Reaffirming our commitment to diversity by Stu Schmill '86

As we conclude our work with the Class of 2027, and turn our attention to the class of 2028 and beyond, I want to take a moment —  alongside President Kornbluth — to reaffirm our commitment to diversity in a time of great uncertainty about the future of affirmative action, and to explain⁠01 In addition to the main text of the post, if you see any text highlighted in transparent red — like “explain” is, here — you can hover over it on desktop (or tap, on mobile) to see a related annotation on the right hand side of the post (or inline, on mobile; note that the desktop/mobile UI is triggered by the width of your browser). The annotations are numbered, and repeated as endnotes at the bottom of the blog. We use this feature to add additional commentary, evidence, and background information throughout the post, in case readers want to explore more context than we could reasonably fit into the main body of text. We do encourage you to read the footnotes; we’ve done our best to show our work in them. more about how a diverse student body advances our education.

Last fall, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases, brought by the same plaintiff, about whether and how colleges and universities may consider race in the admissions process; a ruling is expected sometime in June.⁠02 The Supreme Court does not announce when it will release its decisions in particular cases in advance, so we don’t know when this will be. However, decisions are typically released by the end of June, and the Court usually announces in advance which days it will be posting decisions (without specifying which cases will be decided that day). You can see a calendar of these dates — and copies of opinions, once they are posted — at <a href="http://scotusblog.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SCOTUSblog</a>, and follow along at home just like we are. As my colleague Chris wrote about the amicus brief MIT submitted in these cases, arguing the Court should conserve the existing legal framework:

Affirmative action is legally complicated, politically controversial, and widely misunderstood. Under the currently controlling precedent, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), universities are allowed to consider race only to the extent —  and only for the reason —  that it is “narrowly tailored…to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body”⁠03 In other words, we cannot preferentially select students of certain races in order to redress historic or contemporary disadvantage, nor are we permitted to mechanistically give ‘points’ to students solely because they are from under-represented backgrounds despite other deficiencies in their application. Sweeping measures like those — rooted in attempts to broadly redress inequality and advance justice — have been legally prohibited for decades. As the law stands now, the only reason we may narrowly consider race for individual students in our process is because of the cumulative benefits of diversity on the student body — and the wider world — benefits that have been recognized in the Court’s precedent for more than half a century. by ensuring there is a “critical mass”⁠04 ‘Critical mass’ is a metaphor — best known in nuclear physics — that suggests a minimum necessary amount of material to support a self-sustaining chain reaction capable of generating tremendous additional power. In our work, it means we cannot have quotas or targets for any racial or ethnic group, but we can take steps to pursue minimally sufficient populations to collectively advance our educational mission. In our <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/policies/#diversity" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">diversity statement,</a> we try to give meaning to ‘critical mass’ as such: “Every student should feel that ‘there are people like me here’ and ‘there are people different from me here.’ No student should feel isolated; all students should come into contact with members of other groups and experience them as colleagues with valuable ideas and insights.” of students from underrepresented backgrounds, and only if they can demonstrate that no other workable methods can achieve that critical mass.⁠05 In other words, under current law, if there <em>were</em> other, race-neutral, methods to achieve a diverse student body sufficient to produce these educational benefits, we would be required to use those instead, and required to <em>not</em> consider race.

