly, Martin said, she wanted to be sure, when her application was reviewed, “Y’all know who you are accepting.”

It wouldn’t be as simple as checking a box, though, which led Martin, of Kyle, Texas, to the topic she chose for her college admissions essay, the year after the Supreme Court said race could not be a factor in college admissions. Instead, she looked at the hair framing her face, hair still scarred from being straightened time and again. 

Martin wrote about the struggles she faced growing up with hair that she says required extensive time to tame so she could simply run her fingers through it. Now headed to Rice University in Houston – her first choice from a half-dozen options – she included a photo of her braids as part of her application. Her essay described her journey from hating her hair to embracing it, from heat damage to learning to braid, from frustration to love, a feeling she now hopes to inspire in her sister.  

“That’s what I wanted to get across: my growing up, my experiences, everything that made me who I am.” 

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt

I’m still recovering from the heat damage I caused by straightening my hair every day, because I was so determined to prove that I had length. When I was younger, a lot of my self worth was based on how long my hair was, so when kids made fun of my “short hair”, I despised my curls more and more. I begged my mom to let me get a relaxer, but she continued to deny my wish. This would make me so angry, because who was she to tell me what I could and couldn’t do with my hair? But looking back, I’m so glad she never let me. I see now that a relaxer wasn’t the key to making me prettier, and my love for my curls has reached an all-time high. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

This story about college admission essays was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post How did students pitch themselves to colleges after last year’s affirmative action ruling? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In a world where a person’s decision to go to college depends on their ability to pay for college, money is everything. 

And in a country where access to money is wildly unequal across racial and ethnic groups, whether a family’s financial resources go beyond a biweekly paycheck and include home equity, retirement savings or hefty gifts from older relatives can make a significant difference in access to higher education, according to a new analysis from the Institute of Higher Education Policy. 

The analysis found that family wealth – not just income – affects the likelihood that a student’s parents have saved for college, whether the student will enroll, whether they’ll take out student loans, and even how likely they are to graduate. And it identified a self-perpetuating cycle in which the nation’s pervasive racial wealth gap both contributes to and is exacerbated by disparities in higher education. 

And the report argues that something can be done about it. Distributing federal financial aid dollars based on wealth and income, rather than income alone, could make for a fairer system, they wrote. The authors said more research is needed to determine exactly how the recommended process should be designed so that it minimizes the burden on the families it would be trying to help.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter

Eleanor Eckerson Peters, director of research and policy at IHEP and one of the report’s authors said that affordability is “one of the key levers that higher education can pull to ensure equitable access” and that including wealth in the financial aid calculation could minimize students’ need to take out loans and allow them greater opportunities to build wealth later in life. 

“For decades, policymakers, advocates, researchers have been using income to understand economic inequities within higher education,” Eckerson Peters said. “This research really shows that we should be looking at wealth alongside income.”

Yet college and university financial aid decisions cannot easily take wealth into account, because the FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, does not ask for many of the common elements of wealth.

An estimated 850,000 students per year benefit from assets that are not accounted for by the FAFSA, according to a 2022 report from the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. 

Related: As affirmative action and diversity come under attack, inequity is widening  

Right now, home equity and retirement savings, which are “the most important sources of wealth that most people have, don’t get counted,” said Phillip Levine, an economist who studies college affordability as a professor at Wellesley College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.

“It just creates this obvious inequity in that the people who have exactly the same income, but not those resources, are in a worse position.”

Phillip Levine, economist at Wellesley College

Levine said that white families are more likely to have these types of assets, and excluding them from financial aid calculations disproportionately benefits white students. 

When a student’s financial need is calculated without considering home equity and retirement savings, the Brookings Institute estimates that white students receive roughly $2,200 more per year in financial aid than their Black peers, and $800 more than their Latinx peers. 

“It just creates this obvious inequity in that the people who have exactly the same income, but not those resources, are in a worse position,” Levine said.

Related: Why racial graduation gaps exist across the nation

Eckerson Peters said rethinking the way need-based financial aid is distributed could be one way of ensuring that higher education isn’t contributing to the racial wealth gap. 

The IHEP analysis found racial disparities between median income and median wealth among families with young adults. For Black families, the median income was $43,800, and the median wealth was $4,000. For Latinx families, the median income was $58,000 and the median wealth was $24,000. And for white families, the median income was $84,500 and the median wealth was $52,000. 

In all racial groups, those students with high wealth (not just income) are more likely to enroll in college than those who come from low or middle-range wealth. Among students from high- wealth backgrounds, white students enroll at a rate of 90 percent, compared to 82 percent for Latinx students and 81 percent for Black students.

The IHEP analysis also found that the generational transfer of wealth (a gift of more than $10,000 from living parents or grandparents) plays a role in whether a family is able to save for their children’s education. 

Related: At 17 colleges, students in the poorest income bracket paid higher prices than those in the wealthiest income bracket

About 67 percent of Black families who received financial gifts of that size saved for college, compared to 40 percent of those who didn’t. About 61 percent of Latino families saved for college if they received such gifts, compared to 40 percent of those who didn’t. And for white families, about 60 percent saved for college if they received such gifts, compared to 33 percent of those who didn’t. 

Levine said that in a perfect world, the financial aid system should make college equally accessible regardless of what their family’s financial situation is. 

“If the financial aid system operated well, that almost shouldn’t matter, because it should undo that by charging more to the people with more wealth,” Levine said. “If the financial system worked perfectly, that’s what would happen. But that isn’t the way it works.” 

This story about family wealth was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Should financial aid be based on family wealth, rather than income alone? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Niki Elliott skipped the fifth grade. She was so smart that she could have skipped another, she said, but her mother didn’t want her in class with older boys.*

And so she was always bored in school. She had a “near photographic” memory and didn’t need to study, she said, so she never learned how to. She remembers finishing her assignments in five minutes and spending the next 30 waiting for her classmates to catch up.

When she got to college, where classes were much more difficult, she said, “I really had a big crash and burn.”

