UW–Madison faculty from the School of Education’s Department of Educational Policy Studies shared insights in two recent Capital Times articles discussing the impact of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling and last year’s botched FAFSA rollout on UW enrollment.
The first of these articles, published on Sept. 8, came out before UW–Madison released its fall enrollment numbers. In that article, Taylor Odle, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies (EPS), shared his thoughts on the fallout from complications and delays in the release of the new FAFSA, which stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Students and families fill out the FAFSA so they can gain access to federal award grants and loans.
The delays were due to an effort to simplify the form, “which is actually a good thing,” Odle said. “There just happened to be a perfect storm of issues this year.”
A result of the delays is that fewer people completed the FAFSA. The article notes that at UW–Madison, FAFSA completions were down “from about 35,000 undergraduate students in 2023 to a little over 32,000 in late July.”
“I expect broadly college enrollment to be down, but I also expect enrollment patterns to have changed,” Odle said.
He added that some people may have chosen to skip college because they didn’t think they could afford it, or they might have enrolled in community colleges rather than universities over price concerns.
“The people who are most likely to make these college-going decisions based on their financial aid letters are often, of course, students from low-income backgrounds,” Odle said.
Anthony Hernandez, a teaching faculty member in EPS, also shared his thoughts in the Sept. 8 article, discussing the impact of last summer’s Supreme Court ruling that race-conscious admissions is unconstitutional.
The ruling effectively took “affirmative action off the table,” Hernandez said, though universities can still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race has affected his or her life.
Hernandez said the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision “will be felt for years beyond college campuses. UW–Madison graduates go on to work in a range of fields, and the university plays ‘a pivotal role’ in shaping future leaders, he said.”
“In an increasingly multicultural world where diversity is going to be present in the workforce, it’s important that they get exposure to myriad of perspectives and life experiences beyond their own,” Hernandez said.
A few weeks later Hernandez was quoted a second Capital Times article, published after UW–Madison released its fall enrollment numbers on Sept. 23.
Based on a student census conducted on the tenth day of classes, underrepresented students of color enrolled in UW–Madison’s first-year class decreased from 18% last year to 14.3% this fall. Admission rates of underrepresented students of color also dropped significantly.
Hernandez notes that figuring out how to enroll a racially diverse class in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on college admissions is “not an easy problem.”
“Many underrepresented students and their families want assurance that they will be surrounded by peers who share similar backgrounds and experiences,” Hernandez said. “When they see the low enrollment numbers of minority students, it can create doubt about their potential to belong, making them hesitant to apply.”