But creating that labor pool — taking people from wildly different backgrounds and circumstances and turning them all into polished graduates with comparable skills — is tremendously hard, expensive work. Most corporations that reap the benefits contribute almost nothing to the effort. They sit back and wait, content to let the nation’s colleges and universities scout and nurture that talent.
That’s not going to work anymore.
Look at what happened when California banned affirmative action nearly 27 years ago. Colleges and universities saw a sharp decrease in the diversity of their incoming classes. Many of those institutions were eventually able to get their numbers at least part of the way back up, but developing and implementing new recruitment efforts, including hiring more staff, partnering with community-based organizations and investing in emerging technologies, cost the University of California system more than half a billion dollars, money most institutions don’t have and most states aren’t going to spend.
As a beneficiary of affirmative action myself, I spent most of my career on college campuses working to help pass forward the opportunities that I was given. Changing these institutions is difficult and lonely work, provided the lack of resources most admission officers rely on to achieve the conflicting goals of diversifying classes and meeting tuition revenue targets. For America’s colleges and universities to continue to produce a diverse work force and train young people to engage across differences, our employers are going to have to help make up for what the Supreme Court has now taken away. What if instead of just decrying the problem, Google, Apple, G.E., Mastercard, Meta, G.M., Verizon and all the others who filed amicus briefs leveraged their staggering financial power to fix it? The good news is there are many ways to have an impact.
The most obvious way to help colleges level the field among students is to level the field among colleges. But the largest gifts in higher education often go to the institutions with the most resources. Harvard University recently received a gift of $300 million, the University of Chicago received a gift of $100 million and Columbia University received a gift of $175 million. The combined endowments of these institutions add up to more than $74 billion. They can already afford to fund expensive diversity efforts. What if, instead of the $500 million that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has pledged to Harvard, it spread that kind of money around institutions like Trinity Washington University, where a majority of students are Black or Hispanic and 63 percent of students are Pell Grant recipients?
I asked Elsa Núñez, president of Eastern Connecticut State University, what her institution, with its modest $50 million endowment, could do with a $100 million gift. “I would make sure students have enough financial aid to enroll and ultimately graduate,” she said. “The nation’s most diverse students need money to attend and succeed. When you’re worried about paying for rent or your next meal, you can’t focus on graduating. We have to take away the stress that not having money creates.”