Elliott is what’s now called twice exceptional, a term used to refer to children who are gifted in some areas, but also experience a learning or developmental challenge. In Elliott’s case, that challenge was attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder which made it difficult for her to manage her time and focus her attention.

She remembers being in college and thinking, “People told me I was so smart, but why am I struggling so hard?”

She became a special education teacher, and said she never stops thinking about how to create a world in which a young Black student like herself could be taught to work with (instead of against) her learning differences, to reach her full potential. Now, a clinical professor in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego, she’s helping to open, in August, the school’s Center for Embodied Equity and Neurodiversity.

At its simplest, neurodiversity is the idea that everybody’s brains work differently, and that these differences are normal. Neurodivergent, which is not a medical diagnosis, is an umbrella term that refers to people who have autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, dyslexia, or other atypical ways of thinking, learning and interacting with others.  

“Embodied equity,” the other term in the new center’s name, refers to an anti-discrimination approach that considers all aspects of people’s identities — including race, gender, ability, socioeconomic status — when addressing social problems.

“Who gets to develop the genius?” Elliot said. “Who gets the constraint? Who gets pushed more toward the social conformity? And how do we create a space for all learners to thrive according to their unique design?”

Elliott said the center’s work will fall into four main categories: training K-12 teachers and education support staffers, training community college educators, working on policy issues that affect neurodivergent students and offering programs to set up neurodivergent students for success in college and the workplace.

The training is being funded through contracts with schools, colleges and other organizations; additional costs will be covered by grants from philanthropic foundations, Elliott said.

“We really have to work to change the mindset of faculty to understand the ways in which these adaptations to their delivery and development of content could make all the difference for so many more highly bright and capable students to thrive in higher ed,” Elliott said.

Related: Students on the autism spectrum are often as smart as their peers — so why do so few go to college?

If teachers and education support staff are equipped with strategies to help students whose brains work differently, Elliott hopes that more of these students will have the option to go to college. With access to programs designed to help them transition beyond high school, more neurodivergent students will have the skills they need to succeed when they get there, Elliot said.

As the public understanding of brain differences expands, college leaders are trying new strategies to help make campuses more hospitable to neurodivergent students.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies, convened a task force to identify the needs of neurodivergent graduate students.  The task force is focused on medical care and access to screenings or assessments; disability accommodations for students and for employees, because grad students often work for the university in some capacity; and potential changes to the curriculum.

García Bedolla said that the needs of neurodivergent students force academics to confront a bias in which needless inflexibility is equated with academic rigor.

San Diego State University offers a class focused on cognitive and social differences. It’s designed for neurodivergent students or those who want to work in fields such as social work, special education or psychology. According to the course description, topics include executive functioning and time management; social cognition, context awareness and how to take on the perspective of another person; communication and relationship skills, and self-advocacy.

Inna Fishman, the founding director of SDSU’s Center for Autism and Developmental Disorders, said that although there’s been a “huge paradigm shift,” meaningful change for neurodivergent college students will take time.

“It’s one thing to ask schools to make accommodations for a learner. It’s a whole other empowering thing to help the learner take the bull by the horn and understand themselves.”  

Niki Elliott, professor, School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego

“I don’t mean to imply that it could be done ‘like that,’” Fishman said, snapping her fingers. “I’m sure for everybody, including the big systems, like universities, it’s not a simple transition to this new way of thinking about neurodiversity.”

This work is also complicated by the fact that it’s virtually impossible to know exactly how many students stand to benefit. In part that’s because definitions of neurodivergence vary.

Many experts believe the number of students with brain differences that fit under the neurodivergent umbrella is growing, whether because of an increase in people with such conditions or because of reduced stigma, greater awareness and better identification of such conditions.

For example, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the rate of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses has been steadily increasing since 2002. In 2020, an estimated 1 in 36 eight-year-olds had an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Some experts argue that the rise is the result of overdiagnosis.

Conditions such as autism can go undiagnosed for various reasons, including whether the student’s parents have been educated about such conditions or have the money and time to take their child to the appropriate doctors to be assessed.

The number of colleges where at least 5 percent of students report having a disability has risen from 510 in 2008 to 1,276 in 2022, according to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. But this measure is imperfect: It includes students who have physical disabilities. Also, roughly two-thirds of college students with disabilities who choose not to disclose their disability to their college.

“A lot of students when they leave K-12, they want to wash their label off of them and start fresh,” Elliott said. “They want to believe that they can do well in college without it, or that they would be mistreated or stigmatized if they let people know.”

Experts say that students whose brains work differently often face challenges during their K-12 education; when they get to college, the challenges don’t stop, they just change.

Laudan B. Jahromi, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said these students often struggle with what she called “cognitive flexibility,” which can affect time management, planning, prioritizing and other such organizational skills, and make college classes more difficult to manage. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) 

Fishman, at SDSU, said students with brain differences might need help taking notes, more time to take exams or to have instructions repeated to them multiple times. They might miss certain nonverbal communication or cues from their professors or peers.

Colleges offer accommodations that can help with some of these challenges, but often students can only unlock this help with a qualifying diagnosis, which can be difficult to get, depending on a student’s health insurance and access to the appropriate assessments.

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

Many neurodivergent students use medications, which must be taken on a certain schedule, to help manage their conditions, Elliott said. Problems arise when students’ classes are only offered at a time that doesn’t work with their medication schedule. If students need such a course to progress in their major, then they’re stuck trying to pass it in conditions that don’t make sense for them. Elliott said this can lead attrition or underperformance. 

And physically being in the classroom can cause stress for students who are sensitive to factors such as flickering fluorescent lights, certain types of sounds or who have difficulty being around large groups.

Some neurodivergent people struggle with understanding social dynamics and cues, or with social anxiety. Requiring social interaction (by way of graded group projects) puts them at a disadvantage. Socialization can pose significant challenges for these students outside the classroom, too, as they navigate community living, friendships and dating.

