The Journal. - Wesleyan's President on Admissions Post-Affirmative Action

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

After the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action earlier this summer, Wesleyan University dropped its admissions preference for children of alumni. But it will still consider whether applicants can afford tuition as part of the admissions process. Wesleyan President Michael Roth on why the elite institution is making those decisions. Further Reading and Watching: - Wesleyan University Ends Legacy Preferences in Admissions  - How Colleges Plan to Factor In Race Without Asking About Race  Further Listening: - The Supreme Court Rules Against Affirmative Action  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that race cannot be considered in college admissions. And since then, universities and colleges have been re-evaluating their practices. Schools usually first look at a student's academic record, high school grades, and standardized test scores. But there are other factors that also can come into play, like a student's financial needs, their extracurricular activities like sports or arts, and also whether their parents went to that school. That's called legacy admissions.

You know legacy admissions, right? Practice like legacy admissions. So-called legacy admissions. Legacy admissions. Legacy admissions should be done away with too. Over the years, dozens of colleges and universities have dropped legacy admissions, including Johns Hopkins, Amherst,

and the University of Illinois. And after the Supreme Court's ruling, others have dropped it too. Wesleyan University is the latest in a growing number of schools to scrap legacy admissions. We spoke with Wesleyan's president, Michael Roth, about his efforts to diversify the school, including his decision to ditch legacy preferences. I think it's such a small thing that in the context of the injustices of American education, there are other things to worry about. However, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed like a symbol of our unearned exclusivity. And that I thought we should do away

with. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Monday, August 7th. Monday, August 7th. Coming up on the show, one college's response to the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling. With Uber Reserve, you can book your Uber ride in advance.

90 days in advance. Perfect for all you forward thinkers and planning gurus. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. Uber Reserve. See Uber app for details. Wesleyan University is a nearly 200-year-old liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut. It's an elite school with only around 3,000 students, and its sticker price is about $85,000 a year, including living expenses. Its graduates include Lin-Manuel Miranda, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, and the director of the National Economic Council, Lael Brainard. More than 40% of its first-year class are students of color.

About 10% are Black or African American, and another 10% are Latino or Hispanic. And Michael Roth has been Wesleyan's president for 16 years. I've been there for quite a while, and I was a student at Wesleyan in the 70s, so it is a labor of love. How is Wesleyan different today from when you were there in the 70s? Well, you know, the world is very different than it was. I started in 75. And I think people really fear that if they don't make it big, they're really going to be in trouble. That's not always true, but it's certainly more true than it was or feels more true than it was in the mid-70s.

Do you need a college degree to make it big? No, you don't need one. We all find examples, right? But it sure helps. Yeah. So I think, you know, if you say, do you need to go to college to be a doctor? Yes. Do you need to go to college to be an entrepreneur? No. But is a college degree a great hedge against economic misfortune? Yes, not a perfect one. More importantly, it gives you an education that will set you up for a lifetime of learning. And I think that it's a great thing for most people to have access to.

But access to colleges and universities isn't equal for all. But access to colleges and universities isn't equal for all. And one factor that critics say is very unequal is legacy admissions. Legacies, the children of alumni, can get special consideration in their college applications. Proponents say it fosters generational loyalty and helps with donations. But critics say it disproportionately benefits students who are wealthy and white. New data shows that even though legacies tend to be only slightly more qualified than other students, they are four times as likely to get into top colleges, according to a research group at Harvard. is likely to get into top colleges,

according to a research group at Harvard. At Wesleyan, about 8% of its students have a parent who went there. Roth says he's been trying to get rid of legacy admissions for a long time. My parents didn't go to college, so legacy was not something I knew much about before I got to Wesleyan. And about five years ago, I went to a group of alumni,

like the informal advisors that I have, and said, we should get rid of legacy admissions, right? Why? Well, because it just seems on the face of it unfair. I mean, why would we give you preference? Because your parents weren't there. People sometimes compare this with athletes, right? So if you're a great field hockey player and you have the same academic record as somebody else, we might take you because you're a great field hockey player. Well, you did that. You

worked hard. You're a great field hockey player. We have a field hockey team. That seems like you earned it. If your mother played field hockey, I don't think we should take you. So it's an unearned advantage. We try in this country not to have an aristocracy of birth, but one of merit, right? And some of the statistics at other schools are pretty troubling. And in the past, you've said that Wesleyan

rarely ever considers legacy. Yeah, for us, it was negligible. So why make a big announcement if it's not going to make such a big difference? Because I could talk to people like you. So this is like a marketing position for you. No, it definitely has value more than I expected. It was the right thing to do and to do it in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. It wasn't as well thought out as your question implies.

