MIX & MATCH

By GRANT JOHNSON, LIZZIE STONE & MORGAN BLAIR The Breeze

Between the Supreme Court’s ruling in late June that made race-conscious programs virtually impossible to justify and recent decisions at some universities to limit their preference of legacy students in admissions, the student makeup at a sizable chunk of schools across the country will probably look different for years to come.

But with its current practices, those changes won’t impact JMU.

In an interview with The Breeze in July, JMU President Jonathan Alger said the university already does not use race as a criterion when admitting students, and, in an Aug. 10 email, JMU spokesperson Mary-Hope Vass said legacy status likewise “is not a criteria for admissions.”

So, how is JMU, a school where 74.3% of the student body identified as white in fall 2022 — 14.5% higher than the state’s population — increasing diversity?

The answer, Alger said, may hinge on upping JMU’s socioeconomic diversity by making its financial aid packages and scholarships available to more first-generation students, veterans and students from a wider array of geographical areas — partly similar to what’s been in place in states that moved away from race-conscious admissions long ago, such as California Univerisity and Michigan University.

What remains JMU’s biggest obstacle in becoming more diverse?

Alger said it multiple times in the roughly 30-minute interview: To compete for prospective students against universities that have deeper pockets than JMU, it needs to continue to ramp up financial aid offerings.

“That is the single biggest need that we have, in my mind, here at JMU,” Alger said. “Financial aid is really where we sometimes struggle because we have a pretty modest endowment compared to a lot of other universities that have been around a lot longer and that have had a culture of philanthropy for a lot longer.”

The value of JMU’s “true and quasi endowments” as of June 2022 was $123 million, a far cry from other large public universities in the Commonwealth such as U.Va. ($13.6 billion), Virginia Tech ($2.6 billion) and VCU ($2.4 billion).

To increase its endowment, JMU has launched initiatives such as Dukes Pay it Forward endowed scholarships — five-year awards of $5,000 or more given in the donor’s name — as well as by participating in the American Talent Initiative, which works with colleges nationally to attract Pell Grant-eligible and first-generation students who otherwise might not be able to afford college.

The Warden Scholarship Match, which raised more than $3 million in 2022, is another initiative to bring Pell-eligible students to JMU, which, Alger said, is “going to be a major focus certainly for us, and nationally, going forward.”

Pell Grants are awarded by the U.S. Department of Education to students displaying an exceptional financial need for college — grants that do not have to be repaid. Pell Grants were given to 15% of JMU students in 2021 according to State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), lagging behind the 27% median at four-year Virginia colleges.

As The Breeze reported in 2021, JMU faces a steep climb to receive more funding from the state, one reason being its student body consists of more students from wealthier backgrounds than, for example, VCU and George Mason — schools that get more money to support its larger population of lower-income students. Brad Barnett, director of the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships, said at the time that 60% of JMU’s student body receives some form of financial aid, either through federal, state or institutional grant and scholarship funding, or through student loans.

“My dream for JMU would be to get to the point where anybody who wants to come to JMU and is qualified and able to do the work is able to get an access to a JMU education,” Alger said. “And that’s where, particularly, with scholarships and financial aid, we’re not there yet. We still have a significant ways to go.”

Why hasn’t JMU

used race as a factor in admissions?

The seeds were planted long before Alger arrived in Harrisonburg.

Prior to becoming JMU’s president in 2012, Alger worked as assistant general counsel in the early 2000s at the University of Michigan, where he helped develop the school’s arguments in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, two Supreme Court cases in which students looking to be admitted into Michigan’s law and undergraduate programs, respectively, challenged its race-conscious admissions policies.

In both cases, Alger said in a follow-up email to The Breeze on Aug. 9, the consideration of race “as a compelling interest” in admissions was upheld. However, consideration of race under constitutional standards must meet “strict scrutiny,” which the Gratz case did not.

So, Michigan, with the help of Alger, won the Grutter case — race could be used as a factor in admissions, albeit not a major factor — but lost to Gratz.

In Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion in the 2003 Grutter case, she read, “It has been 25 years since Justice [Lewis] Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education [in the 1978 California v. Bakke case] … We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

That opinion, Alger said, led universities across the country to start focusing heavily on “raceneutral” alternatives to achieve the educational benefits of diversity — foreshadowing the ruling two decades in the making regarding Harvard and North Carolina.