“She didn’t have a name for what my brother was experiencing. But she knew that it was not in alignment with who he had the potential to be.”

Kimberly White-Smith, dean, School of Leadership and Education Sciences, University of San Diego

Neurodivergent college students are often left to figure out how to survive in a system designed by and for people without brain differences. The students must also be their own advocates, often without fully understanding their own needs.

“The accommodations high schoolers are getting, they don’t know that they’re getting them; they’re just used to always having them,” said Melissa Boduch, a learning specialist at Beacon College in Florida. “If a student doesn’t necessarily know what they need, they don’t know what to ask for, either.”

That problem is less common at Beacon College because its entire system is designed for neurodivergent students; accommodations are embedded in its structure. Big projects are broken into smaller parts with individual deadlines and extra time is built into the syllabi by giving students advance notice about assignments, Boduch said. Students are required to make regular visits to the Center for Student Success to meet with their learning specialist who helps them stay on top of their workload, understand the challenges they face and learn how to advocate for themselves with their professors.

Though people with brain differences have always existed, the challenges they face have not been thoroughly understood, nor have there been systems in place that could help them move through the world more easily and successfully, said Kimberly White-Smith, dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego, where the new Center for Embodied Equity and Neurodiversity will be housed.  

Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not.

White-Smith grew up in the foster care system with a brother who was nonspeaking. Because he didn’t talk, social workers thought he must not have the ability to learn and labeled him “uneducable,” she said.  

Her foster mother believed he did have the ability to learn and wanted him to be able to reach his full potential. She fought to have the “uneducable” label removed and transferred both kids to Catholic school. White-Smith’s brother eventually began speaking. He did well enough in his classes to graduate from high school.

“She didn’t have a name for what my brother was experiencing. But she knew that it was not in alignment with who he had the potential to be,” White-Smith said. “We’re much more aware now than we were 40 years ago.”

“A lot of students when they leave K-12, they want to wash their label off of them and start fresh [in college].”

Niki Elliott, professor, School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego

As the public understanding of neurodiversity grows, White-Smith said it’s incumbent on educators and college leaders to make changes to support these students.

“There are a lot of challenges that come with being neurodivergent, but there’s also a lot of potential,” White-Smith said.

Elliott said that the new center will offer a program that will support Black students with and without brain differences starting in sixth grade. The idea is to help students understand their learning styles, what they need to be successful in school and how to advocate for themselves as they move toward college. If the students finish high school and qualify for admission to the University of San Diego, they will have a full-ride scholarship to attend.

Next year, Elliott said the center will begin offering a summer bridge program specifically for neurodivergent students, with a similar curriculum.

“It’s one thing to ask schools to make accommodations for a learner. It’s a whole other empowering thing to help the learner take the bull by the horn and understand themselves,” Elliott said. “It’s teaching each person where their gifts are, how they contribute to a whole and how to use that to navigate a successful higher ed experience.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Niki Elliott’s name.

This story about neurodivergent students in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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If survival required a special backpack and a portable first aid kit, you’d do well to hear that with enough time to prepare. If wilderness guides knew all this and didn’t tell you, what kind of wilderness guides would they be?

But when a college student enrolls in a course that has a high rate of students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing – or high DFW rate – the only way they might find that out is through informal warnings from an academic advisor, said Bridget Burns, chief executive officer at the University Innovation Alliance, a group of public research universities that works to increase college graduation rates. Historically, students enrolling in these classes haven’t been equipped with the academic first aid kit they might need to get through the course without becoming part of the DFW statistic. 

Those who run colleges know when a course is a “high DFW” course, Burns said, but their approach is simply to hope that students don’t fail. “And we’re smarter than that, as a sector. We care too much about students to let that kind of posture for our work continue.”

This realization sank in for Burns during the pandemic, when leaders from the University Innovation Alliance began reporting increased DFW rates. Surely Covid itself was a factor, but it was unclear what else was contributing to these students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing. Factors such as the time of day a class is offered, whether it’s in-person or online, the student demographics and faculty demographics, or the combination of classes a student is taking could all contribute, but there hasn’t been a way of identifying why certain classes have high DFW rates. 

“I was shocked to discover there’s no way of diagnosing DFW rates,” Burns said. “That blew my mind.”

Not surprisingly, students who receive Ds, Fs or Ws graduate at lower rates than their peers, according to a 2021 analysis of data from eight colleges by the Association of Public Land Grant Universities. The report found that 69 percent of students who had never received a DFW graduated in four years, compared to 44 percent of those who had received one DFW, and 22 percent of those who had received more than one DFW.

And students from certain groups get DFWs at higher rates than others, the study found. For example, in 18 of 20 classes analyzed, first-generation students were more likely to have a DFW than their peers. Students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were more likely than their peers to have a DFW in 19 of 20 classes. Students receiving Pell grants were more likely to have a DFW in 17 of 20 classes. 

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter

Burns said the answer should not be to track students into easier classes, but to ensure that all students have enough academic support to succeed in the tough classes and finish their degrees.

“It’s more expensive, it’s a little bit more resource intensive, I get it,” Burns said. “But it’s so much more costly for us to have students getting Ds, Fs and Ws and walking away.”

Over the past few years, Burns has been working to better understand DFW rates, reduce them, and figure out how to help students recover academically after they’ve received a D or F or withdrawn from a particularly tough class.

Burns and leaders at 11 colleges across the country have put together a sort of academic first aid kit, and are testing it on students who have got a D or F or withdrawn from certain classes. The kit includes things like academic coaching, writing assistance, supplemental instruction and tutoring. As a part of the trial, they also re-enrolled students in the courses they’d failed, at no cost. 

According to data from the University Innovation Alliance, about 77 percent of the students in the trial passed the class the second time, compared to 55 percent of students who paid to retake the course and did so without the added support. These figures reflect the outcomes of 311 students who had earned Ds, Fs or Ws in certain classes and then retook them with the support of the University Innovation Alliance last summer or fall.  

