Brown University announced on Wednesday that it was launching a set of admission recruitment initiatives aimed at boosting the enrollment of “diverse students from all backgrounds.”
The strategy comes in the wake of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. University of North Carolina that essentially ended the practice of race-conscious college admissions used at many colleges.
In this fall’s entering class, the first after the Court’s decision, Brown saw the enrollment of underrepresented minority students decline to 18% of first-year students down from 27% in 2023.
In their announcement of the plan, Brown Provost Francis J. Doyle III, and Patricia Poitevien, interim vice president for institutional equity and diversity said, “Brown remains committed to complying with the law while fostering a diverse and inclusive community as integral to our mission of academic excellence.”
They then outlined what they called a “set of concrete actions focused on ensuring a robust pool of highly qualified diverse students apply to Brown and, once admitted, have access to the resources they need to enroll.”
The strategies include:
- Increased funding for matching financial aid awards to all students admitted to Brown from institutions making competitive offers;
- Greater participation by Brown with QuestBridge, a national nonprofit that helps connect top colleges and universities with talented high school students from low-income families;
- The addition of five regionally based admissions positions focused on local recruiting across the country. Their locations have yet to be finalized. These new staff would work with high schools and community-based organizations to boost diversity recruiting;
- New communications campaigns targeted at prospective students, their families and high school counselors:
- Additional admissions programming for guidance counselors to build understanding of Brown’s admissions process and its commitment to a diverse student body;
- Greater use of Brown’s alumni network to aid in recruitment and enrollment, with the goal of add more than 750 alumni for this effort;
- The addition of an alumni relations position and more partnerships with alumni affinity groups to support recruitment efforts in diverse communities;
- More travel grants for prospective and admitted low-income students to be able to visit Brown’s campus.
The Brown officials said the initiative, part of which will be funded through private donations, would be a “years-long effort,” intended “to sustain the pipeline of applicants to Brown from historically underrepresented student populations; increase awareness of Brown’s holistic, individualized, mission-driven admissions process among students, families and guidance counselors; and increase Brown’s yield of admitted students from a diverse range of backgrounds.”
The intent, they added, was “ensuring that prospective students and their families, as well as those who support them, feel confident in Brown’s commitment to providing a diverse and inclusive environment that is welcoming to students from all backgrounds.”
Two things the new recruiting strategy apparently will not involve are a rollback in Brown’s resumption of requiring standardized test scores for its undergraduate applicants and the elimination of its legacy preference, by which relatives of Brown alumni or the children of Brown faculty and staff are given some advantage in admission decisions.
Earlier this year, an ad-hoc campus committee released several recommendations related to by Brown’s admissions policies. Included in those recommendations were the ending of its test-optional policy and a call for the university to evaluate the data on applicants with family connections to Brown, “with attention to the policies and practices that will best serve to advance the institutional goals of academic excellence, equity, access and diversity.” At this point, Brown has not announced that it will discontinue its consideration of legacy status.