In other words, I wasn't sitting there going, marketing time. I was upset about the Supreme Court decision. upset about the Supreme Court decision. And I thought, how can I run a school where we give preferences to children of people we like when we're not allowed to use racial affiliation? It's hypocritical. Is there a relationship between legacy preferences and race-based admissions?

Well, legacies are overwhelmingly white. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, someone sent me an article from the National Geographic that said that legacies were introduced to keep Jews out. They didn't have a legacy preference until Jews started applying to school.

I don't think it makes a lot of sense. Schools say it creates loyalty. Do you think all schools should get rid of legacy? Obviously, it's up to them. I do find it, I think I've used the word obscene, that the wealthiest schools in the world are the ones that say they can't do this because they're afraid they'll lose money. And at a time when people have less and less confidence in the fairness and clear thinking of higher education, to defend exclusivity through family ties seems preposterous to me. Are you rethinking any other parts of your admissions process?

Virginia Tech last week discontinued non-binding early admission, and early admissions kind of ties applicants into a school so they can't sort of compare financial aid packages. Yeah, our financial aid, we meet full need. We don't have merit scholarships, so if people are looking for that, they're not going to look at us. Our early pool is as diverse as our regular pool. I do think there's some advantage to having people at the school who really want to be there. So we've talked about whether that would be an equity issue. We don't think it would be in our case. And what about like, you brought up field hockey earlier. Is athletic preference something you would think about stepping away from? We think about it all the time.

And in some sports, there are some sports that are very much white sports still. And there are others that are not. So it's a very mixed bag. not. So it's a very mixed bag. My feeling about this now is that these are people who are high achievers and they're very good students. And what we've seen is they become higher achievers academically than they would have been otherwise. They come to a place like Wesleyan, it has a great athletic program now. And so it's a place where the lessons you learn in athletic competition also help make you a better student. So what are you doing after the Supreme Court decision to foster diversity on campus? I'm glad you asked, because that's really the biggest issue here,

is that we want to send a signal to black and brown students and minority students of any sort that we're serious about cultivating a diverse applicant pool and having a diverse campus. So some of the things we're doing, we're working much more intensively with community-based organizations, some of which work with black students or with Hispanic students. We've worked for years now with QuestBridge, which is a great national organization. You probably know that defines people,

especially in rural America and folks from high schools that don't normally send students to the selective places and they find great students and match them with great schools. We are working with the National Educational Equity Foundation. We've done this for a couple of years, and we're going to intensify this partnership. Wesleyan also offers classes at low-income high schools for free college credit. You offer a class online.

There's a high school teacher that helps the students in the classroom. And then we have TAs from Wesleyan. And the kids, they get a free college credit, which is great. They can get a few of these. Most importantly, from my perspective, they learn, hey, I could do the work at a place like Wesleyan or Columbia or Harvard, wherever. And then they find out it's free for me because I don't have any economic resources. And then they find out it's free for me because I don't have any economic resources. Coming up, Michael Roth on why Wesleyan is so expensive and how that affects diversity efforts. Need a great reason to get up in the morning?

Well, what about two? Right now, get a small, organic, fair trade coffee and a tasty bacon and egg or breakfast sandwich for only $5 at A&W's in Ontario. At Airmiles, we help you collect more moments. So instead of scrolling through photos of friends on social media, you can spend more time dinnering with them. How's that spicy enchilada? Very flavorful.

Yodeling with them. Ooh, must be mating season. And hiking with them. Is that a squirrel? Bear! Run! Collect more moments with more ways to earn. Air Miles. And hiking with them. Is that a squirrel? Bear! Run! Collect more moments with more ways to earn.