The participating colleges are the University of California, Riverside; North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; the University of Illinois, Chicago; Georgia State University; Purdue University; the University of Utah; Virginia Commonwealth University; Oregon State University; the University of Central Florida; Arizona State University and the University of Colorado, Denver. 

Each college selected courses with high DFW rates, including classes in math, chemistry, biology, psychology and English. 

Burns said that academic support services are clearly helping the students as they retake the difficult classes. And they’re resources that are already available at most colleges. If students are not being connected with these resources before enrolling in these challenging courses for the first time, Burns said, “we are just not giving ourselves the benefit of our own knowledge.”

“Why are we letting students fail when we know that they’re going down a path that is unlikely to be successful?” Burns said. “We’re going to have to interrogate the practices that allow students to consistently struggle with the exact same classes over time. Because it’s not the student that’s the problem.”

This story about difficult college classes was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Tom Brunskill thought he wanted to be a corporate lawyer. 

Now, looking back, he thinks it may have had less to do with his actual skills and interests, and more to do with his devoted consumption of television dramas like Suits and Boston Legal.  

“I used that as my proxy for choosing a career in corporate law, which – shocker – is not a great reason to choose a career,” Brunskill said. 

But Brunskill didn’t come from a family of lawyers. And, though he had studied law as an undergraduate in Australia, he said had no sense of what being a corporate lawyer would actually entail on a day-to-day basis. When he got his first job, it was clear almost immediately that it was not a good match.

“We’ve kind of popularized this idea that you kind of have to be miserable in the early parts of your career as you try and find the role that does align with your skills and interests,” Brunskill said. “That should not have to be the case.” 

So, he set out to change it. He created a program called Forage, which contracts with companies to offer free, virtual job simulations for students and those looking for work. 

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Forage was recently acquired by the education consulting firm EAB, which works with colleges across the U.S. on issues related to enrollment, student success and other institutional goals. The plan is to add Forage’s job simulation resources to other apps that students use regularly, said Scott Schirmeier, the president of technology and partner development at EAB. 

Schirmeier said that although Forage job simulations aren’t a replacement for internships, they can help begin to level the playing field for students who don’t have access to internships and other such opportunities. 

Brunskill said that those students – the ones who don’t have access to robust career networks and internship opportunities – are the ones who stand to benefit the most from these job simulations. They can become familiar with the niche vocabulary and specific tasks associated with the roles they are interested in, and eventually be more confident going into the job interviews. 

“Students that are really well connected or in Ivy League-plus schools, they’re not typically doing our simulations because they already see a route to those employers,” Brunskill said. “There should be no barriers to accessing what those careers look like.”

Related: College leaders refocus attention on their students’ top priority: Jobs after graduation

Brunskill said there are two main goals. One, of course, is to expose students to careers they might not know about (and prevent them from being unpleasantly surprised by their career choice, as he was). The other is to help companies identify candidates who have demonstrated their commitment and interest and who will be likely to stay in these roles for longer periods of time. In the nearly six years since Forage was founded, Brunskill said they’ve found that applicants who go through job simulations are about twice as likely to get jobs at these companies than their peers. 

On the website, students can go through a “job application basics” series, which includes lessons on networking, building a resume and how to prepare for an interview. Or they can go straight into job simulations provided by companies in sectors such as investment banking, life sciences and marketing. 

The simulations, which are self-paced and typically take a few hours, allow students to get an idea of the types of tasks they might be doing. If, for example, they chose to be on the marketing team at Lululemon, they might be asked to create a marketing plan for a new fitness product, and given a list of questions that their plan should answer. After submitting their marketing plan, they’re given an example of how someone actually in that role might have written the plan. 

Brunskill believes that completing these tasks in the simulations makes the students more qualified and competitive applicants. Even if they don’t get the exact job they did a simulation for, they might be more confident in their choice to pursue a similar career at a similar company, and better versed in what that job might actually entail, he said. 

Related: College internships matter more than ever – but not everyone can get one

“The career advice I got from my parents was like, ‘You are an argumentative child. You should become a lawyer.’ That is like literally the extent of what their knowledge was,” Brunskill said. 

“I reckon within like five weeks — I did it for like three or four years — but within about five weeks I realized this is not for me.” 

Avoiding that type of situation also benefits employers, Brunskill said. 

When a student can show that they completed a virtual job simulation, it signals to the employer that the applicant invested the time to get to know the company and the type of work they’d be doing in the job they’re applying for. Brunskill said those students are more likely to be engaged, get promoted and stay with the company. 

By offering job simulations with Forage, companies can also connect with students on far more college campuses than they could otherwise reasonably visit to recruit from, said Schirmeier.

“They have the most to gain from a student making an informed, deliberate career decision,” Brunskill said. 

This story about job simulations was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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You’ve read the national headlines about the student-led protests at Columbia University and graduation ceremonies being canceled because of demonstrations at the University of Southern California.  

In both cases, and in similar protests including those at Yale, Rutgers and UCLA, the students are protesting the war in Gaza and demanding that their universities cut financial ties with Israel and call for a ceasefire. No doubt, what’s happening on these high-profile campuses is worth paying attention to.  
 

But protests are happening on campuses all across the country, and some of the most dogged reporting on demonstrations has come from the student journalists who are covering their own classmates and administrations. 

As of May 1, these protests were happening on at least 80 college campuses, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education tracker. 

At Virginia Commonwealth University, the situation suddenly went from sidewalk chalk messages to officers in riot gear when students set up a “liberated zone” encampment near the campus library, and refused to leave at night when college leaders asked them to. According to reporting by The Commonwealth Times journalists, state police, city police and campus police officers used pepper spray* to control the situation, and arrested several students.  

The situation developed rapidly. Four days earlier, in an email to The Hechinger Report, student editor Peggy Stansbery had said: “I wouldn’t say there is unrest, but students using their voices in unison to try to make a change and hold people in power accountable, including our university’s president. To note, the president has not tried to silence anyone on campus.” 

