The Supreme Court outlawed the use of race in admissions last month, but the scrutiny of colleges’ responses to the landmark ruling is just beginning.
Students for Fair Admissions made that clear on Tuesday when it sent a stern letter to 150 public and private colleges citing several passages from the court’s majority opinion, including its emphasis that the law requires “color-blind” admissions practices: “It is therefore incumbent upon your institutions to ensure compliance with this decision.”
The letter, which was signed “Sincerely yours,” by Edward Blum, SFFA’s founder, instructed colleges to take four specific actions. One was to stop making “check box” data about applicants’ race available to admissions officers.
You remember the check box, right? It came up again and again during oral arguments last fall. Lawyers for SFFA argued that admissions officers shouldn’t be able to consider which box applicants check on applications to note their race and ethnicity. The consideration of “race by itself,” one of those lawyers told the court, was unlawful. And in the end, the court’s majority agreed with that.
But does that mean colleges now must remove the check box from their admissions applications?
Art Coleman, co-founder and managing partner at EducationCounsel LLC, was asked that question during The Chronicle’s recent webinar about the implications of the court’s ruling. “Nothing should stop an institution from collecting the information,” he said. “There’s just nothing in the opinion that suggests that. … There are important reasons to take that data and evaluate it for educational purposes that affect all students. The question, legally, is: How are you using that information in the context of making decisions about whether a student is admitted or not?”
EducationCounsel, a consulting firm that advises colleges on legal issues, has published a working draft of its preliminary guidance on complying with the court’s decision. “The mere collection of disaggregated data based on race and ethnicity should remain as a viable, lawful practice,” it said.
That guidance also included the following: “It is important to segregate such collection practices from any effort to monitor class composition in real time with respect to rolling or other admissions practices, by which awareness of evolving class racial composition might influence the admissions decisions being made. In other words, maintain a clear separation between information accessible to those who are building an applicant pool and those involved in the individual applicant decision-making process.”
The check box is a powerful symbol. It has long figured prominently in the debate over race-conscious admissions. Critics of the practice, either in ignorance or a willful attempt to mislead, have helped popularize the widely held notion that underrepresented minority applicants gained admission to highly selective colleges merely by checking a box to indicate their race. But in holistic evaluations of applicants, race was one of many factors colleges considered — and just one.
The check box has remained a subject of considerable attention as colleges prepared to adjust their practices in anticipation of the court’s decision. This spring, the Common Application, the online platform used by more than a million students each year to apply to college, announced that it would allow its 1,000-plus member institutions to hide information about students’ race and ethnicity starting in August, but applicants may still choose to answer those voluntary questions. Member colleges already can hide information about an applicant’s birthday, gender, Social Security number, and test scores.
The court’s ruling has prompted confusion about the purpose of the check box now that colleges can’t consider an applicant’s race. “It’s a confusing issue because the assumption is that if it’s there, people will use it” in admissions decisions, said W. Carson Byrd, an associate research scientist at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “So the question people have is: If you don’t use it, then why do you need it?”
But that demographic data has many uses beyond evaluations of applicants for admission. “It’s helpful for understanding who’s applying,” said Byrd, who described the importance of such data in an op-ed for the Times Higher Education on Wednesday. “If we start to see a dramatic decrease in in-state students who are Black and Latino, there are going to be questions about what it was that made them decide that this wasn’t the place for them. These are really important kinds of questions. If you don’t have basic data about who these students are, you can’t really make any adjustments, you can’t make any programmatic changes or policy changes.”
This is what their endgame is — to literally get rid of data on race.
SFFA’s letter arrived during an especially anxious period for higher education. Throughout the nation, admissions and enrollment officials are huddling behind closed doors with general counsels and other administrators to make sense of the court’s decision, determine how to adjust their policies, and insulate their institutions from lawsuits as best they can.
Some admissions officials on Wednesday privately described SFFA’s letter as an attempt to bully and intimidate colleges into making changes that the court’s decision doesn’t necessarily compel them to make. The letter also instructed colleges “to prohibit your admissions office from preparing or reviewing any aggregated data (i.e., data involving two or more applicants) regarding race or ethnicity; eliminate any definition or guidance regarding ‘underrepresented’ racial groups; promulgate new admissions guidelines that make clear race is not to be a factor in the admission or denial of admission to any applicant.”
When asked via email if a specific incident or concern had prompted the letter, Blum wrote: “It’s common in various legal settings.”
No one should mistake SFFA’s letter for a list of legal commandments handed down from on high. Later this summer, the U.S. Education Department plans to issue federal guidance for complying with the court’s ruling. That document will provide specific advice on how colleges should adjust institutional practices to meet new race-neutral requirements.SFFA’s letter, on the other hand, was a growl from one of higher education’s self-appointed watchdogs.
But Byrd saw a deeper implication in what the group wrote. “This is what their endgame is — to literally get rid of data on race,” he said. “If we know that we have a lot of racial inequality, one of the ways we know whether something is getting better or worse is being able to have this kind of data. So, really, this is meant to undercut the ability to make policy changes or cultural changes. You can’t point at something if you don’t have the data. That is their ultimate goal: to prevent people from pointing out that systemic racism is still an everyday reality for people.”
The lawsuits that ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision on race-conscious admissions centered on two colleges where most prospective students who apply won’t get in.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, just two in 10 applicants were admitted for the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data. The odds of enrolling at Harvard were even slimmer: The Ivy League institution had an admission rate of 4 percent.
Institutions like them — selective enough to need to use race as a factor in admissions to diversify their student bodies — have garnered outsize attention in the long-running debate over affirmative action’s role in higher education. That’s in part because the road to high-level positions in government and industry often includes a stop at a highly selective institution. One example: Five out of six living U.S. presidents earned undergraduate degrees at colleges that admit less than 15 percent of applicants.
Still, in the landscape of colleges and universities, highly selective institutions are far outnumbered by those with much higher acceptance rates. Most students never participate in an admissions process that considers race in the manner of UNC and Harvard. Although it’s hard to say definitively which colleges use race in some way when making admissions decisions, selectivity is a useful lens through which to view the practice’s real reach, as the following data visualization shows.
Methodology
This analysis considered more than 3,000 degree-granting institutions in the United States that participate in the Title IV student-aid program. The percentages by race include the total minus students who identified as nonresidents or of unknown race. “Underrepresented minority” is the sum of students who are American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and two or more races. Only institutions that received more than 50 applications for first-time, first-year students for 2021-22 and had 150 or more undergraduates in the fall of 2021 are included. The percentages may not add up to 100 percent because of rounding.
Across the country, Republicans have attacked diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses as being discriminatory, ineffective, and a waste of taxpayer money. They’ve introduced dozens of laws in 21 states to try to dismantle the work of these offices and, in some cases, shut them down.
Some universities have responded by suspending DEI policies and programs, others by removing the word “diversity” from the names of offices and the titles of officers. The opposite is happening at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, an institution that has played a pivotal role in the decades-long debate over race and college access. Instead of cutting back, it’s doubling down on its commitment to one of the nation’s most expansive DEI efforts.
The university has been detailing its work on a public website and in campuswide and community meetings. Employees whose jobs in some way touch on diversity were worried about the growing attacks, says Tabbye M. Chavous, who in August became vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer.