For many years, we have admitted students to MIT consistent with the approach prescribed by Grutter. ⁠06 As we say in <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/policies/#diversity" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">our policies</a>, “In undergraduate recruitment and selection, MIT looks at each application holistically, taking account of many different factors that have shaped a student’s experience, including their racial, ethnic, social, economic, and educational context. We believe it is crucial for the successful future of our world to educate people from every walk of life.” This and other statements on the relevance of diversity to MIT’s educational mission have been developed in close consultation with <a href="https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/committee/committee-undergraduate-admissions-and-financial-aid" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CUAFA,</a> our student-faculty advisory committee. In this blog post, I use “affirmative action” and “race-conscious admissions” interchangeably, as the litigation does. The former is a general term describing a broad class of approaches that intentionally seek diversity; the latter is how we do it in our specific professional context. Alongside considerable investment in our outreach and recruitment programs,⁠07 We put a lot of thought and effort into trying to identify and support students from under-represented and/or under-served backgrounds who are <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/what-we-look-for/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">strong matches for the MIT education</a>. This includes (but is not limited to) <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/summer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">partnering with MIT summer programs</a>, targeting travel to regions and high schools that would benefit most from our physical presence, and working with our alumni to run affinity programs like <a href="https://wise.mitadmissions.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">WISE</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv9t8qKHWKv/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sin LiMITe</a>, and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CcIhUR5OYne/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ebony Affair</a> that help students learn about, and find community at, MIT. We also work with well-matched partner organizations like <a href="https://www.questbridge.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">QuestBridge</a>, <a href="https://collegehorizons.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">College Horizons</a>, and more to help their students learn about what MIT is like. Meanwhile, our generous need-based, full-need, no-loan financial aid ensures that everyone who is admitted to MIT can afford to attend; we <a href="https://sfs.mit.edu/#:~:text=Register%20to%20vote%C2%A0%E2%86%92-,BY%20THE%20NUMBERS,-TOTAL%20MIT%20SCHOLARSHIPS">distributed more than $153 million in scholarship grants to our undergraduates last year alone,</a> and about a third of our undergraduates paid no tuition at all. our ability to (narrowly) use race in the pursuit of the educational benefits of diversity has enabled us to enroll cohorts of MIT students that have become progressively more diverse⁠08 What it means for a class to be “more diverse” is a complex and contested question. For the purposes of this post, we mean we work to improve the recruitment and enrollment of well-matched and academically prepared under-represented minority students — as well as other students who are less commonly present in our applicant pool — to the point where MIT obtains a critical mass sufficient to provide the educational benefits of diversity consistent with <em>Grutter</em>. Demographically speaking, there is no majority race or ethnicity at MIT, and a majority of our students are either <a href="https://president.mit.edu/speeches-writing/immigration-kind-oxygen" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">immigrants</a> or the child of at least one immigrant. Of course, diversity across <em>many</em> axes of identity, experience, and perspective is required to achieve educational benefits consistent with our mission, which is why we actively pursue all of them in our recruitment and selection, including through our partnership with <a href="https://www.questbridge.org/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">QuestBridge</a>, our membership in the <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2023/3-questions-stuart-schmill-mit-admissions-stars-college-network-0404">STARS Network</a>, and many other initiatives — including our <a href="http://catalog.mit.edu/mit/undergraduate-education/career/rotc/">ROTC programs</a>, some of which are the oldest in the country — that tend to broadly attract people from many backgrounds and worldviews to apply. It is the combination of diversity across all these features of our community that collectively generate its robustly diverse character. The reason this blog post focuses principally on the question of racial and ethnic diversity because that is the issue presently before the Court. — and simultaneously more academically successful⁠09 For example, steadily rising graduation rates across all demographic groups, as well as steadily falling numbers of students receiving academic warnings or review at the beginning and end of the term, over the last decade or so, just in terms of things we can straightforwardly measure. We also see that strength in our <a href="https://capd.mit.edu/post-graduateandsummer/">postgraduate outcomes across graduate school and employment</a>. As our Provost Cynthia Barnhart <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2022/3-questions-provost-cynthia-barnhart-mit-community-excellence-0519">recently said</a>, “MIT has been working to broaden our community’s diversity for at least four decades. If work like this threatened MIT’s excellence or its reputation, we would surely have seen the impact by now....Our student body is both more diverse and more accomplished than ever. And, each year, MIT is well represented among the recipients of prestigious awards and honors. It is clear that our increasing diversity is not hampering excellence at MIT.” — over time, in all the ways we can reasonably measure. As you can see on our recently updated class profile, the MIT Class of 2027 is composed of students from a wide variety of backgrounds — including the largest proportion of under-represented minority students in our history⁠10 For the purposes of interpreting the descriptive statistics reported on the class profile, we adopt the standard convention of using “under-represented minority students” to count Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, who are historically under-represented in STEM education. This is a crude standard, and one that has been (rightly) criticized for subsuming other minority groups — particularly <a href="http://asianamerican.mit.edu/recs/">Asian-American students</a> — into monoliths, as well as for sidestepping the sovereign status of Indigenous peoples; we acknowledge the <a href="https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/h1w0nbqp/release/3)">limitations of these ways we currently count people</a>. However, I want to be clear that the bluntness of these reporting standards does not represent the subtlety of our admissions process, where we regularly make fine distinctions based on the individual experience of students as evident in their essays, activities, and other aspects of their application. Meanwhile, admissions is part of a broad group of MIT students, faculty, and staff working to develop more appropriate and fine-grained ways to collect and represent the complexity of individual identity without reducing the power of collective claims. I hope more will come from this group over the next year. — who all meet a common standard of academic excellence.⁠11 There is a widespread myth that practicing race-conscious admissions means necessarily compromising standards of academic preparation on behalf of under-represented minority students. I want to make it clear that this myth is false, and we reject it utterly. As we have said for many years, <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/diversity-or-merit/">there is no inherent tradeoff between diversity and merit</a>; the considerable leverage of race-conscious admissions comes from our current ability consider diversity when picking among comparably prepared applicants whom we believe are all ready for an MIT education. To use a math metaphor, the utility of race-conscious admissions is generated by the difference in demographic denominators: because of <a href="https://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Inequities-in-Advanced-Coursework-Whats-Driving-Them-and-What-Leaders-Can-Do-January-2019.pdf">widespread and systemic educational inequality in the K-12 system</a>, there are typically many fewer students from under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds with demonstrated academic preparation for MIT in our applicant pool. So we have to be very intentional in our recruitment and selection to identify and enroll such students when there are — for structural reasons — fewer of them applying to MIT, in order to achieve the diversity that we think provides educational benefits to the Institute. Race-conscious admissions, as we have practiced it under the guidance of Grutter,⁠12 As I said earlier, our ability to narrowly consider race under the <em>Grutter</em> framework is what has enabled us to enroll extremely strong under-represented students despite their relative under-representation. At bottom, what seems to be at stake in this case — based on oral arguments, since we haven’t seen the decision yet — is the question of whether or not the diversity of the MIT undergraduate body remains a legitimate goal we can pursue through the selection process, and — if it still is — what steps we can take to achieve diversity given these systemic challenges. has been essential to achieving these outcomes simultaneously.⁠13 The reason it is essential is the same reason <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">we restored our SAT/ACT requirement last year</a>: because the judicious use of testing (as one empirically important measure of academic preparation, at least for our specific education) combined with the narrowly tailored consideration of race (to help select a diverse class from among many well-prepared applicants) allows us to craft a class that is <em>both</em> academically robust <em>and</em> demographically diverse. We are not the only institution for whom this is true: in their <a href="https://blueprintlabs.mit.edu/research/the-efficiency-of-race-neutral-alternatives-to-race-based-affirmative-action-evidence-from-chicagos-exam-schools/">detailed study of Chicago’s exam schools</a>, MIT professors Glenn Ellison and Parag Pathak have shown that “prohibitions on affirmative action policies that explicitly consider race” introduced “significant efficiency costs” in the selection process — reducing both socioeconomic diversity <strong>and</strong> academic preparation simultaneously — and that no race-neutral (e.g. socioeconomic or geographic) methods restored that diversity, a finding consistent with other studies I review below.