Some students returned to the encampment site the day after the arrests, but so did police. University leaders also handed out fliers with a “major events policy” that said any gathering of more than 50 people, any installation of tents or other structures or use of speaker systems could result in being “excluded from university property,” criminal penalties for trespass, or other university disciplinary action.  

At the University of Delaware, students staged a three-day “Walk Out, Die In” event, in which they marched across the campus and then lay on blankets outdoors in silence to honor the Palestinians killed in the conflict, according to reporting in the The Review. 

The university has permitted the protests so far. The Review reported that police were present during at least one demonstration, but the protest was peaceful and officers didn’t get involved.  

 In early April, The Review wrote about a display of hundreds of small Israeli flags placed on campus lawns, which another group of students removed and threw in trash cans. The university said there would be “repercussions” for those responsible and allowed the display to remain on the green for a week.  

At the University of Portland in Oregon, student journalists for The Beacon have written about very tall graffiti on campus buildings that read “Palestine” and “Free Palestine.”  

The university is removing the graffiti, but the director of campus safety and emergency management, Michael McNerney, told The Beacon, “We’re not doing [the cleanup] because of any judgments placed on the message or the meaning [of the vandalism], although the University has chosen to take a more neutral position on the conflict, but because this is something that has significant repercussions for the campus community.” 

Beyond dealing with the graffiti, the university administration has not addressed the conflict or the protests, except for a Palm Sunday email to students. In it, the vice president of student affairs, Rev. John Donato wrote “May this upcoming Holy Week be remembered by prayers for peace and action. Let’s be focused on ending war, death, and destruction in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and Haiti, and at home in the United States.” 

Last week at the University of Minnesota, student journalists for The Minnesota Daily covered a protest related to “the political repression of Palestine activists on campus,” during which the campus police cleared out a student tent encampment. The student publication reported that six students, two former students and one faculty member were arrested.  

Student activists have since called for “an escalation of support,” and the university has closed 12 campus buildings. The Daily reported that, in an email to students, executive vice president and provost Rachel Croson said protestors are expected to adhere to student and employee conduct policies while engaging in freedom of expression. 

*CORRECTION: An earlier version misstated what police officers at Virginia Commonwealth University used to control protests on that campus. It was pepper spray. The Commonwealth Times student newspaper updated its story with this corrected information.

Reporting was contributed by Peggy Stansbery, Ella Holland, Kate Cuadrado, Konner Metz and Alex Steil.  

This story about student journalists covering protests was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast. 

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BALTIMORE – Jazz Lewis wound up at the University of Maryland not by luck or privilege but by the strings of a guitar.

Now a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, Lewis said he paid for his college degree with a mix of scholarships and money paid from stints with his church band. As one of the first men in his family to attend college, he said higher education was by no means a given; he earned it.

That’s why, Lewis said, he co-sponsored legislation designed to eliminate the use of legacy preferences at Maryland universities.

“I’m a Terp; I would love for my son to go there,” he said of the main campus at College Park. “But I just think, as a matter of public policy, state money shouldn’t be helping fulfill these types of preferences.”

The bill passed just before the end of the legislative session, was signed by Gov. Wes Moore in late April and will become law on July 1.

The idea for the legislation came last summer, after the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions. Lewis, like many others across the country, wondered why colleges could still consider whether an applicant was the child of alumni or donors, but not the child’s race. While some have lauded his bill, others say it’s not enough unless it comes with other efforts to foster diversity on campus.

Lewis, a 35-year-old Democrat serving his second term in the state legislature, sees it as an easy win for Maryland, one of the most racially diverse states in the country, where the most selective college, Johns Hopkins University, and the state’s flagship, the University of Maryland, already do not consider legacy status in admissions.

Maryland becomes the third state to eliminate the practice, as the question of fairness in admissions undergoes increased scrutiny across the country. Colorado was the first state to ban legacy preference in 2021, and earlier this spring, Virginia became the second.

Legislators in California, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Connecticut are considering similar proposals. On the federal level, Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia (a Democrat) and Todd Young of Indiana (a Republican) have introduced a bill that would prevent colleges from being accredited if they considered legacy or donor connections in admissions.

Julie J. Park, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies equity in college admissions, said that giving preference to applicants who have ties to alumni or donors unfairly benefits students who likely already have advantages over their peers.

“They’re obviously not first-generation college students, they’re not suffering due to lack of opportunity,” Park said, and those with fewer advantages “are usually the students we want to help.”

Even though elite colleges have slowly diversified over the past several decades, Park said, the people who benefit from legacy preferences are still disproportionately white and affluent.

Across the country, racial disparities in access to college are pervasive. Far more white Americans than Black Americans hold college degrees, and the gap is growing. And many taxpayer-funded flagship universities, including in Maryland, have been failing to enroll Black and Latino students in the same proportions as Black and Latino graduates from their state’s high schools.

The Supreme Court’s majority determined that attempts to diversify college campuses with affirmative action policies violated the Constitution’s equal protections clause designed to prevent race-based discrimination. But the court’s dissenting justices argued that ignoring race would hurt, rather than help, students from historically disadvantaged groups and reverse progress on promoting more inclusive campuses.

In the wake of the decision, the Departments of Education and Justice jointly released a list of recommendations for colleges to use to advance opportunities for applicants from historically underrepresented groups. The list included eliminating legacy considerations from admissions, but some institutions have hesitated to adopt this recommendation.

James Murphy, the director of postsecondary policy at the advocacy group Education Reform, said he expects legacy admission preferences to disappear through a combination of legislation, like Maryland’s bill, and institutions voluntarily dropping the practice.

“Legislation has become necessary,” he added, “because colleges have not chosen to do the right thing themselves.”

At least 593 colleges across the United States reported that they considered legacy status in admissions during the 2022-2023 academic year, according to the most recently available data from the National Center for Education Statistics. That number has since shrunk due to the statewide ban on legacy preferences in Virginia, and other individual institutions dropping the practice. In Maryland, schools that do consider legacy status include Bowie State University, Capitol Technology University, Goucher College, Hood College, Loyola University of Maryland, Mount St. Mary’s University, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Salisbury University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the United States Naval Academy, Washington College and Women’s Institute of Torah Seminary and College.

