The ways in which colleges decide whom to accept in their incoming classes have recently come under increased scrutiny from the Trump administration, which has used settlements, a memo and an executive action to pressure colleges to change their admissions practices.

Those directives reflect the administration’s focus on ensuring what they call merit in the process, as well as an effort to expand the Supreme Court’s decision banning race-conscious admissions to bar any type of race-based programming or activities.

That includes using “proxies” for race in recruitment. In a recent memo, Attorney General Pamela Bondi specifically warned colleges against using geographic targeting—recruiting from a specific city, neighborhood or high school.

“A federally funded organization implement[ing] recruitment strategies targeting specific geographic areas, institutions, or organizations chosen primarily because of their racial or ethnic composition rather than other legitimate factors” would be unlawful and discriminatory, the memo states.

Engaging in potentially unlawful practices could lead to a loss in grant funding, Bondi added.

The federal government applied more pressure to colleges with an executive action last week that directed colleges to submit more admissions data to the Education Department.

This scrutiny of geographic targeting, which comes just as admissions season for many institutions has gotten underway, could complicate colleges’ efforts to recruit students this fall. Many have already begun traveling for recruitment purposes, but there is concern that once-routine high school visits could put them in the Trump administration’s line of fire.

The administration’s focus on recruitment strategics can be traced back to the immediate aftermath of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the Supreme Court barred race-conscious admissions policies. Some education-equity experts and legal scholars at the time suggested that increasing the geographic recruitment of low-income and historically underserved students could be another way to boost racial diversity in incoming classes. (And even at the time, some conservatives labeled such efforts attempts to circumvent the law.)

The court’s decision seemed to indicate that doing so would be legal. In his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. pointed to a brief submitted by lawyers representing SFFA. In it, the lawyers suggested institutions could adopt strategies that have been used to maintain racial diversity in states where affirmative action was already banned, including “policies promoting geographic diversity, including percentage plans” and “partnerships with disadvantaged high schools.” (Under percentage plans, colleges agree to admit students in the top 10 percent of every high school in their state. These plans have been shown to improve both racial and socioeconomic diversity.)

Harlem and Rural Missouri

Admissions and college access experts, however, argue that many college didn’t actually revamp their recruitment strategies to focus more on primarily Black and Hispanic areas.

Geographic recruitment, they say, is and has long been just one of the many tools in an admissions office’s toolbox to recruit students with characteristics an institution is seeking out.

“It’s a combination of: Where have your students historically come from? Because you want to continue to serve those communities,” said Angel B. Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “It is also … to be 100 percent honest: Where are there enough students who can pay your tuition? Because most colleges in America are highly tuition dependent.”

Geographic recruitment could also include coaches reaching out to high schools with certain strong sports programs or a university with a storied marching band recruiting in communities with their own successful bands.

More recently, as the number of high schoolers entering college in many parts of the nation has begun declining, colleges have refocused efforts on few areas of the country where there is an increasing high school population, including California and Texas, added Pérez.

“Institutions are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Does [the memo] mean you cannot go recruit in … Harlem, New York? That I should not recruit in Washington, D.C., because there are students of color there? Well, there are white students there, too,” he said.

Edward Blum, who spearheaded the affirmative action ban, told Inside Higher Ed in February that he views geographic targeting as unconstitutional if a college is recruiting from “Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, and not also rural Missouri and northern Maine.”

Many colleges participate in rural recruiting initiatives. It’s also common for institutions to target recruitment at wealthier enclaves that also tend to skew white, in hopes of finding students who can pay the full cost of tuition. A 2018 study showed that colleges are more likely to visit high schools in areas where the median family income was upward of $100,000—and bypass those in the $60,000–$70,000 range. When colleges visit high schools out of state, those are often in areas that are wealthier than the colleges they visited in state.

Beyond institutions, most college access initiatives are also positioned in underprivileged areas or high schools, many of which have student bodies that are majority students of color, according to Catherine Brown, senior director for policy and advocacy at the National College Attainment Network, a member organization for college-access groups.

The goal is not to get more students of color into college, she said, but to help improve the lives and outcomes of students, their families and their communities in an area that has historically been underresourced.

“Often, the way place-based college access programs function is they’re really designed to be economic development programs for communities. The goal is to better educate the students graduating from high school there and then entice them to remain in the community and generate jobs and buy homes and start families,” Brown said. “I can’t imagine that this is the kind of approach that the Trump administration wants to crack down on. Just as a practical matter, what is the alternative? Every scholarship in the country has to have a national approach to recruitment? These tend to be relatively small initiatives.”

Joshua Wyner, the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, emphasized in an email to Inside Higher Ed that research shows that highly qualified lower-income students are less likely than their wealthier peers to attend top colleges.

“A fair and smart strategy to recruit the best talent is one that actively recruits students from low- and middle-income communities,” he wrote.

Focusing on Intent

Both Brown and Pérez said their members haven’t come to them yet with questions about if they should change any of their recruitment practices in light of the DOJ’s guidance.

“We’ve still been looking at analyses from different legal organizations to try to make heads or tails of it, and I think our members are in the same place … [It’s] not really specific enough, I think, to be actionable,” Brown said.

Wyner said that he doesn’t think the guidance won’t impact the American Talent Initiative, a project housed in Aspen’s College Excellence Program that aims to recruit low- and middle-income students to selective universities, because the program has always been focused specifically on socioeconomic status, not race.

Jeffrey Metzler, a partner at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP who specializes in education law, said one of the biggest challenges in enforcing this guidance will be proving an institution’s intent—that is, the fact that they were seeking to recruit students based on race rather than other criteria.

“That same reasoning goes beyond just the geographic [component] to other race-neutral criteria like income—‘Why are you recruiting low-income students; are you doing that because your intent is to improve racial diversity because of correlations between income and race?’” he said.

He said he anticipates there might be more trepidation about geographic recruiting going forward out of fear of being investigated by the Department of Education or the Department of Justice, “even if you as an institution know that the reason that you’re doing geographic recruiting has nothing to do with race.”

“Even if ultimately you’re confident as an institution that your reasons would satisfy the requires of the memo, going through an investigation by [the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights] or the DOJ is a burdensome and unpleasant and nerve-racking process, and we’ve seen, particularly in this administration, investigations by OCR and DOJ can involve very, very high stakes.”