“Some institutions were preemptively tamping down their efforts so they wouldn’t be the target of inquiry or be noticed, and there was some concern we might go in that direction,” she says. “Michigan learned there’s nothing we can do to avoid scrutiny, so why not try to be creative and bold within the confines of the law to take every effort to still uphold the value of diversity in higher ed. We just have to be prepared to defend it.”
The first five years of Michigan’s initial 10-year DEI plan have shown that gains are possible, even when the consideration of race in admissions is banned, as it has been for some time in Michigan and nine other states. They’re harder to achieve, though. Michigan’s DEI structure, with $85 million in initial funding and more than 100 employees contributing at least part time to diversity efforts, is widely considered among the most ambitious and well-funded offices in the nation. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation reported that Michigan had 163 people in DEI roles, making the university’s the largest “DEI bureaucracy” in the country.
Yet despite the size and scope of its efforts, Black students say the university has failed to meet their needs, especially when it comes to enrolling them in what they consider a critical mass — enough that they’re not isolated and forced to feel like spokespersons for their race.
Last year, after Black enrollment dipped to 3.9 percent — 14 percent of the state’s population is Black — the Black Student Union released a manifesto to highlight its most urgent needs. “DEI at the university, as it currently stands, is structurally flawed,” the student group wrote in November in a document it called “More Than Four: The 4 Point Platform.” The group wrote that “85 million dollars was spent on DEI efforts and yet, Black students’ experience on campus has hardly improved.”
After meeting with the student leaders, the university set up committees comprising faculty, staff, and students to tackle the four points discussed in the document and to make recommendations for the next round of DEI programs. That’s given student activists a front-row seat into some of the challenges a highly selective university faces in creating racially balanced classes.
Their input will be added to the mounds of data and pages of testimony collected and publicly posted during a year-long review of “DEI 1.0″ — the effort that spanned 2016 to 2021. In October a second five-year phase — “DEI 2.0″ — will start, focused on a subset of strategies that have showed measurable progress.
Over the past several years, the university has hired more diverse faculty and staff, increased the number of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and incorporated diversity-related material across the curriculum, according to a university analysis. However, fewer students reported being satisfied with the campus climate in 2021, compared to those surveyed in 2016.
The situation underscores how challenging it can be for DEI offices to do all they’re expected to do, including monitoring the recruitment and retention of minority faculty members and students while combatting real and perceived acts of racism. To critics, the mixed record is evidence that DEI practices and policies can struggle to achieve their own goals.
Across the country, most DEI offices are staffed with a few people with backgrounds in law, labor relations, or behavioral sciences who are expected to ensure compliance with federal laws, while making sure students, faculty, and staff from a variety of identities — underrepresented minorities, those who identify as LGBT, veterans, students with disabilities among them — are treated fairly. But even at the University of Michigan, with tenfold the number of staff assigned to diversity work, along with administrative, faculty, and political support, the DEI office is struggling to create conditions where minority students feel represented and included.
Chavous, who has worked in a variety of DEI-focused roles at the university since 1998 as both a faculty member and administrator, has spent much of her career researching how Black adolescents and young adults form their identities, and the roles institutions like universities play in that development.
Erin Kirkland, U. of Michigan
Tabbye Chavous is vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at the University of Michigan.
“A lot of the criticism of DEI is based on very effective misinformation,” she says. “Our work cuts across almost every community that people care about.” Robust diversity offices are more important than ever, she says. By the end of the month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to strike down, or at least severely restrict, the consideration of race in admissions. Chavous and others argue that DEI officers and the staff they oversee will be the people best positioned and trained to navigate a thorny political and legal landscape in the coming months to accomplish a vital task: recruiting and retaining students of color.
What Michigan has found, Chavous says, is that race-neutral approaches, like focusing instead on socioeconomic status, “are not an adequate substitute” for the race-conscious strategies that may soon be off the table at both public and private colleges nationwide.
The attacks on DEI and the potential for a nationwide affirmative action ban are twin pressures weighing on campus administrators at a time when the nation’s minority populations are growing, but their representation on many campuses is shrinking. Nationally, Black undergraduate enrollment dropped by about 17 percent between 2010 and 2020, and another 7 percent since then.
As of mid-June, 38 bills that would dismantle campus DEI efforts have been introduced in 21 states. Six have received final legislative approval, five have been signed into law, and 26 were considered but failed to pass before the end of the current legislative session. The bills mostly seek to eliminate the use of diversity statements, training, and funding for DEI offices. One of the most restrictive that is still under consideration is in Ohio, Michigan’s neighboring state. It would withhold money from public colleges unless they declare that they will not require students, faculty, or staff to take part in diversity training or programs.
Chavous says she feels a responsibility to speak out at a time when many college leaders have remained silent, fearing political backlash. In Michigan, a state with a Democratic governor, Senate, and House, “the legislative space is not as challenging as it is in other states,” she says, “but we’re only an election away from things changing. We’re not immune from those dynamics.”
Michigan has been a central character in higher education’s legal battle over race-conscious admissions. In the 1970s, Black student activists occupied the central administration building and boycotted classes, frustrated by the slow progress the university was making to diversify enrollment. During the 1980s and 1990s, the university pursued a plan it called the Michigan Mandate, which included aggressive recruiting efforts for minority faculty and specific enrollment targets for underrepresented students in all of the university’s colleges and schools. By the mid-1990s, Black enrollment had reached a peak of 9.3 percent.
The university’s practices attracted intense scrutiny and became the subject of two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases. In 2003, the court upheld the limited use of racial preferences in admission in a case, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan Law School. The court agreed with the law school that diversity was central to its mission and that race could be considered as one of many factors in admissions. In a separate case involving Michigan’s undergraduate admissions, the court ruled that the university’s practices had gone too far in favoring minority candidates. A point system with explicit benefits to minority groups was unconstitutional, the court determined. Race must not be the “deciding factor” in admissions. The university took the split rulings as a limited win for affirmative action.
The reprieve was short-lived. In 2006, Michigan residents approved Proposal 2, which banned public institutions from using affirmative action based on race or ethnicity in admissions and hiring. By then, worried about the possibility of more legal challenges, the university had already started backing off from its more-explicit consideration of race in admissions, and minority enrollments were sliding. After the state ban was imposed, Black and Native American enrollment dropped by 44 percent and 90 percent, respectively, the university reported last year.
The loss was felt across the campus. In a statement to The Chronicle last week, Santa J. Ono, who became president last October, said that “diversity in the broadest sense … benefits the exchange and development of ideas by increasing students’ variety of perspectives; promotes cross-racial understanding and dispels racial stereotypes; and helps prepare students to be leaders in a global marketplace and increasingly multicultural society.”
Michigan’s initial five-year diversity plan began in 2016. The $85-million program was created following a rally by several hundred faculty and staff members and the discovery of racially offensive flyers in several spots on campus.
The goal was to ensure that DEI permeated the entire highly decentralized campus.
Each of the university’s 50 units has a DEI lead — typically a full-time employee whose job also includes other responsibilities. Combined, these units came up with 2,800 detailed action plans for achieving diversity goals. The central office also pursued 37 universitywide strategies.