Murphy said that passing this kind of legislation matters because “it sends a clear signal that Maryland is a state that doesn’t believe it’s fair to give students an advantage that is passed along family bloodlines.”

Also, he said, just because some college leaders drop the practice doesn’t mean their successors will follow the same course. Creating laws that prohibit the consideration of legacy status in admissions will ensure that these practices become a relic of the past.

And Park, the University of Maryland professor, said that states banning the practice can contribute to the momentum of the movement across the country.

“We can say, ‘Hey, this is something that if institutions are not brave enough on their own to step away from it, then, you know, states will act,’” she said.

Research shows that elite colleges benefit from accepting legacy students. These students often matriculate at higher rates than their peers, boosting completion rates and other success metrics, and their alumni family members are more likely to donate.

Johns Hopkins University ended legacy-conscious admissions in 2013, a move that university president Ronald J. Daniels said helped boost its proportion of low-income and first-generation students. The number of Pell grant recipients increased by about 10 percentage points from 2013 to 2022, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Admissions Office. Meanwhile, the number of legacy students dropped from more than 8 percent in 2013 to fewer than 2 percent over that same period, while the percentage of first-generation college students grew from about 8 percent to 21 percent.

In an interview, Daniels said that creating more parity during the admissions process has enriched the social fabric of the campus during a period he described as “highly polarized” across the country.

“There’s a richness of debate you’re able to have on a set of contemporary political and social issues that is possible with more diverse students,” Daniels said.

The institution did weigh the effect the move would have on alumni support, but Daniels said alumni giving has not significantly declined.

The university’s effort to broaden access also benefited, he said, from a $1.8 billion donation from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2018 that allowed Hopkins to provide more need-based financial assistance to students. And it has changed its recruiting and outreach procedures to identify more students who might not have considered Hopkins as an option.

“We have worked very deliberately to change the applicant pool,” Daniels said. “The truth is, it’s multi-factorial … but I don’t think we would’ve been entirely as successful at changing the percentage of students from Pell-eligible populations had it not been for the coupling of the legacy admissions [ban] and the change in strategy.”

If Hopkins can end legacy-conscious admissions, Lewis said, other Maryland institutions should have no problem following suit.

“If it’s good for the most selective private institution in the state, then all the other private institutions in the state, I think, can come aboard,” Lewis said.

In written testimony about the bill, Matt Power, president of the Maryland Independent College and University Association, wrote that some private institutions in the state do consider “alumni relationships” as part of a comprehensive application process, but that students who do not meet admission standards are never accepted due to legacy or alumni relationships alone. He also wrote that alumni relationships can be powerful tools to recruit and attract prospective students. (The group did not take a position on the legislation.)

During committee hearings, Lewis and the bill’s co-sponsor, state Sen. Benjamin Brooks, a Baltimore County Democrat, also faced questions about the legislation having “unintended consequences” of harming admissions chances for students of color and low-income students at selective institutions that had accepted their parents or relatives.

Brooks, an Army veteran who attended college with help from the G.I. Bill, said that the legislation might have flaws, but with the Supreme Court having “taken the stance they did,” this bill “is one way of bringing some equity back into the process.”

Supporters of fair admissions acknowledge that ending legacy-conscious admissions alone won’t diversify college campuses.

“These legacy admission bans often are simply a way to create the illusion of change, and excusing institutions that end the practice from taking more substantive steps,” a former U.S. Education Secretary, John B. King, said in a keynote address earlier this year. “The reality is, this is performative wokeness when transformative action is what is desperately needed.”

King, now the chancellor of the State University of New York, said that the legacy preference bans must come with other efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity among the student body.

He said colleges should strive to double the number of Pell-eligible students and try harder to recruit students from rural communities. He urged colleges to value student extracurricular activities such as part-time jobs or caring for family members as much as “equestrian trophies or glam charity outings in the more vacation-friendly developing nations.”

Lewis, the state delegate, said he can’t remember meeting with University of Maryland recruiters when he looked into applying to colleges. He now has two degrees from College Park, which he attributes to hard work — but he hopes his bill can make it easier for the next generation of Black and low-income scholars to get their feet in the door.

“I don’t see this bill as a silver bullet,” Lewis said. “I see it as one piece of our broader collection of bills that me and other colleagues are bringing to make sure that we don’t move backwards in Maryland. And hopefully, we can be a leader in the country.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct an error in federal data. McDaniel College does not consider legacy status in admissions.

This story about banning legacy admissions was produced by The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit local news site, and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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What makes a first-generation college student? Well, that depends on who’s doing the defining.

Yes, there’s the federal definition: a student is first-generation if neither parent has a bachelor’s degree.  

Sounds simple enough. But it doesn’t account for those who had a highly educated parent who wasn’t involved in their lives, or those whose parent got a college degree in another country, with an academic system unlike ours, or those who have one degree-holding parent, but are being raised in a single-parent household.

Researchers argue that many students like these are still meaningfully less advantaged compared to students who have two parents with degrees. Despite the narrow federal definition, many believe these are students who need to be identified and given added resources and support both to get through the college application process and to thrive once they get on campus.

New research from Common App shows that expanding the definition of first-generation expands enrollment data, and thus can tell a different story about who is ready for college.

According to 2022 data from Common App, about 450,000 applicants that year met the federal definition, meaning that neither parent had a bachelor’s degree, including about 300,000 students whose parents had never attended any college. But if the definition is expanded to include applicants who had one parent with a bachelor’s degree, the population increases to more than 700,000. And, according to the report, changing that definition changes other things, too, such as college readiness, socioeconomic status and the number of colleges students apply to.

Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research and analytics at Common App, said there isn’t one right way to define first-generation students; the question should be, “What kind of disadvantage are we trying to measure?”

