Por COLLIN BINKLEY
WASHINGTON (AP) — Some of America’s most prestigious universities are enrolling record numbers of low-income students, a growing priority in admissions in the absence of affirmative action.
Affirmative action or positive discrimination measures aim to equalize opportunities for students taking into account factors such as their race, gender, sexual orientation, age or religion.
America’s top campuses remain affluent, but some colleges have accelerated their efforts to reach a broader swath of the country, recruiting more in urban and rural areas and offering free tuition to students whose families are not among the highest-income.
The strategy could generate friction with the federal government. Donald Trump’s administration, which has pulled funding from elite universities over a series of complaints, has suggested it is illegal to target needy students. University leaders believe they are on solid legal ground.
At Princeton University, this year’s freshman class has more low-income students than ever before. One in four is eligible for federal Pell Grants, which are scholarships reserved for students with the greatest financial need. That’s a jump from two decades ago, when fewer than one in ten were eligible.
“The only way to increase socioeconomic diversity is to be deliberate about it,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber said in a statement. “Socioeconomic diversity will increase if and only if university presidents make it a priority.”
Last year, Princeton set aggressive goals to recruit more low-income students in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in higher education. Officials wrote in a campus report that without the ability to consider race, focusing on economic diversity offers “the university’s greatest opportunity to attract diverse talent.”
The country’s most selective colleges still enroll large proportions of students from the families of America’s richest 1%. Many of those campuses have tried for years to shake off reputations for elitism, with only incremental changes in enrollment.
Colleges Break Enrollment Records for Low-Income Students
Only a small fraction of the nation’s colleges have publicly disclosed their low-income enrollment this year, and national data will not be released by the federal government until next year. But the first numbers show a trend.
At 17 highly selective colleges that have released new data, nearly all saw increases in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year, according to an Associated Press analysis. Most saw increases in consecutive years, and none saw a significant decline in the aggregate over both years.
Yale, Duke, Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have set enrollment records for students eligible for Pell Grants in the past two years.
Part of the increase is due to a federal expansion that made more students eligible for Pell Grants last year. But campus leaders also believe the increases reflect their own efforts.
Numbers in MIT‘s freshman class have increased 43% over the past two years, and low-income students make up more than a quarter of this year’s class. MIT officials cited their policy of providing free tuition for families earning less than $200,000 a year.
“MIT has always been an engine of opportunity for low-income students, and we are dedicated to ensuring that we can make an MIT education accessible to students from all walks of life,” Stu Schmill, dean of admissions at MIT, said in a statement.
Nationally, about a third of undergraduate students have received Pell Grants in recent years.
Two years ago, Amherst College in Massachusetts made tuition free for students in the bottom 80% of incomes in the United States. It also began covering meals and lodging for those below the median income, and stopped prioritizing children of alumni and donors in admissions decisions. Since then, low-income enrollment has risen steadily, reaching one in four new students this year.
At the same time, the admissions office has stepped up recruiting in parts of the country that have been overlooked, from big cities to small towns.
“When we go out and talk to students, it’s not in the fanciest ZIP codes,” said Matthew McGann, dean of admissions. “It’s in places where we know there is a lot of talent but not a lot of opportunities.”
Racial diversity does not necessarily follow economic diversity
On many campuses, officials hoped the focus on economic diversity would preserve racial diversity: Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans have the highest poverty rates in the country. But even as low-income numbers rise, many elite campuses have seen racial diversity decline.
Without the emphasis on income, those declines might have been even steeper, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocates for class-based affirmative action. He described Pell’s latest figures as “a significant step in the right direction.”
“Economic diversity is important in and of itself,” he said. “It is important that America’s ruling class, which disproportionately comes from selective colleges, includes people who have faced economic hardship in life.”
Swarthmore College saw the largest increase in Pell student enrollment, going from 17% to 30% last year.
While many campuses delayed scholarship decisions until the government resolved issues with a new financial aid form, Swarthmore used other data to determine applicants’ financial need. That allowed Swarthmore to offer scholarships to students while they were still waiting for decisions from other schools.
More financially disadvantaged students ended up enrolling at Swarthmore than officials expected. University leaders also credit their work with reducing campus costs: Laundry is free and students receive annual credits for textbooks, for example.
However, Swarthmore saw its enrollment of black students drop to 5% of its freshman class this year, from 8% the year before.
“In a race-neutral environment, those numbers are likely to drop,” Jim Bock, the dean of admissions, said in a statement. “Not all minority students are low-income, and not all majority students have significant financial means.”
Strategy risks federal scrutiny
In legal memos, the White House has alleged that prioritizing students based on income or geography amounts to “racial indirection” in violation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision against affirmative action.
In a June letter, Trump officials accused the University of California-Los Angeles of “admissions based on race in all but name.” The letter criticized UCLA for considering factors such as applicants’ family income, ZIP code and high school profile.
Colleges often weigh that type of information in admissions decisions. However, the Trump administration has stated that the Supreme Court decision prohibits a wide range of long-accepted educational practices, including scholarships aimed at students in disadvantaged areas.
There are already signs of an impact.
Earlier this year, the College Board, the nonprofit that oversees the SAT, suddenly suspended an offering that provided admissions offices with a wealth of information about applicants, including income data for their neighborhoods.
Kahlenberg and others see it as a concession to government pressure. The College Board offered little explanation, citing changes in federal and state policy on the use of demographic information in admissions.
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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