Between 2016 and 2021, the university reported that its DEI programs made the university more accessible and affordable for students from underserved communities, shrunk disparities in performance between majority and minority students, and created more diverse candidate pools for faculty and staff. Hispanic enrollment grew by 58 percent to 7.3 percent of undergraduates, while Asian American students rose by 40 percent to 17 percent of the total student body. Native American enrollment dropped by nearly 18 percent to 0.1 percent of undergraduates. Five percent of students in 2021 declared two or more races. Although the number of Black students increased slightly, from 1,255 in 2016 to 1,267 in 2021, it was less than the expansion of the university’s overall population, so the percentage of Black undergraduates dipped from 4.3 percent in 2016 to 3.9 percent in 2021.
85 million dollars was spent on DEI efforts and yet, Black students’ experience on campus has hardly improved.
During the first phase of DEI work, the university also opened a $10-million multicultural center, started an intensive tutoring and advising program with families and schools in four underserved areas, and offered free tuition to low-income students. Faculty were trained in inclusive teaching practices, students were supported by a larger network of peer mentors and professional coaches, and buildings were modified to accommodate people with disabilities. It was an unapologetically ambitious attempt to infuse DEI principles throughout the university’s processes and policies. Conservative critics took aim.
In its critique of “DEI bureaucracy,” the Heritage Foundation contends that Michigan’s DEI structure appears to “increase administrative bloat without contributing to the stated goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Chavous says the employees with diversity-related jobs are a tiny fraction of the Ann Arbor campus’s approximately 50,000 workers. Most have jobs that include other responsibilities and were already on staff before the DEI plan began in 2016, working in a variety of areas across the university: ensuring compliance with federal laws on sexual misconduct, age discrimination, and gender bias; helping faculty members teach more effectively; and advising struggling students. The $17 million a year the university spent during the first five years of its DEI plan represents less than 1 percent of the university’s annual operating budget of $2 billion.
“The breadth and depth of the work” across the university has made Michigan a model for others to follow if affirmative action is further restricted, says Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “It’s to their credit, but it’s also made them a target.”
Chavous hadn’t planned to step into the chief diversity officer role, previously held by her husband, Robert Sellers, until after the university started a nationwide search for his replacement. But the job aligned well with the research she’d done on identity development among minority adolescents and young adults, as well as the impact institutional climates have on students’ academic, social, and psychological adjustment. Students who don’t feel a sense of identity with their discipline are more likely to interpret the normal setbacks of college, she says, as affirmation that they don’t belong. That makes it all the more important, she says, to have a critical mass of minority students across all disciplines.
Chavous received a doctorate in community psychology from the University of Virginia. She and Sellers, who she met at the University of Virginia, have collaborated on research into how racial identity relates to well-being.
Chavous, who earns $380,000 a year and reports directly to the provost, is the president’s principal adviser on DEI issues. She works in a renovated 1928 building, formerly the home of the Museum of Natural History, whose rotunda is capped by a domed plaster ceiling with carvings of flowers, monkeys, geckos, and swirling vines. Millions of museum specimens were moved out so that the president, provost, and other top executives could move their offices in last year. Regents now meet in a two-story room that once housed dinosaur skeletons. It’s a setting that could both awe and inspire first-time visitors to the campus.
When she started, the university was preparing for a second round of DEI programming. The challenges happening in other states didn’t dissuade her from taking on the role. “I’d spent a career experiencing different forms of resistance to this work,” Chavous says. “I felt like this is water I was already swimming in.”
For enrollment managers, it can feel, at times, like treading water. The population of high-school graduates in Michigan has plummeted 40 percent since the 1990s, as industries like auto and manufacturing shrank and families moved out. Meanwhile, inequalities in school funding and the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on learning in predominantly minority schools mean that there are fewer competitive applicants in those schools. Because of the state ban, race can’t be factored into admissions decisions. The combined impact means that the university has had to rely more on out-of-state students to recruit a strong, diverse class, Chavous says. Out-of-state students now make up 50 percent of Michigan’s undergraduates.
One of the signature programs of DEI 1.0 is Wolverine Pathways, which offers year-round academic and social support to students, families, and schools in four underserved areas — Detroit, Ypsilanti, Grand Rapids, and Southfield — starting in seventh grade. One example of the support: a math specialist who’s familiar with both K-12 and university-level math helps bridge what is often a huge chasm in preparation for college.
About one in five of Ann Arbor’s entering Black in-state students are program graduates, university leaders say. Those who complete the program are more than twice as likely to apply to, get in, and go to Michigan, and those who are admitted to the Ann Arbor or Dearborn campuses receive four years of free tuition. But relying on place-based recruiting leaves out many Black students from middle- and upper-income families, Chavous says. Not all Black families live in poor neighborhoods, and the kind of diversity the university is seeking includes students from all socioeconomic levels, she says.
The central DEI office also oversees the Go Blue Guarantee, which offers four years of free tuition at Michigan’s Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses for qualified Michigan students whose families earn $65,000 a year or less.
A program called Success Connects was started by the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, which is also under the DEI office. It offers one-on-one coaching sessions, peer-support chats, and study skills and goal-setting workshops. Participants gained higher GPAs, were more involved in campus activities, and reported in surveys a greater sense of belonging.
Changing perceptions about the university is one of the main goals of its expanded outreach. “The University of Michigan is either seen by some families as inaccessible — it doesn’t admit people like me — or unapproachable — if I am admitted, will I find a home there?” says Carla O’Connor, director of Wolverine Pathways.
The university hopes that its $10-million Trotter Multicultural Center will create a welcoming environment for prospective students. Approved in 2014 and opened in 2019, the walls of its sunny, comfortable lounge are covered floor to ceiling with black-and-white mural-sized campus newspaper photos that trace decades of student activism. Michigan students are shown protesting the war in Vietnam, decrying racism, defending affirmative action, and many times over the decades, demanding better representation on campus.
Two leaders of the Black Student Union sat down with a Chronicle reporter shortly after graduation in a conference room at the center to talk about DEI. Brooklyn Blevins, a rising senior who serves as speaker of the group, says that the first phase of DEI seemed “sort of like a primer” to explain to majority groups why DEI matters. For decades, Black students had been making demands for greater diversity and inclusion. Their latest document took a less combative tone, Blevins says, to give the university’s new president and DEI leader time to work with them. “Coming straight out of the gate really hot with the new officers would be a lot,” Blevins says. “We didn’t want to sever the relationship before it even started.”
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Brooklyn Blevins and Kayla Tate at the University of Michigan Trotter Multicultural Center
Kayla Tate, who graduated in April, was last year’s BSU speaker. Explaining to white people why Black students often feel so isolated is tiring, she says. “So many times I’ve been the only Black person in my classes,” Tate says. “Having to intentionally seek out my community because there isn’t a critical mass of Black people — that’s work. Staying up ‘til 3 a.m. writing the political platform — we’re students ourselves — it’s labor on top of labor.”
A first-generation student from Detroit — a city whose population is 78 percent Black— Tate was apprehensive about the university when she went on a campus tour and saw few people who looked like her. What won her over was visiting the multicultural center, which had just opened, and seeing exhibits by artists of color. She credits the center, and the friends she met there, with helping her overcome doubts about whether she would fit in. Other colleges that accepted her sent her T-shirts and banners. With Michigan, “it’s such an elitist school that the attitude seemed to be ‘you’re lucky you got in.’”