It may be that the Supreme Court upholds its own recently affirmed precedent;⁠14 The <em>Grutter</em> framework was reaffirmed as good law by the Supreme Court <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_(2016)" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">as recently as 2016</a>. Meanwhile, the lower courts concluded at trial that Harvard and UNC were acting legally within the <em>Grutter</em> framework, before the current Supreme Court decided to take up these cases. if so, we will continue to rely on the narrowly tailored consideration of race to the extent necessary to achieve our goal of a diverse MIT, with all of the accompanying benefits that flow to our students, the Institute, and the world.⁠15 In addition to our <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/policies/#diversity:~:text=Statement%20on%20the%20role%20of%20diversity%20in%20MIT%E2%80%99s%20educational%20mission" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">statement on the role of diversity in MIT’s educational mission</a>, I would like to draw your attention again to our <a href="https://ogc.mit.edu/latest/mit-submits-supreme-court-amicus-brief-harvardunc-admissions-cases" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">amicus brief</a>, filed jointly with Stanford, IBM, and Aeris Communications, which addresses (1) the vital role that diversity, including racial diversity, plays in achieving the educational missions of institutions of higher education for all students, with particular focus on STEM fields; (2) the importance of diversity to our nation’s success in the global economy; and (3) why consideration of race as one among many factors in the admission of students to selective STEM degree programs is essential to achieve these critical educational goals.