After the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions last summer, Kim said he was interested in looking at many different aspects of diversity in college applicants, including first-generation status. He said this analysis might help colleges that want to understand the diversity of their applicants; how certain home contexts and hardships might affect how competitive students appear in the application process; and how to support students from all different backgrounds.

“It would be great if everyone could kind of align on one definition for first-generation, it’d be so wonderful if we had that clarity,” Kim said.  “But the reality is that different contexts kind of require different identification methods.”

Related: Sick parents? Caring for siblings? Colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them

The Common App’s analysis shows that, depending on the definition, the percentage of students identified as being part of an underrepresented minority group can range from 45 percent (for those who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 58 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college). And the percentage of those students from low-income families varies from 48 percent (for students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 66 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college).

Sarah E. Whitley, vice president of the Center for First-generation Student Success, said most colleges define first-generation students as those whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees or those whose parents did not earn bachelor’s degrees in the United States. She said the center doesn’t use one universal definition, and instead works with colleges to identify the definition that makes the most sense for them.

Whitley said the purpose of identifying students as first-generation is to understand whether they have people in their family who can support them with college-going knowledge, but that’s often harder to determine than asking simply “Are you the first in your family to attend college?”

Whitley discourages college from using this language because students may not categorize themselves as first-generation if they had an aunt or uncle or older sibling who attended college. She said it’s better to ask specific questions about parental education, as Common App does, but it can still be difficult to capture everyone. For example, asking about the education of biological parents might not capture students who had a highly educated birth parent but were raised by a stepparent, she said, or students who were raised in a family with two moms or two dads.

The Common App research found that there could be more than 100 definitions, considering the different combinations of parents and caregivers, whether they attended college or graduated, what degree they and many more factors. The analysis considered eight definitions:

• Neither parent earned a bachelor’s degree (the federal definition)
• No bachelor’s degrees among living parents (to focus on those who can provide support to the student)
• No bachelor’s degrees among caregivers (considers others in the household beyond biological parents, such as a stepparent)
• No domestic bachelor’s degree among caregivers (because degrees from other countries may be less relevant in helping students in the U.S. higher education system)
• No bachelor’s degrees earned by caregivers before the student was born (excludes those who earned degrees more recently and may not yet have “accrued some of the more socioeconomic benefits of a college degree,” according to the report)
• No associate degrees, either parent
• No college attendance, either parent
• One parent earned a bachelor’s degree

Yolanda Watson-Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said it’s also important to think about the social capital that students have if both their parents went to college, such as access to college alumni and professional networks. She said there are big differences in resources between students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree and students whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all went to college.

It makes more sense to think of first-generation status as a spectrum, she said, rather than a yes or no question.  Using only the federal definition of first-generation is too narrow and constrictive, she said.

Watson-Spiva’s mother earned a bachelor’s degree and her father went to community college, but one of her grandmothers only had an eighth grade education. She doesn’t identify as a first- generation student, but said she could imagine how someone in a similar situation might, even though they don’t meet the federal definition.

“Many of those folks still struggle,” she said. “There are still big variations between that person and a person who’s had like four generations of family members that are legacies, that went to college.”

This story about first-generation students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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When Carlos Sanchez immigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, from Mexico City 25 years ago, he’d already completed two years of college at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he was determined to finish his degree. Already bilingual, he felt comfortable tackling the second half of his education in English. But the language barrier was only part of the challenge. 

When he tried to enroll, he found that colleges had no idea how to handle his international transcripts and credentials. He recalls finding (and paying a considerable amount for) an outside company that could convert his transcripts into something more comparable to the U.S. education system. 

Eventually, Davenport University recognized the academic work he’d done in Mexico and he was able to finish his bachelor’s degree in international business there, without having to start from scratch. 

Sanchez is now the executive director of Casa Latina, a new bilingual college program at Davenport that will cater to students exactly like the one he was 25 years ago. He hopes it will help many highly trained or qualified people who are underemployed because they believe their English isn’t good enough to earn a college degree.

“I’ve been here 25 years and I’ve met engineers that are Uber drivers,” he said. “I’ve met accountants that have worked on a manufacturing line. Not that there’s anything wrong with those positions, but these individuals have four-plus years of college in their countries and they are underutilized.”

Beginning this fall, Casa Latina will offer 12 online undergraduate and graduate programs in an entirely bilingual and bicultural format. The curriculum will be offered entirely in Spanish one week and entirely in English the next, and all support services will be available in both languages.

Davenport’s tuition prices will apply to the Casa Latina programs, but accepted students will be awarded scholarships of $9,200 per year to help make the program more accessible financially. Those enrolled part time will receive a proportionate amount of scholarship funding, Sanchez said. Students are eligible for the scholarship award regardless of their immigration status, which Davenport does not ask about, he said. If students are eligible for federal financial aid, they can also use that funding to pay tuition.  

Once students are accepted, Sanchez said, Davenport will assess their education and work experience to see what can count toward degree progressions. The idea is to help students finish their education as efficiently and affordably as possible and get them into the workforce so they can provide better lives for their families. 

Latinos are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States, but data shows they are less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to have earned a college diploma. About 23 percent of Latino adults between the ages of 25 and 29 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 45 percent of their white peers, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.

Davenport, like colleges across the country, has struggled with declining undergraduate enrollment since the pandemic. It has six campuses in Michigan along with its online program. In the 2018-2019 academic year, the university enrolled 6,763 undergraduate students, compared to 5,372 in the 2021-2022 academic year (the most recent year available from the National Center for Education Statistics). And colleges across the country are bracing for a shrinking number of graduating high schoolers after 2025 to have an effect on their enrollment. 

But Davenport’s president, Richard J. Pappas, said that the college has had good enrollment for the last three semesters, and the Casa Latina program is not just about boosting those numbers.

“It’s not a recruiting tool. Because if we don’t retain them and graduate them, this is a failure,” Pappas said. 

About 7 percent of Davenport’s undergraduate students identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 34 percent as nonwhite, according to data from the Department of Education. 