Air Mile. At $85,000 a year, Wesleyan is among the most expensive colleges in the country. According to U.S. News & World Report, around 35% of its graduates have loans with a median debt of over $15,000. Isn't cost itself a huge barrier to achieving diversity? It is. And I have been totally unsuccessful

in bending the cost curve. You know, I've been 16 years, I've been trying to figure out ways to, without reducing the quality of the education, to make it less expensive. And I don't mean just more financial aid, although we're doing that all the time, but to actually mean you'll spend less per student. We do spend less per student than some of our peer institutions, and we are punished for that by U.S. News because that's been one of the big categories for ranking schools. But small classes with great faculty and then all the rest that you have in a residential liberal

arts-oriented school, it's expensive. The only way so far that we have found that reduces costs dramatically is to compress the time to degree. So we introduced a three-year program really early in my tenure. I did this when I was a student trying to impress my father, save him some money, and graduated quickly. How has it gone? We had about three or four people doing it. Now we have 20 people. I thought by now we'd have a few hundred people doing it because people rightly complain about how expensive it is. And so I said, well, yeah, you can save like 20%,

not 25% because it costs a little bit to take a course in the summer or the winter. And very few people choose the option. I would also like to offer a full year of college courses, freshman year of college, free, online or in hybrid form. But most families that we've talked to about this say, I would never ask my Sophie to compress her college years. Sophie to compress her college years. Wesleyan promises to meet every student's financial need, and it funds some of that through its $1.5 billion endowment. About 10 years ago, Roth changed the way Wesleyan evaluates an applicant's financial need.

The school had been need-blind, meaning it didn't consider whether a student needed financial aid in the admissions process. But now, Wesleyan is need-aware, meaning it does look at an applicant's financial resources. This change brought controversy. Critics said the decision favored the wealthy. brought controversy. Critics said the decision favored the wealthy.

Roth defended it as key to maintaining the academic experience. Why was being need-blind eroding the experience? Well, because we weren't collecting enough revenue to invest in the institution. I would like to be able to take more students without economic resources than we do. But if you need a certain amount of tuition dollars, as we do, to invest in the experience, and you want to have an economically diverse campus,

it's challenging. Two-thirds of our budget is coming from tuition still. Now, we spend roughly 4.5% from the endowment a year, and we use about 38%, 39% of the revenue that we collect, we actually give in financial aid. At Wesleyan, 15% of students receive Pell Grants, which are need-based federal grants that generally go to students from the lowest income brackets. I'm disappointed in that Pell Grant number you cited.

I've pushed my admissions people, but as other schools, it's good for America that other schools are doing this. They've gotten more serious about recruiting Pell-eligible students. Those students have more choices. And so our yield is less than it was before when we've been doing this for a while. But I need to raise more money so that I won't be as dependent on tuition.

And that's the pressure on any president is to raise more money so you're not dependent on tuition. In your view, what does a fair admissions process look like? It's such a hard question. In our case, and this is probably true of the schools in our peer group and then the Ivies, you know, two-thirds of the people who apply are fully capable of getting the average high grade at Wesleyan. And we can only take 15%, 16% of the students. And so we do our best to not use distinctions that we couldn't defend with an articulate defense, but reasonable people disagree. I mean, like, would it be more fair at

Wesleyan if we didn't have to worry about how much people could pay? It would be. I mean, I made the decision to no longer be need-blind because I felt we were compromising the quality of the education in order to promote access to it, which in my father's lingo would be ass backwards, you know, that we were so desperate to keep the label that we weren't investing in the faculty, in small classes, and in facilities. So I said we would invest in the academic core and we would build financial aid. Every year we would try, through fundraising, to invest a bigger percentage of the budget in financial aid. And we've done that. And eventually we'll get to the point

where we don't have to worry about whether somebody could pay. But since the education we offer is expensive, we still do have to do that. How do you think next year's class will look in the wake of the Supreme Court decision? Well, I'm hoping black and brown students especially will apply, that they won't stop applying,

which is what happened in some of the big public universities when affirmative action was forbidden. You saw a drop-off in applications from black and brown students. So I'm using this bully pulpit I've been given to say we want people to apply. We want people to apply. And I'm sure that's true of all the schools in our peer group.

And so I am hoping that we don't sacrifice diversity in the coming year. Thanks so much for the conversation. Thank you very much. That's all for today, Monday, August 7th. The Journal is a co-production of Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Melissa Korn.

Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.