Ono, the university’s president, and Chavous sat down with the students and agreed to involve them more in DEI planning by placing them on committees that will make recommendations in the fall. Ono said he agrees “100 percent” with the priorities of their platform: raising Black student enrollment, giving students more input in decision-making, investing in K-12 education to produce more college-ready students, and “explicitly combatting anti-Blackness.” An example of anti-Blackness, the student document says, is a deeply entrenched pattern, which current DEI efforts haven’t erased, of failing “to engage rigorously with the unique needs of Black students.”
Combatting anti-Blackness, “improving structural inequities, and bridging the opportunity gap” in public schools: These are big asks for a DEI office of any size. “Some of them know — OK we’re not going to eradicate racism in a semester, but what can we do that pushes the needle forward in a real way that others can build on,” Chavous says. “Eradicate inequality — that’s overwhelming,” she adds. A smaller, actionable step might be to recruit scholars with expertise in racial equity.
Blevins understands that many of the problems the students want to see fixed will take much longer than the four or five years most spend on campus. “We have so little time here, and often nothing comes of our efforts,” she says. As they approach graduation, student leaders try to pass as much information and strategies to the next generation of leaders so the momentum for change continues.
“We’re at a pivotal point now because we finally got a seat at the table,” Blevins says. “I’m hopeful for progress but choosing not to be naïve because these same promises have been made so many times in the past.”
When Black students complain about the climate at Michigan, some administrators worry that they’re scaring away potential applicants. “That’s victim-blaming,” Tate says in response. The “More Than Four” document echoes that. “We understand that having a reputation for being an unsafe space for Black students potentially deters prospective students and hinders their desire to attend,” it reads. “However, the Black students who endure this negative campus climate will not — nor should they be expected to — be silent about the harm, isolation, and inequities they experience.”
Those who oppose affinity groups and multicultural centers often argue that they segregate students. Tate says spending time in a place that feels like home gives her the confidence to spend the overwhelming majority of her time in what can feel like an “oppressively white” campus. “When I feel more grounded, that’s when I can go out and interact with others,” she says. “When I don’t feel grounded, I stay in my room and my grades suffer.”
Chavous’s research bears this out. Students who have a strong connection to their identity and heritage, she says, tend to be more motivated and persistent. “It doesn’t make you more insular — it makes you more proud in a way that gives you confidence to interact with others.” When she was growing up, her world history class made no mention of Africa, she says. Her parents, both civically engaged educators, encouraged her to read at home about current and historical Black role models and shared recollections of their own involvement in the civil-rights movement.
The Trotter Multicultural Center is a place where students can celebrate their own cultures, and learn about others. It came about because of decades of student activism at Michigan, including a 2013 Twitter campaign, #BBUM or Being Black at the University of Michigan. It was prompted, in part, by a planned fraternity party advertised as “Hood Ratchet Thursday” with an invitation that welcomed all “bad bitches, white girls, basketball players, thugs, and gangsters.” Tweets like these revealed common but unspoken frustrations and insecurities:
#BBUM is working in study groups and your answer to the question always requires a double check before approval.
The campaign, which went viral and prompted similar hashtags from other top universities, sparked a nationwide conversation about how isolated and stigmatized minority students often feel. Students also issued seven demands, including bringing Black undergraduate-student representation up to 10 percent — a demand that hasn’t been met — and building the new multicultural center.
The center, which replaced an aging structure farther from campus, has proven popular with a wide variety of students. Tensions have occasionally risen when Black students have had to compete with other students for conference spaces. On a recent Friday afternoon, Ali Curry studied for a GRE exam in the new Trotter lounge, which she described as “definitely the hub for Black students.” Until 4 p.m., it’s a quiet place to study, and after that, it’s somewhere to hang out with friends, play cards, watch movies, and listen to music. The building includes meeting rooms, study nooks, a roof deck, and kitchen.
“I grew up in Ann Arbor, and I’m from a predominantly white school and neighborhood, so I’m used to being one of the only Black people in a space,” Curry says. “But many of our students from areas like Detroit grew up surrounded by other Black people, and being among so few can give them a level of anxiety. It’s so important for them to have a place that feels like home.”
Plaques and photos throughout the building emphasize its roots in Black student activism, but as a multicultural center, it’s intended as a place where different groups can mingle. Curry understands Trotter should be open to all, but she feels that white students should respect that “this was founded as a result of Black activism, as a safe space for Black students.”
Last year, a Black graduate student wrote a letter to the Board of Regents complaining of “white student organizations kicking Black and brown students out of spaces within Trotter because their white organizations reserved the space.” The student, Byron D. Brooks, said white students were “colonizing” a building that was supposed to be “a Mecca for students of color.”
Charles Hilo, who at the time was a senior serving as editor in chief of The Michigan Review, a student-run publication with a conservative/libertarian bent, fired back. “If students, whether white or Black, feel uncomfortable around people of other races the solution is more integration, not less,” he wrote. In a closing dig, he added, “I wrote the entirety of this piece while sitting in the Trotter Multicultural Center. Cry more, Byron.” In other columns, Hilo and his co-writers complained that Michigan’s DEI efforts pit students against each other, make them more unhappy, and force everyone to walk on eggshells to avoid offending someone.
As evidence, the writers pointed to the results of the university’s 2016 and 2021 climate surveys. The percentage of students who were satisfied with the overall campus climate decreased from 72 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2021. Students in less-privileged groups generally felt less positive. Skeptics suggest that calling attention to inequities and setting up offices to tackle them encourage people to look for problems where they don’t exist and to turn small disagreements into bigger battles requiring interventions from administrators. (Neither Hilo nor Brooks could be reached for comment.)
The university sees it differently. Because of the intense institutional focus on DEI, the university’s progress report suggests, “those responding in 2021 have a greater understanding of DEI issues and challenges and may bring a more critical lens to their evaluations of the campus climate.”
The university acknowledges that more work is needed, but points out that, between 2016 and 2021, other factors besides DEI were weighing heavily on students, faculty, and staff, including the Covid-19 pandemic, racial unrest, and growing political divides.
Studies have shown that students perform better and are more likely to persist when they have opportunities to interact with faculty members from their own background, Chavous says. Michigan’s ban on affirmative action means that the university can’t factor race or gender into its hiring decisions, but it can still cultivate diverse applicant pools.
During the first phase of its latest DEI plan, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts started the Collegiate Fellows Program, focused on recruiting early-career academics with demonstrated commitments to diversity through teaching, research, and service. Over the first six years of the program, the university hired 50 fellows from a pool of nearly 4,000 applicants. Nearly all are now on tenure track. About 90 percent of the recipients are people of color, Chavous says, and nearly 70 percent are from underrepresented racial groups.
Faculty are offered mentoring and professional development, and because they’re brought in as a cohort, “they come in with a built-in network of friends,” says Elizabeth R. Cole, a professor of women’s and gender studies, psychology, and Afroamerican and African studies, who oversees the program. Cole also directs the National Center for Institutional Diversity, a campus-based program that researches the benefits, challenges, and opportunities for expanding diversity efforts. The center was started as a result of the state’s affirmative action ban.