Deborah Santiago, president of the national advocacy group Excelencia in Education, said she’s excited about Casa Latina because it is advancing what it means to support not only Latino students but Latino communities more broadly. 

For these students to thrive in college and afterwards, Santiago said, the bilingual curriculum has to be connected to services that support students’ lives outside the classroom and resources that help them prepare for the workforce. 

“There is intentionality, there’s leadership here,” she said of the Davenport program. “They see the Latino community, they want to connect them to employment, they want to make sure that they get the academic rigor.”

Pappas said Davenport has worked with state and local Hispanic business leaders to make sure that Casa Latina is an opportunity for higher education and career development for “people who don’t feel comfortable, who may feel like they’re not capable because of the language barrier.”

Degree programs to be offered include accounting, business administration, education, human resource management, health services administration and technology project management.

Latino adults with work experience or some higher education in their home country are one of three demographic groups that Davenport expects to serve with this new program. Another is the college-aged children of those immigrants, who speak Spanish at home but are English dominant, and who have not yet harnessed their Spanish skills in academic or professional settings. 

Sanchez said they also expect to serve non-Latino students who attended immersion programs in high school, are bilingual and want to develop Spanish-language proficiency in their field of study and prepare to work as fully bilingual professionals. 

Regardless of their backgrounds, Pappas said he thinks that having a bilingual degree will help set these students apart in the workforce. 

“We still have some heavy lifting to make sure we do it well,” Pappas said. “But I think it’s going to have a big impact, not only on the people who go to our program, but the places that employ them.” 

This story about bilingual college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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People who read college applications are a lot like detectives. Without having been there for the event (the student’s K-12 education and life), they must find clues in documents (high school transcripts and student essays) and eyewitness accounts (letters of recommendation) to solve the case (decide whether a student might be able to thrive at the college). 

But even with the extensive applications that each student submits, the detectives (college application readers) must do a lot of reading between the lines, said Tim Brunold, dean of admission at the University of Southern California. 

The clues they have on how students spend their time outside of school are typically limited to a list of sports teams they’ve captained, clubs they joined, volunteer work they’ve done and awards they’ve won. But the application readers often lack key information on other responsibilities or life circumstances students may have, such as caring for siblings or sick family members, working part-time jobs to help pay family bills, or living in a home without a stable internet connection.

And those missing clues often mean a student’s application doesn’t get a fair shake. If a student is getting good grades in spite of being responsible for siblings from after school until bedtime, that could mean the student is even more academically talented than a peer with no such burdens. 

In order to fill this gap, and signal to prospective students that these responsibilities matter, a set of 12 colleges participated in an experiment in which they asked every applicant to go through a list of extenuating home life circumstances or responsibilities and check off which ones they spend four hours or more per week doing.

“We want these kids to essentially get credit for these things that are taking a lot of skills and a lot of time, in the same way that kids who are doing traditional, school-based extracurricular activities are getting credit,” said Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission director of the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, which helped develop the questions with Common App. (The idea was in development before the Supreme Court ruled that race could not be considered in admissions decisions.)   

“We want to make it easier for students to report this information and talk about it. If students don’t want to have to write their essay about this, for instance, they shouldn’t have to.”

In order to make it fast and simple for prospective students, and to prevent application readers from having to play detective as they try to figure out, “Is there something else going on with this kid?,” they added this optional question to the Common App: 

Sometimes academic records and extracurricular activities are impacted by family responsibilities or other circumstances. We would like to know about these responsibilities and circumstances. Your responses will not negatively impact your application. You may repeat some information you already provided in the Common App Activities section. 

Please select which activities you spend 4 or more hours per week doing: 

• Assisting family or household members with situations such as doctors’ appointments, bank visits, or visa interviews
• Doing tasks for my family or household (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.)
• Experiencing homelessness or another unstable living situation
• Interpreting or translating for family or household members
• Living in an environment without reliable or usable internet
• Living independently or living on my own (not including boarding school)
• Managing family or household finances, budget, or paying bills
• Providing transportation for family or household members
• Taking care of sick, disabled and/or elderly members of my family or household
• Taking care of younger family or household members
• Taking care of my own child or children
• Working at a paid job to contribute to my family or household’s income
• Yard work/farm work
• Other (please describe)
• None of these

Across the 12 colleges, 66 percent of the students who applied to these colleges using the Common App checked at least one box, according to Karen Lopez, who manages this project at Common App. A quarter of the prospective students checked four or more boxes.

In the fall of 2022, these 12 colleges included the question in the Common App: Amherst College, Caltech, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, St. Olaf College, Transylvania University, University of Arizona, University of Dubuque, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

In the fall of 2023, these 23 colleges added the question: Allegheny College, Amherst College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Boston College, Caltech, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, College of the Holy Cross, Cornell University, Earlham College, Elon University, George Washington University, Harvey Mudd, Haverford College, Immaculata University, Lafayette College, Maryland Institute College of Art, Nazareth University, Providence College, University of Pennsylvania, University of Richmond, University of Rochester, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Ross Anderson said that the second-year data will begin being processed in the coming months. She said they also plan to look at how this question affected admissions and enrollments, but they won’t be able to examine that until late summer. Lopez said these are among the factors that will help decide if this question should become a regular part of the Common App. 

Brunold, from USC, said that the people who read college applications are trying to get a “360-degree view of this young person who’s often baring their soul to you,” without knowing them personally. Giving students the opportunity to share information about their lives in this way helps colleges make a more thorough assessment. 

“For us, at a place that unfortunately doesn’t have the capacity to admit anywhere near the number of students who want to come here, we take great care in this process,” Brunold said. 

Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said that asking this question and capturing a wider view of students’ lives can help level the playing field for applicants of different backgrounds. 

“What we are trying to do is understand how a student is moving throughout their lives, what their commitment of time is and their responsibility is, and their awareness of themselves relative to other people,” Soule said. “Because that’s going to be incredibly important in our environment when they arrive on our campus, and they’re living and learning within the community of our school.”

This story about student home life was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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