“It was not a particular surprise,” Alger said, adding that he read all of the roughly 250 pages of opinions in the late-June ruling and has been “thinking about and working on” diversity-related cases for 30 years, dating back to his time working for the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in the 1990s. “It reflects the changing composition of the Supreme Court, so it was the kind of decision many of us had anticipated.”

All of the amicus briefs — “friends of the court” providing third-party testimonies — that Alger worked on during the Michigan cases led him to consider alternative ways to increase access and opportunity to higher education: that intervention needs to start earlier than right before college, rather, at the K-12 level. He said organizations came together harping on how important diversity is in the military, corporate America and education of all levels.

“If you wait until students are seniors in high school, it’s in some ways too late to make much of an impact,” Alger said. “They’ve already taken the courses that they’re going to take, and they’re either prepared or not for admissions to different schools.”

After leaving Michigan, he became Rutgers University’s senior vice president of general counsel and worked on the Rutgers Future Scholars program — a similar model to JMU’s Valley Scholars program — to increase access to higher education earlier in students’ careers before it’s too late.

“Very much in my mind was, ‘How do you build sort of pipeline programs that create opportunities for students of all backgrounds?’” Alger said. “Especially students that might not otherwise be expected to go to college.”

What has JMU been doing to diversify its student body?

JMU’s Valley Scholars program, the early-intervention model to get students on a college track early in their academic careers,just turned nine years old this past academic year. The first cohort of 19 students, 17 at JMU, graduated in May.

It works like this: Guidance counselors and middle school teacher help JMU find students in its backyard who have the academic potential to get to college but might be not able to because of financial or social situations. If Valley Scholar students maintain acceptable grades through high school and get admitted to JMU, they have a full-ride scholarship waiting for them.

But, Alger cautioned, these kinds of programs take a while “to really bear fruit” because of the the long-term support and funding they need.

Nevertheless, with more national dialogue about how to adjust to many colleges’ changing student demographics, it’s “an example of the kind of model I think that we have to be thinking about going forward.”

“It’s the kind of relationship or partnership, collaboration, working across institutional lines, that I think is so important,” said Alger, who was asked by the Department of Education to speak at a late-July summit

by Ben Moulse /TheBreeze

about Valley Scholars. “To me, long-term solutions are going to require that kind of thinking, that kind of partnership and collaboration, because we can’t expect higher ed to solve these issues on its own, and we can’t expect K-to-12 necessarily to do it on its own either.”

Valley Scholars’ success is hard to measure after just one graduating class passing through, though JMU’s changing diversity numbers — as it pertains to race — since 2013 seem to reflect at least a marginal improvement. The percentage of JMU students who identify as Black (4% to 4.8%), Asian (4% to 5.7%) and Hispanic (4.6% to 7.4%) have all gone up over the last 10 years, while white-identifying students have dipped from 78.8% in 2013 to 74.3% this past fall.

Other diversity and outreach efforts, Alger said, include on-campus summer camps that host K-12 students, professor-in-residence programs — faculty members embedded in different schools across the Commonwealth — and the opening of the Reddix Center for First-Generation Students in the Student Success Center, meant to create a “sense of belonging” for the roughly 12% of JMU’s student body who are first-gen.

“It’s got to be a number of approaches that you’re working on simultaneously,” Alger said about upping diversity. “I think what you’re going to see here is there’s going to be a lot of conversation about what’s worked so far, what lessons can be learned from schools that have been doing this, what are things that are good models but now should be scaled up?”

According to a recent JMU campus climate survey — which was open to students, faculty members and staff in fall 2021 and drew 4,450 respondents — 69% of students said they were “comfortable” on campus. Emil Cunningham, vice president of external relations for Rankin & Associates Consulting and presenter of the results in April 2022, said people who identify as a marginalized group, such as women, transgender people and Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC) are significantly less comfortable on campus.

For Alger, a diverse, comforting environment is what will take JMU’s campus climate up a notch.

“Diversity and excellence go hand in hand,” Alger said. “They’re not competing concepts.”

CONTACT Contact Grant Johnson at breezeeditor@gmail.com, Lizzie Stone at breezenews@gmail.com and Morgan Blair at thebreezeculture@gmail. com. For more coverage of JMU and Harrisonburg news, follow the news desk on Twitter @BreezeNewsJMU.