Minority Student Access to Higher Education

Roots of Access

Tracing back to its beginnings, higher education in the United States was reserved for an elite few, typically White males from privileged backgrounds. As a result, minority students found alternate paths to higher education through such initiatives as the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Although the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education focused on elementary and secondary public school education, it underscored the inequity of educational opportunities for students based on race.

Campaigns such as the civil rights movement and public pressures pushed colleges and universities to address racial concerns on their campuses. Over time, the doors of higher education slowly opened to include a more diverse population. Today, however, some [Page 505]colleges and universities still continue to struggle with diversification of their campuses. As such, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights functions as an agency to ensure and enforce nondis-criminatory educational practices.

To support and encourage minority student participation in higher education, affirmative action policies were designed to counteract the past effects of racial discrimination and recruit underrepresented groups of students to colleges across the country. These policies, however, were met with much controversy. Over time, the public tested the authority of affirmation action in the courts. In the 1978 case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court determined that race could be a factor taken into consideration when assembling a student body. The Court, however, rejected the use of quotas to implement affirmative action policies.

In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld the decision that race could be a factor considered for admission purposes in a case against the University of Michigan Law School, Grutter v. Bollinger. That same year, the Supreme Court also ruled in Gratz v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan's Undergraduate Admissions Office could not award students admissions points simply based on race. Ultimately, the Supreme Court's message encouraged colleges and universities to assemble a diverse student body without using formulaic methods.

Choice and Benefits

According to the College Board, students who graduate with a bachelor's degree earn annual salaries that average $20,000 a year more than high school diploma recipients. Current literature also suggests that attainment of a bachelor's degree is associated with lower unemployment rates, fewer incarcerations, increased voter participation, greater tax contributions, and positive health-related behaviors. The benefit of higher education extends not only to individuals, but also to the greater society. That is, investment in higher education is both a private and a public endeavor.

Inadequate academic preparedness and/or lack of opportunities for college preparation in high school can inhibit minority students from transitioning into college. Governmental support and outreach programs that address these issues, however, tend to be subject to cutbacks and elimination every budget year. Especially for minority students from urban areas, the accessibility of guidance counselors is low, and these students often do not have the necessary information regarding the college process when making their future career and educational goals. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2004, 35.6 percent of the high school dropouts were Hispanic and Black students compared to 6.8 percent of White students. Conversely, 72.2 percent of bachelor's degree recipients were White, non-Hispanic in 2003–2004. This achievement gap also persists at the graduate and professional school level.

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