Ono, the president, told listeners in the public session on DEI that his reasons for supporting diversity are partly personal. The son of a college professor who immigrated from Japan, Ono said he and his family experienced racism within the white, middle-class neighborhoods and schools where he grew up. “Having been a target of racism as a kid, I know how much it hurts and how much it gets in the way of a young person achieving at their optimum if they’re going to an institution where they don’t feel welcome,” he said.
While the field may be under attack elsewhere, he said, “it’s incredibly important for me to clearly show I’m behind DEI 1.0 but also, as we embark on DEI 2.0, that we do so with more vigor and more determination and more support from me and everyone here.”
The job won’t be done, Ono added, “until the students are convinced that they feel the impact of the work.”
It was almost midnight on St. Patrick’s Day at the University of Michigan, and the party was in full swing. Inside, college students were stumbling and falling to the ground as the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” pulsated through the room. A line ran out the door, filled with eager faces looking for a good time.
No, this wasn’t a fraternity mixer. This was Sober Skate.
And people weren’t falling onto a sticky wood floor, but a skating rink at the Yost Ice Arena. The event was so popular that within the first 30 minutes, the rental desk had already leased 300 of its 350 pairs of skates. The 45 large pizzas that organizers ordered were gone in an hour, as were the cases of Faygo and Diet Coke.
Each year around St. Patrick’s Day, Sober Skate — co-hosted by Michigan’s Collegiate Recovery Program and the Washtenaw Recovery Advocacy Project — offers local college students and community members a dry alternative to the holiday’s liquor-soaked festivities. Not all attendees identify as sober, but they’ve all chosen to abstain from alcohol on one of the highest-risk drinking nights of the year.
“Hundreds of people come out,” said Matthew Statman, manager of the recovery program, which supports students healing from substance-use issues. “And most of them are just young people who are not interested in drinking green beer.”
This year’s Sober Skate was the most popular yet. Statman said he is always surprised by how many students “come out of the woodwork” to attend the program’s substance-free events.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
A sober skating event hosted by the Collegiate Recovery Program at Yost Ice Arena in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“They’re everywhere,” Statman said. “Most students are not using substances heavily or frequently, but they’re just in the libraries and in the dorms. And you wouldn’t see them otherwise.”
For as long as the modern campus has existed — as long as films like Animal House and She’s the Man have primed expectations for campus life — administrators have tried to curb dangerous drinking. While students’ participation in drinking has fallen in the past 40 years, high-risk binge drinking has remained a stubborn problem.
Yet recently, there’s been a shift in many students’ attitudes toward drinking. Instead of seeing alcohol as a fact of college life, more students are questioning its presence in their lives. Many are deciding they don’t want it to be in their lives — or at least not as much.
Drinking remains widespread on campuses, and other substances are only becoming more popular. Still, students who choose sobriety are facing less social shame and judgment than in years past.
That’s great news for administrators who have long worked toward this end. But now they must figure out how to help students lead fulfilling social lives without alcohol — a substance which, like it or not, is entangled with many colleges’ bottom lines.
The sober movement’s roots formed long ago. It might not feel like it, but student drinking has been on a downward turn for the last four decades.
In 1981, 82 percent of students reported drinking in the previous 30 days. In 2021, that figure was less than 60 percent. The data come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future survey, which experts say is a reliable measure of students’ alcohol consumption. Students’ participation in drinking trended downward until about 1997 and has continued to decline slightly since then.
About 44 percent of students in 1981 self-reported binge drinking in the previous two weeks, according to the survey. In 2020, when many college students were home because of the pandemic, the binge-drinking rate fell to 24 percent, but it bounced back to 30 percent in 2021. Binge drinking is defined as having five or more drinks in one sitting.
Duncan B. Clark, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on adolescent substance use, said there was a significant drop in alcohol use in the 1980s after Congress made 21 the minimum drinking age. Since then, “a lot of the rates have been fairly stable,” he said.
“Seven years after most states increased the legal drinking age to 21, college officials are still wrestling with how to respond,” The Chronicle declared in 1990. “Some are trying to stamp out underage drinking on their campuses, while others say a more realistic approach is to acknowledge that students use alcohol and to encourage them not to abuse it.”
Over the past 40 years, colleges have poured millions of dollars into alcohol-education programs, health-promotion centers, and collegiate-recovery communities. They’ve invested time and money into hiring staff to oversee these efforts.
These interventions have worked to an extent. Recovery programs continue to pop up all over the country to support students healing from substance-use issues. At the same time, alcohol-education programs are a mixed bag, with the benefits wearing off over time.
And while binge-drinking behavior has slowed, it remains a major concern of college leaders, who fear that students will die from alcohol poisoning. Each death brings renewed calls for institutions to crack down on alcohol culture and hold the groups that cultivate it accountable.
These administrators may be relieved to learn, then, that there’s a nascent movement of college students turning down the red Solo cup.
While young people have many personal reasons for making the choice, confluent forces — a more inclusive society, a stronger safety net for those struggling with addiction, and increased skepticism toward alcohol — have made it easier than ever to be a college student who doesn’t drink.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Students converse as they lace up their skates during a sober skating event
That cuts against the conventional campus wisdom that students who abstain are just alcoholics. The substance-free community is made up of people with various reasons for not using alcohol and drugs, said Lindsay Garcia, who oversees Brown University’s Donovan Program for Recovery and Substance-Free Initiatives.
“Some people just want to study really hard,” Garcia said. “Some people have family history of addiction; some people are in recovery. People have religious reasons or personal reasons or medical reasons.”
Society has, in recent years, become more willing to embrace and organize around the sober lifestyle, Clark, of the University of Pittsburgh, said. He pointed to Dry January, a popular health campaign that encourages people to take a break from drinking in the new year.
More bars are offering “mocktails,” or nonalcoholic cocktails. Headlines declare that alcohol just isn’t cool anymore. The “sober curious” movement has spawned a cottage industry of podcasts, books, and social groups designed to uplift people who are questioning their relationship with alcohol.
People are also more attuned to the research on the negative health effects of alcohol, said Lynsey Romo, an associate professor of communications at North Carolina State University who studies how people talk about alcoholism and sobriety.
“All of a sudden, everything is ‘sober curious,’” Romo said. “Every single news outlet is writing about this.”
On campus, demographic shifts may be amplifying the sober wave.
Students today are more diverse, and research shows that students of color and first-generation students are less likely to drink excessively. Today’s college students are also more open-minded toward people who are different from them, and that’s reflected in the greater acceptance of those who choose not to drink.
“A lot of students coming in are really seeking to align with their values, seeking activities that allow them to grow,” she said. “This incoming student population is reflecting a lot more about that, and there’s a lot more awareness of the adverse effects of alcohol and consequences.”
One of the largest shifts in higher education over the past 20 years has been the increasing pressure on colleges to offer full services to their students. Many students today arrive on campus with the expectation that their institution provides not only academics, housing, and food, but also medical care, security services, and mental-health support.
In that vein, collegiate-recovery programs have sprouted across the United States. They offer sober housing, social events, and connections to community services. According to its website, the Association of Recovery in Higher Education has 152 member institutions worldwide.
