Revitalizing College Admissions

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Designing Towards an Antiracist University

8 min readDec 9, 2021

This story was written as part of Designing Towards An Antiracist Stanford, a course at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) during the fall 2021 quarter. This project was led by Madison Haley, Sophia Lynn, and Kheshawn Wynn.

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended college admissions. In the past year, colleges from all across the country have begun to reimagine the admissions process. With testing centers closed due to the pandemic and schools transitioning to remote learning, colleges and universities had no other alternative than to transform a system that “has not changed in the span of 50 years”(1). Some changes, namely test-optional admissions and ending legacy admissions (2), had gained traction prior to the pandemic. Like many institutions within California (3), Stanford has waived the standardized testing requirement for another admissions cycle and made changes to their admissions essays. Despite these changes, many are questioning how educational equity will be impacted. A recent panel, sponsored by Stanford’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, tackled this question. The panelists remained skeptical that test-optional admissions would be “enough to combat the inequities ingrained in the college admissions process”(4). Our educational system plays a role in perpetuating systemic racism and inequity. While some of these admissions changes may help “level the playing field” for applicants from underrepresented communities; they could also produce unintended consequences. The path forward may be unknown, but it is evident that more work needs to be done in this space. For the scope of this article, let’s focus on Stanford University’s undergraduate admissions process.

Stanford Undergraduate Admissions:

According to Stanford’s Diversity Works website, ”diversity has been a core value at Stanford since the university’s founding in 1891.” Recently, Stanford released the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning Environment (IDEAL) Dashboards, which reflects the demographics of our campus community. According to the IDEAL Dashboard, Stanford is fairly diverse across racial and ethnic groups. White students comprise 29% of the undergraduate population, 25% for Asian students, 17% for Hispanic/Latino students, and 7% for Black/African American students (5). However, what Stanford desperately needs is to increase socioeconomic diversity. In 2017, the New York Times released a study on economic diversity and student outcomes in higher education. The figures for Stanford were particularly startling — “more than half of Stanford undergraduates came from a family in the top 10 percent of wealth in the United States”(6). Now, four years later, Stanford’s Faculty Senate is poised to establish new policies that de-emphasize wealth in the undergraduate admissions process. Wealth is not an official criteria for admission(7); however, its impact on undergraduate admissions is pervasive. Ask Stanford students about the role wealth plays in undergraduate admissions… we did. The insight and feedback we received from these sessions empowered us to dive deeper into this ecosystem and ultimately helped shape our final solution.

Our Beginnings:

At the start of the class we were interested in how structural inequalities were present within student access to higher education. Our early conversations were centered around university admissions (as a whole) as two of our team members are coterminal students who recently went through their own admissions processes for their graduate programs. Further conversations about our undergraduate admissions process made us realize that none of us applied to Stanford the “traditional” route of just submitting a Common App. Two of us were student-athletes and the other one of us applied to Stanford through Questbridge. We all wanted to explore the traditional admissions system and what barriers exist within it.

Key learnings:

To get started with our design process, we convened a focus group with an alumna of the course to discuss undergraduate admissions. Together, we explored different avenues to higher education that are available to students and why some would prefer one route over others. From the personal testimony of someone who chose to attend a historically black college or university (HBCU) over Stanford, we learned that there were not many university resources available to prospective students from BIPOC and other marginalized communities to encourage them to apply to and matriculate into schools like Stanford. We concluded that the lack of DEI recruitment at elite universities like Stanford, along with the heavy recruitment to legacy and wealthy applicants, causes students to feel uncomfortable applying to these universities. In the weeks following this first conversation we were able to draft a prototype identifying the problem with undergraduate admissions and how we could potentially correct this systemic inequality.

For our next focus group, we aimed to invite representatives from the various community centers on campus (Asian American Activities Center, Black Community Services Center, El Centro Chicano y Latino, First Gen-Low Income Office, etc.) and undergraduates from BIPOC communities at Stanford. We ended up being joined by a freshman and another guest who was invited to the conversation by our instructor Humera Fasihuddin. We went into this focus group wanting feedback on our prototype and suggestions for creating something tangible by the end of the course. Both of our guests brought up ideas related to mobilizing community members (including Black and Brown faculty) university accountability for upholding its commitment to providing access and opportunity for students from underrepresented backgrounds. It was this conversation that had the biggest influence on our decision to create a landing page to be featured on Stanford’s Office of Undergraduate Admission website, which we later named the Equity Action Plan.

Our design process was concluded with a presentation of the Equity Action Plan in front of our instructors, peers, and invited university stakeholders who consisted of former admissions officers, researchers, deans, and other administrators. We proposed the EAP with five main sections: 1) Mission & Goals, 2) Current Faculty & Students, 3) Outreach, 4) Advocacy, and 5) Call to Action. We were surprised to receive very engaging feedback from the stakeholders who listened to our presentation on how the Equity Action Plan could be revised should it ever come to fruition in the future. Many people thought that the EAP should cater to students a few years before they begin the college application process to open their minds to the multitude of opportunities that can come from higher education. It was so powerful to see so many people invested in making access to higher education a right that should be made available to all on equitable terms.

When we embarked on this journey at the beginning of the quarter our goal was never to create the perfect undergraduate admissions process at Stanford; instead, our goal was to take the first crucial step towards creating a better version of our admissions system. After ten weeks of applying design thinking principles and frameworks, we still do not have all the answers. That is why we need YOU. While our group will not be bringing these ideas to fruition, we hope that these suggestions will inspire you to get involved in this space or another area that you are passionate about. You will mature throughout your time on the Farm, but it is crucial that Stanford grows with you. We all have a role to play in designing towards an anti-racist Stanford and there is plenty of work to be accomplished. Use our recommendations as a starting-point: scrap some, evolve others, and eventually make them real. We look forward to seeing your progress!

Our Solution / Recommendations:

Our solutions and recommendations took many shapes throughout the quarter. They spanned from specific to broad, from feasible to farfetched, and from drafts to our final. We took all of the feedback from our teaching team, peers, stakeholders, and conversation guests to heart and owe them a tremendous ‘thank you’ for helping to shape our final prototype. Our solution was to create a landing page on Stanford’s admissions site. This landing page would serve as a singular destination for the coalition to create more equity and transparency in the undergraduate admissions process. We felt as though this was the best solution and first step to this large problem because there are so many different people and entities at Stanford who already care about this problem. Whether that be the faculty senate, student organizations, admissions officers, or anyone else. We believed our biggest additive to this cause would be to create a centralized platform for all different people and organizations to meet. This landing page would clearly state our goals, the parties involved, outreach, our advocacy measures, and our calls to action. We received a lot of great feedback that helped land our final prototype on this approach- we originally started from a policy point of view, hoping to convince Stanford to systematically change the way they run undergraduate admissions. We realized that we, as students in this class, would have a much larger impact by creating a space in which people could advocate together rather than attempting to tackle a much larger beast. We received great feedback on this in our final conversation- we heard recommendations like starting our outreach earlier because it’s generally too late to change a students admissions process when they are already juniors and seniors. Other feedback included focusing more on valuable stakeholders rather than attacking the university and using the power of influence. While we are not taking this project beyond this class, we met so many people at Stanford who are interested in this cause and we hope that we can provide them with a first step to taking action.