Are DEI Initiatives Still Necessary?

So, here’s the question: have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives achieved their intended or desired goals? For decades, governments issued ‘Affirmative Action‘ (AA) mandates to balance economic and social inequities and undo the biases of past governing administrations. However, in 2023, the US Supreme Court determined that the AA directives that drove those efforts were unconstitutional. The resulting lack of official guidance on equity issues leaves a void as the nation ponders the obvious “now what?” concern.

One agency is already researching the impact of AA and now of its demise. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce recently released a paper on how AA initiatives played out on America’s college campuses, many of which used AA regulations to structure their student support strategies. Its report, “Progress Interrupted,” looks at how higher ed demographics have changed as a consequence of race-, gender-, etc.-conscious policies. Other conversations within the academic world are also focused on these issues as schools grapple with how to achieve well-entrenched institutional diversity requirements now that the grounding federal impetus has been removed. It’s become a very interesting conversation.

Why DEI Initiatives Matter

According to one of the panelists at a 2023 Johns Hopkins University symposium, DEI strategies, including AA, are still needed because class and race continue to influence how Americans live their daily lives. Natasha Warikoo, an author and Tufts University sociology professor, spoke specifically on how economic and other inequities impact Black families:

“When you compare a poor or working-class Black family with a poor or working-class white family, [data shows that] they often live in different kinds of neighborhoods. … The white family is more likely to live in a more mixed-income neighborhood and go to schools with higher levels of academic achievement than poor Black kids.”

Additionally, she notes, Black families are also well behind white families in generational wealth building. Black families experience a median household wealth status that is only 15% of that of white families, leaving those people with far fewer resources to achieve access to and success in higher education programs.

The Georgetown report underscores the validity of Warikoo’s conclusions and why continued enforcement of equity principles in higher education institutions is necessary. Note, here, that the report focuses on equity practices in the nation’s most elite schools, those that cost a lot but also produce (arguably) the best-educated population of graduates. These ‘selective’ (most competitive) schools set high academic benchmarks for incoming populations and typically keep seat availability low to ensure that they enroll only the best-qualified applicants. (‘Middle-tier’ schools are deemed simply ‘competitive,’ while open-access schools that accept almost every applicant are labeled as ‘less’ or ‘non-competitive.’)

While only a small percentage of all higher ed schools are deemed ‘selective’ (the report states that there are 498 such schools), their graduates are also often offered the highest-paid jobs, are often advanced at a faster pace, and have access to higher career options than do those graduates from less competitive schools. And, according to the data, race certainly appears to play a part in who has access to those seats.

According to the report, over the course of the decade between 2009 and 2019:

• The percentage of ‘historically marginalized students’ (American Indian, Black, Alaska Native, Hispanic/Latino, and African American) rose by a mere 5%, from 16% in 2009 to 21% in 2019.
• Economically challenged learners also struggled to make it into the country’s top colleges. Learners with Pell Grants (who display exceptional financial need) accounted for only 24% of selective college populations but over 56% of open-access schools. Overall, students with more substantial financial bases (non-Pell Grant recipients) account for 58% of all higher educational enrollments.
• Graduation rates also differ from selective to open-access schools, typically because wealthier learners don’t have the same financial concerns or distracting obligations as their less-wealthy classmates. Overall, 78% of selective school cohort groups graduate within 150% of the typical time allotment, while only 37% of the open-access learners are able to achieve that metric. Even in elite schools, Pell Grant recipients aren’t able to match the graduation rate of their more financially stable colleagues. While 80% of non-Pell Grant learners graduate on time, only 69% of the Grant-holding students are able to achieve that milestone.

The data indicates that, for the student population of selective colleges to match the race/ethnic/class distribution of the typical high school graduating class, and therefore achieve a truly equitable and diverse population:

• the percentage of Black, Latino, and Indigenous persons needs to grow by 19%, and
• the percentage of less wealthy learners needs to increase by 30%.

This data indicates that true equity remains elusive, at least in America’s top and most selective educational institutions. In these communities, the impact of AA initiatives appears to be minimal, which means that millions of highly intelligent, highly motivated learners do not have the opportunity to attain the best possible education available.

Achieving DEI Goals Without AA Mandates

There are many ways for schools to achieve a more equitable campus even after the end of the AA mandate. One organization offers a two-pronged strategy that embeds equitable education resources into instructional materials to address traditionally oppressive pedagogy while also providing meaningful and relevant content that uplifts all students.

The non-profit organization everylearnereverywhere identifies its strategy as ‘social justice education.’ It presents two strategies that teachers can implement in pursuit of the standards they’ve devised to achieve true social justice: anti-racist teaching and abolitionist teaching.

• Anti-racist teaching expands on the practice of detailing the existence of societal inequities and how they evolved. In addition to those premises, teachers are encouraged to also discuss their particular experience with privilege, and how equitable and inequitable practices show up in their subject matter disciplines, research, industries, and communities. The curricula and practice help all learners to see not just the inequitable situations in their world but also track those impacts across multiple social sectors.
• Abolitionist teaching encourages pursuing systemic change by dismantling traditional, typically inequitable curricula and replacing them with materials that embrace and highlight the successes and values provided to the community by the underrepresented populations. People lose their sense of ‘otherness’ when their community’s contributions to society are raised to an equal level of value and validity as those of their more affluent (and often white) neighbors. It seeks to ‘abolish’ the thought processes and social norms that perpetuate inequitable actions and outcomes.

There is probably no one response to the question asked at the beginning of this piece. However, the demise of Affirmative Action as a driving force for equity does compel that query. If, after all these years and the millions of dollars spent pursuing these goals, America has still not achieved a truly equitable and just society, then what else needs to be done to attain that objective? Further, to what extent is the country willing to continue on this path, given that the Supreme Court has removed the biggest legal driver of the initiative? While the answers to all these queries have yet to be determined, it appears that the processes and impetuses in place to achieve these goals remain active, relevant, and more critically important than ever before.