At Michigan, most of the recovery program’s events are only for students in the close-knit group. But in addition to St. Patrick’s Day skating, the program hosts an annual sober tailgate, which is open to the public. For students who don’t enjoy drinking or partying, events like these prove that they’re not alone.
“I don’t really like parties,” said Wencke Groeneveld, a Michigan student who attended Sober Skate. “I prefer physical activity, and I am a big fan of ice-skating. Even when I go to parties, I don’t drink. But it’s a little bit weird because other people are drinking.”
And for students who do enjoy going out, the prospect of free pizza and ice-skating may be enough to lure them away from the party scene.
“Without alternatives like this, people will just get drunk,” said Maya Castleberry, a Michigan graduate who attended the event. “There’s a huge turnout. People see that ice-skating is more fun than drinking.”
Recovery programs only serve a subset of students who abstain, and those students’ needs are different. But just the presence of a collegiate-recovery program on campus helps normalize the experience of being a college student who doesn’t drink, Statman said.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Matt Statman, manager of the Collegiate Recovery Program at the University of Michigan
“Campuses that really are invested in collegiate recovery and raise up students in recovery do something to help normalize sober students, whether they’re in recovery or not, or need to be in recovery or not,” Statman said.
Some campuses have student-run clubs that host alcohol- and drug-free activities, like Bucknell University’s C.A.L.V.I.N. & H.O.B.B.E.S. and Brown University’s SoBear.
Madhu Subramanian, a senior at Brown and president of SoBear, said that while club events are designed for people who are substance-free, it is not a requirement.
“You just have to remain sober right before, and during,” Subramanian said. “I think we provide a really good avenue for people who, for whatever reason, might just want a space that doesn’t have substances for a night.”
SoBear’s spring 2023 schedule includes bookmark weaving and tote-bag decorating. Events typically draw between 20 and 30 students, Subramanian said. Once, a mocktail-and-movie night attracted 180 people. “Last week we created potted felt succulents,” he said. “Last semester we went to Dave & Buster’s.”
Sober students at Brown gather in several different ways, including through substance-free housing.
Requests to live in first-year substance-free housing have tripled since the beginning of the pandemic, Garcia said. When she assumed the position, in January 2021, participation in the collegiate-recovery program had dwindled to three or four active members. Now, it’s between 30 and 40.
Subramanian lives in Donovan House, a 17-bed residence for sober students.
“Everyone in the house is there for different reasons, but all of us completely respect each other’s reasons for not wanting to interact with substances,” he said.
“I wanted to create a space and awareness that binge-drinking culture is not required to have a good college experience,” said Julie Lawton, a sophomore at the University of Connecticut who runs a health-and-fitness TikTok account.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Natalie Christian, a recovery-support assistant and graduate of the University of Michigan
Lawton said social media helps people who choose not to drink feel less lonely.
“If people didn’t have social media, they’d look around in college and think everyone’s drinking,” she said. “The only reason people know that I don’t drink is because of my social media.”
When Lawton started college, she noticed how normalized drinking was at Connecticut. There wasn’t much to do in Storrs, she said, besides drink and party.
So she’d drink, but it didn’t make her feel good. Lawton said she’d get really bad “hangxiety,” which she defined as the anxiety one feels the morning after drinking, when you can’t remember who you talked to or what you said.
At the beginning of her sophomore year, Lawton decided to try going out sober. She didn’t tell anyone and made sure to have a nonalcoholic drink in her hand. “I felt like I had a lot more confidence sober,” she said.
But the frat parties aren’t clearing out just yet.
While sober students have found support and community, they still struggle to navigate their peers’ expectations around drinking.
“I am comfortable talking about it,” said Claire Fogarty, a junior at the University of Southern California, of her sobriety. “People don’t know my relationship with it. But it isn’t something you’re supposed to ask people about.”
Colleges are still playing catch-up on creating better sober spaces that work for students. Campus-sponsored events often end before the weekend-night revelry even begins.
“The administration can only do so much when it comes to student culture, because that’s something that takes years to change,” said Kacey Lee, a sophomore at Cornell University. “But I do wish they would implement night events or concerts or open-mic nights, low-key things at night so that there’s things for students to do without alcohol.”
Not having alternatives is especially difficult for students in recovery, who often have to choose between going out sober and staying in.
“College is not a recovery-enhancing environment,” said Katie Carroll, a Michigan senior and member of its Collegiate Recovery Program. “I’d love to say it’s as common to find sober activities as it is ones where drinking is involved, but it isn’t.”
At Michigan, part of the success of the skating event was that it was so late, running from 10 p.m. to midnight. When asked what their plans were for the rest of the night, most attendees said they would go to bed.
“I’ve come to college to study and get a degree, so it’s better that there’s an event that doesn’t involve alcohol,” said Pranav Varshney, a Michigan freshman. Ice-skating is “not going to make me feel bad the next day, and I can go back to studying.”
Hosting better substance-free events is one thing; changing attitudes and behavior around drinking is another.
Alcohol consumption is so entrenched in the public imagination of college life that its absence is newsworthy; we question why students do not drink, not why they do. And the functioning of the college relies, financially and otherwise, on the assumption that students will drink.
Institutions attract students by promising both academic and social nourishment, but the responsibility of engaging students often falls to Greek-life organizations and other student clubs where booze reigns supreme. Colleges reap the benefits: In 2021, a Gallup poll commissioned by the National Panhellenic Conference and the North American Interfraternity Council found that fraternity and sorority members were much more likely to report donating to their alma mater than unaffiliated alumni — 54 percent versus 10 percent. Former fraternity and sorority members were also more likely than unaffiliated alumni to recommend their institution to others.
These groups remain embroiled in alcohol-related hazing scandals. About 1,500 college students between 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related causes each year, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
“Although alcohol use has decreased over time, it still remains — by far — the most prevalent substance used on college campuses,” said Megan Patrick, a research professor at the University of Michigan and principal investigator on the Monitoring the Future study, in an email to The Chronicle.
And a recent TikTok trend that recommends mixing water, liquor, flavoring, and electrolytes in a gallon jug is a new stressor for administrators. Advocates of the borg (“blackout rage gallon”) argue that the concoction reduces harm, because drinkers control what goes in their jug. That’s not so reassuring to colleges.
Photo by Michael Theis, The Chronicle
A borg — “blackout rage gallon” — is a cocktail of spirits such as vodka, Kool-Aid, and electrolyte solutions drank from a repurposed gallon jug.
In March, during the annual “Blarney Blowout” binge-drinking event, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Town of Amherst released a joint statement alerting the community to the use of borgs. The Amherst Fire Department received 28 requests for ambulance transport during the event. Officials planned to “assess this weekend’s developments and consider steps to improve alcohol education and intervention.”
Marijuana use, meanwhile, has been rising steadily since the mid-aughts. In 2021, 24 percent of college students said they had used marijuana in the last month, according to Monitoring the Future data.
Statman, at the University of Michigan, said he has noticed an uptick in cannabis use as Michigan has legalized recreational use and dispensaries have opened within walking distance of campus.
“That’s affected the culture for sure around substance use,” he said. He said he didn’t have the numbers, but “I think it’s safe to say that more people are using cannabis than they were before you could go buy it at the store.”
