There are many aspects of a person’s life that affect their ability to go to college. The simplest thing many think of that determines whether a person can get a higher education is their merit. The idea of college at its core is that the harder you work to prove that you are an outstanding, intelligent and community-driven person in high school, the more likely you are to get into the college of your dreams. It ties right back into the tried-and-true American ideal that if you simply work hard enough, you will be able to live the life you desire.
However, those of us living in the common world understand more and more with each passing day that this idea is not based on the reality of the 21st century. Unfortunately, your work ethic is not the only determining factor in whether or not you get to live the life of your dreams. There are many other factors that determine things for people, such as the opportunity to attend college, which are often out of their individual control.
One of these factors is finances. While you might work exceptionally hard and be more than qualified to attend your dream school, you may come to find that there are often hundreds of other kids who have worked just as hard as you whose parents’ pockets are bigger to accommodate the exceptionally high costs of attending higher education. Another is location. The geographical location of where you attend school greatly impacts your access to a well-funded high school, the place that determines the bulk of your college application process.
While I just examined finance and location separately as determining factors in a college path, these two things actually tie together. This is because the most well-funded high schools often live in the most expensive locations, meaning that if your financial situation is weighing you down, your location likely is too. The union of these two concepts exists under intersectionality, a term that describes how two or more factors intersect to determine an outcome.
Other factors that exist in intersectionality are factors of identity. Gender and race are two factors that greatly determine the way you are treated by the society around you and how you live within it. An example of this is when college first became standard in the United States, all college institutions were reserved exclusively for the attendance of white men. Women and people of color had to advocate for decades just to gain the right to a higher education in the United States. This is a fact of our history.
In acknowledgement of that fact and the efforts of our ancestors, many colleges have put effort towards making college accessible to those whose identity has historically been a factor that negatively impacts their ability to attend a college institution. However, these efforts have recently been ordered to cease by the Donald Trump administration.
According to AP News, “A coalition of 17 Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging a Trump administration policy that requires higher education institutions to collect data showing they aren’t considering race in admissions.” This policy set forward by the administration requires colleges to submit the required data within a specific time-frame or face consequences regarding funding at the federal level.
“The memo directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to require colleges to report more data “to provide adequate transparency into admissions.” The National Center for Education Statistics will collect new data, including the race and sex of colleges’ applicants, admitted students and enrolled students. McMahon said the data, which is due by March 18, must be disaggregated by race and sex and retroactively reported for the past seven years,” according to AP News.
The article continues, “If colleges fail to submit timely, complete and accurate data, McMahon can take action under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which outlines requirements for colleges receiving federal financial aid for students, according to the memo.”
Essentially, if a student’s acceptance to a college has been at all influenced by them being of an underrepresented race, the college will face punishment. Because of this looming punishment, programs such as Landscape, a tool operated by the non-profit College Board that allowed admissions officers to view data on an applying student’s neighborhood, high school, median family income, crime rates in locations and percentage of single-parent households, have been shut down.
The elimination of Landscape in particular is a key example of why this administrative mandate is absurd. See, Landscape was never designed to specifically collect race data. However, because it was designed to examine the other factors listed, it allowed many Black, Latino and other racially underrepresented children from low-income neighborhoods to be able to go to college.
This is because the way that the U.S. has systemically operated for years has forced many people of color into underserved communities that disable their chances to receive a higher education, as growing up in an underserved community means that you face financial, locational and other systemic challenges. This is a fact that sociologists have studied and accepted for years, and means that a person’s race often either creates or eliminates barriers that might deter them in their journey to college.
The Trump administration and those who support it continue to put forward and advocate for legalities to dismantle tools that help people of color under the guise that we live in a society that is entirely equal on the basis of race, and therefore these tools are unnecessary and discriminatory against white people who, in their minds, do not have any inherent privilege in our society. The reality is that if you take even 10 minutes of your lifetime to learn basic sociology or take a glimpse back into the past 100 years of American history, you will learn very quickly that white people do have and have always had inherent privilege over people of color in our society.
The idea that white people are somehow being sabotaged by a college admissions process that favors people of color is rich considering people of color were widely barred from even attending college in the many years close to its inception solely because of the color of their skin. The idea becomes even richer when advocated for by an administrative cabinet that boasts a 17% person of color participation compared to the 43.4% of the United States population that is not white.
It is high time we stop entertaining the ideas of people who live in a fantasy world so dictated by white privilege that they cannot understand the basic concept of how race affects the determining factors of an individual’s livelihood. Just because it is no longer culturally acceptable for white people to spew slurs at someone with darker skin than them on the street does not mean that racism does not still exist systemically and independently in our country, and yes, the fact that it still exists affects something as major as a person’s ability to attend higher education.
At the end of the day, in a country where approximately 771,480 people are currently homeless, around 27.1 million people actively avoid health check-ups because they do not have any form of health insurance, and 30 million people live in areas where drinking water systems regularly violate safety regulations, there are simply more pressing issues for our government to be putting their resources towards other than whether or not more people of color can attend college than they would like. This policy being put forward by the Trump Administration exemplifies everything wrong with modern politics, and we need to put our energy towards uplifting underserved communities rather than wasting our time entertaining it.
Serena Taylor can be contacted at