There’s reason to be optimistic, though, about the trajectory of alcohol-free life on campus.
“All the positive trends that we’re seeing point to a safer campus in terms of alcohol use,” said Julia Martinez, an expert on college drinking and an associate professor of psychology at Colgate University.
Clark, the Pitt psychiatrist, said he welcomes the greater acceptance of sobriety on campus and the shift toward a more expansive definition of college fun.
“What is fairly ingrained in our culture is that being a college student is associated with alcohol and other drugs,” Clark said. “That’s proven to be a problematic expectation.”
Instead of embracing these expectations, college students today are charting their own paths.
Emily Elconin for The Chronicle
Students at a sober skating event
“People talk about this current generation like they don’t take on any risks,” Martinez said. “I would really want to emphasize that younger people are putting their foot down and are saying, ‘We don’t have to do the status quo.’”
In the lobby as the Michigan event waned, Bella Nuce, who graduated in 2021, reflected on the four years she has attended Sober Skate. When the 25-year-old first started going, it was much smaller, mostly fellow students in recovery. Now, it’s everyone.
She credited “a younger generation that’s more mature than me” for increasing Sober Skate’s popularity.
Meanwhile on the ice, Justine Sedky, who earned her master’s from Michigan in 2020, danced in anticipation of midnight. At that time, she would celebrate her fifth sober anniversary. Her peers whooped as the minutes counted down.
Of course, there would be no clinking of glasses when the clock struck midnight. Statman, the recovery-program manager, made just one request, tongue in cheek, as Sedky’s big moment approached: “Don’t drink.”
Public colleges and universities across the country are barring TikTok from their internet systems as a slew of states ban the popular video app from state-owned devices. In the last two months, more than two dozen states have issued such bans, prompting many public colleges to tell students they’ll have to log out of the campus Wi-Fi if they want to use the app.
In taking action against TikTok, many governors have cited the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray, who in early December told an audience at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor that the app raised national-security concerns. The app’s algorithm could be used to flood the United States with misinformation, Wray said, and its user data could be harvested for espionage. TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd., a Chinese technology company.
Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana, a Republican, sent a letter on January 3 to the Montana Board of Regents asking it to block TikTok’s use on Montana University System networks.
“The ability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to spy on Americans using TikTok is well documented,” he wrote. “Using or even downloading TikTok poses a massive security threat.”
TikTok has been banned from state-owned devices in 27 states and is partly banned in four states, according to a CNN analysis.
Texas is one of those states. After Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued a directive last month barring TikTok from state-owned devices and networks, the University of Texas at Austin announced this week that TikTok would no longer be accessible through its campus Wi-Fi. “As outlined in the governor’s directive, TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices — including when, where, and how they conduct internet activity — and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government,” wrote Jeff Neyland, the university’s adviser to the president on technology strategy, in an email.
The University of North Texas and the University of Texas at Dallas have also blocked access to TikTok on their Wi-Fi networks. In Alabama, Auburn University blocked TikTok through campus networks in December, after Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, banned the app from all state-government networks and devices.
The colleges are responding to executive action, but limiting access to the app may be in their best interests, said Karen North, a clinical professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. North said keeping TikTok off campus networks will help colleges protect their servers from data breaches or being hacked.
“The universities are really thinking long and hard right now about the fact that when people log on to the secure network at a university, and then they have apps on their phones that might penetrate that network, there’s a lot of really sensitive information that exists within that network,” North said.
Still, colleges have increasingly turned to TikTok to reach prospective students. A study by the Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of teens use TikTok.
A Tool for Teaching and Recruiting
That trend has created challenges for colleges seeking to follow their governors’ orders. The University of Central Oklahoma joined the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University in blocking access to TikTok through campus networks in December, following an executive order by Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican.
In an email to the Central Oklahoma community, the university’s communications team recommended that any existing campus TikTok accounts be deactivated.
Adrienne Nobles, vice president for communications and public affairs, said the university is exploring ways to continue promoting itself on TikTok, while observing the governor’s executive order.
“We’ve got a fantastic team of recruiters on the ground, great technology to support our recruitment strategies, and a strong presence on other social-media platforms,” Nobles said via email.
The Texas A&M University system has also banned TikTok access through its campus networks, even though some of its academic departments have popular accounts. The physics and astronomy department on the College Station campus has over 1.5 million followers on TikTok, where scientists share educational videos of their experiments. The account’s home page now directs viewers to YouTube, where the scientists continue to upload videos.
Kate Biberdorf, an associate professor of instruction in the University of Texas at Austin’s chemistry department, runs a popular TikTok account, with over 194,000 followers, that shares videos of science experiments.
Biberdorf, who uses TikTok in teaching and to get people interested in science, said it’s unusual for UT-Austin to limit educational tools on campus.
“There are a lot of different avenues that TikTok has, and I know it can be silly, and I know it can be goofy, but it can also be used as an educational tool and really help our students see some experiments that I can’t possibly do in the classroom, but I can 100 percent do safely in my home studio,” Biberdorf said.
She plans to continue making TikTok videos, which she can still film while disconnected from the campus network. But she said the new rule, which she understands the university must obey, could hamper recruitment of students and faculty members.
“I do know that right now we’re in a culture in our little Austin bubble where, over all, we kind of feel like our rights are being taken away, and this was just another push in the wrong direction,” she said. “So, I think in terms of recruitment, it definitely will have an impact because all of these little things are going to add up and make a big difference.”
Aynne Kokas, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, said that as TikTok becomes more ingrained in society, it will grow increasingly difficult to regulate the company.
“The more TikTok becomes embedded in the U.S. information ecosystem, the more difficult it is to take any significant action against the company,” she said, “because then it becomes not just a question of regulating the firm, but also impacting U.S. businesses, U.S. users.”
Kokas added that she doesn’t think blocking access to TikTok on campus networks will keep students off the app.
“I would be very surprised,” she said, “if that actually works.”
Eight years ago, New Jersey City University began several ambitious efforts to expand its campus locations through real-estate deals and a public-private partnership meant to bring in more students and money.
But the university’s grand vision has crumbled in the wake of the pandemic: Enrollment has slid more than 14 percent over the past two years, the university ended the previous fiscal year with a $14-million budget deficit (more than 10 percent of its total budget), and the president who helped lead the expansion plans resigned suddenly in June. College leaders are preparing to cut programs and faculty members, and the state’s governor has called for an investigation into the institution’s finances. Some state lawmakers are even questioning whether the university, commonly called NJCU, should remain open.
NJCU’s story is a cautionary tale for similar institutions — small public regional colleges with ambitions to expand in a crowded higher-education market. While its real-estate dealings have drawn unfavorable scrutiny, the university was responding to challenges that face its peers, in northern New Jersey and around the country: increased competition for a declining number of high-school graduates.
“It was reasonable for them to take a shot at growing,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “But the overall pool of potential students is far smaller than anyone was expecting, and students are generally wanting to go to bigger, more selective institutions.”
The university’s fiscal situation will not get better anytime soon. Enrollment is projected to fall again next year, and officials estimate a shortfall of nearly $13 million in the 2023 fiscal year, according to a September report to the university’s Board of Trustees.
How did things get this bad? Faculty members who objected to the expansion plans blamed the former president for mismanagement and betting the university’s future on risky ventures. None of the projects “have shown proper return on investment to date,” said a University Senate resolution of no confidence approved a year ago, “and it’s unclear when and if they ever will.”
University officials acknowledged the deals have not worked out as planned, but said the arrangements are not entirely to blame for their fiscal troubles.
“Would you have been able to predict a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic?” said Andrés Acebo, the university’s general counsel, describing the impact of Covid-19 on enrollment. “Since the fall of 2018, the university has lost close to 1,300 students,” Acebo said. “That would have a seismic impact on any institution. It would make life easier to say that real estate is the problem.”
Public regional universities, like NJCU, enroll about 40 percent of all college students nationally, and a far larger percentage of minority, low-income, and first-generation students than better-known flagships and top research universities do. At NJCU, for example, more than 70 percent of students qualify for Pell Grants, according to federal data, and two-thirds are Hispanic or Black, a reflection of Jersey City’s extraordinary diversity.
But a lack of state support, limited ability to attract students from outside the region, and sparse fund raising have made the university vulnerable to economic downturns and demographic shifts that have led to fewer high-school graduates, especially in the Northeast and upper Midwest.
In Connecticut, for example, the system of state colleges and universities is facing a budget shortfall of nearly $270 million, according to news accounts, in large part because of declining enrollments and increased labor costs.
In Michigan, public regionals are shuttering dorms or selling buildings to developers to offset the loss of tuition revenue, while enrollment at the flagships, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Michigan State, has remained strong and is even growing.
NJCU has fared worse than many of its peer institutions. From 2016 to 2021, undergraduate enrollment tumbled more than 21 percent, according to data from the university.
This fall’s enrollment declined nearly 5 percent from a year ago, university figures indicate, and it’s projected to decline 8 percent again next fall, according to the September report to the university’s board.
At one point, the university had a plan to put itself on a better footing, to serve more students in the region and diversify its revenues.
In 2014 the president, Susan Henderson, signed a 20-year lease on a 70,000-square-foot building to house its business school, with an annual rent of $2.3 million.
In 2017, Henderson was among the officials who broke ground on a 22-acre development that included a dormitory for the university, a performing-arts venue, and several commercial sites for apartments, retail stores, and parking. The land is owned by the university, but under their public-private partnership, the developers will not begin paying rent until the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years.
In 2018 the university signed a 40-year lease for space at a former U.S. Army base, some 50 miles away from the campus, that was being redeveloped by the state. That deal cost NJCU about $1.6 million a year beginning in 2021.
Initially, those plans seemed to work. Undergraduate enrollment grew 7 percent from 2014 to 2016, according to university figures.
But then enrollment dropped. And over time the real-estate deals led to financial problems, according to university audits and financial analysts at the bond-rating agency Moody’s Investors Service, in part because NJCU’s early enrollment projections were too rosy.
For example, the university’s foundation created a separate limited-liability corporation to finance the construction of the dormitory in the 22-acre University Place development. But because the university didn’t fill the dorm, it has “decided” to pay the corporation nearly $3.5 million since 2020 and has committed $3 million more for the current year, according to an auditor’s report.
Acebo, the university’s top lawyer, also blamed the financial problems on the university’s financial-aid program, which he said had increased from $3 million to $14 million in recent years. The program guarantees that the state’s high-school graduates from families earning less than $65,000 a year can complete their degrees without any student loans if they attend full time. It was another cost that was difficult to cover due to falling tuition revenue and increased operating expenses.
Henderson did not respond to a request for comment.
While enrollment has fallen at NJCU, the possibility of recruiting more students in the region is dimmed by the crowded market for higher education around Jersey City.
Within just a few miles of the university are several other institutions — Essex County College, Hudson County Community College, Rutgers University at Newark, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology — that are competing for some of the same students who typically attend NJCU.
Some institutions are openly advertising for students in NJCU’s own community. Saint Peter’s University, the Jersey City campus famed for its surprising success in the 2022 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, is even advertising at bus stops around the campus, said Francis Moran, a professor of political science at NJCU and president of its University Senate.
Montclair State University, about a 20-mile drive from NJCU, touts a seamless-transfer program with Hudson County Community College, which is just two miles away. Students in certain majors can start at Hudson and are guaranteed admission to Montclair to complete a bachelor’s degree. Unlike NJCU, enrollment at Montclair has declined only slightly during the pandemic.
For competitive reasons, NJCU should be considering ways to add other locations as expansion projects, said Tennessee’s Kelchen, who was previously a professor at Seton Hall University, which is just 14 miles from NJCU. “If they didn’t try to grow, other universities would eat their lunch,” he said.
But the university needs to be realistic, he said, about the kinds of projects it pursues and the competition for students in the region.
Despite the challenges of enrollment and competition, New Jersey’s elected officials have cast the university’s financial problems more as a matter of mismanagement and questioned whether it can remain open.
“I firmly believe an independent investigation into the school’s finances and operations would be in the best interests of the public at this time,” Gov. Phil Murphy said this past summer in a news release announcing his request for such an inquiry by the state comptroller.
In the announcement, the governor, a Democrat, cited news reports that the university’s “2014 surplus of $108 million vanished within one year due to pension liability and the issuance of bonds toward a greater expansion venture.”
The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
University officials have pushed back on those claims, explaining that the governor and journalists have confused the net position with a cash surplus. Instead, they have said, the negative net position is the result of 2015 changes in accounting rules that required NJCU to subtract the cost of pension liabilities that are paid by the state.
Audits and financial analysts have flagged other problems in the university’s development plans. For the past two years, the university has paid $1.4 million to the Strategic Development Group, a real-estate development and consulting firm owned by a former member of the NJCU foundation’s Board of Directors, Anthony V. Bastardi.
“In both fiscal years 2021 and 2020, the university incurred expenses of $0.7 million in monthly retainer fees, pertaining to real-estate consulting and project-management services,” according to the university’s audit.
Acebo said Bastardi’s company had been hired through a competitive bidding process and presented no conflict of interest.
Bastardi, who was on the foundation’s board from 2016 to 2020, said in an email that his company had “served as the special adviser to the president and Board of Trustees on real-estate matters. Our services were procured by means of state-compliant, competitive procedures, and our contract with the university was approved by its Board of Trustees.”
No matter the reasons, the university’s financial woes will have a deep impact on employee morale and the student experience.
Campus leaders are considering cutting up to 30 percent of academic programs, including many nondegree offerings, said Moran, the professor. More than 20 faculty positions could also be eliminated, he said, on top of the more than 40 already lost through attrition in recent years. NJCU employs about 250 full-time faculty members, according to university data.
Many faculty and staff members who do keep their jobs will see a pay cut. The faculty union and the university have agreed to unpaid furloughs of five to 18 days, depending on the employee’s pay.
Moran said many of his colleagues on campus are frustrated by the sense that NJCU is being singled out for a problem affecting many other public regional colleges in the state.
At the same time, the governor added $100 million to the state budget to renovate athletic facilities at the flagship campus of Rutgers University. NJCU’s total budget is less than $140 million.
“We’re going to lose faculty,” Moran said, “but Rutgers is going to get $100 million for a football stadium.” By contrast, he said, NJCU’s request for state money “is a drop in the bucket.”