However, it may be that the Supreme Court chooses to further restrict — or fully prohibit — our ability to do so. If the Court rules in a way that constrains how universities may compose their communities, our commitment to the pursuit of diversity that advances MIT’s education will not waver, but our ability to achieve it will change — potentially dramatically. Indeed, dramatic change has been seen in flagship public universities⁠16 For example, in his <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272300021X">landmark study of the University of California system</a> — with a dataset spanning more than 2 million applicants over nearly 30 years — Zachary Bleemer estimates that passing of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_209">California Proposition 209</a> in 1996 led to a decline in Black enrollment at its most selective campuses by more than 60%, and that no race-neutral initiatives have restored diversity to prior levels at those campuses. Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/kidder_paper.pdf">a separate study by Kidder and Gándara</a> found that “in spite of high investments of both human and financial resources in many areas ⌈with⌋ an array of race-neutral alternatives, including outreach, partnerships with high minority schools, academic preparation programs (some of which it invented), and targeted information and recruitment efforts… a percent plan ⌈and⌋ comprehensive review of vast numbers of applications…modified admissions criteria…special attention to low-income students ⌈and⌋ one of the most generous need-based financial aid programs in the country...the ⌈University of California system⌋ has never recovered the same level of diversity that it had before the loss of affirmative action,” which has remained most true at its most selective campuses to this day. in the states that have already enacted bans on the use of race-conscious admissions, with attendant negative consequences for their communities.⁠17 In a <a href="https://record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-files-amicus-brief-in-support-of-harvard-and-unc/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">compelling amicus brief</a>, the University of Michigan describes the effect of the 2006 ban on their community: “Despite persistent, vigorous, and varied efforts to increase student-body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means...the admission and enrollment of underrepresented minority students have fallen precipitously...especially among the most-underrepresented groups, Black and Native American students, whose enrollment has fallen by 44% and 90%, respectively...fully one quarter of underrepresented minority students surveyed indicated they felt they did not “belong” at U-M, a 66% increase over the last decade...U-M’s more than 15-year-long experiment in race-neutral admissions helps to establish that racial diversity in student enrollment, and the compelling government interest in the resulting educational benefits, cannot be adequately realized at selective institutions without taking race into account as one factor among many in admissions decisions.” Meanwhile, <a href="https://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/affirmative-action-mismatch-and-economic-mobility-after-california%E2%80%99s-proposition-209" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">another study by Professor Bleemer finds that</a> — contrary to the “mismatch hypothesis,” which holds that affirmative action negatively impacts under-represented students because they are necessarily unprepared for the college to which they were admitted — Proposition 209 had substantial negative economic and educational impacts on under-represented Californians, with none of the supposed academic or professional benefits predicted by the mismatch hypothesis.

The reason communities changed in those states — and may change here — is because the narrowly tailored consideration of race is a crucial tool⁠18 Indeed, as the research I mentioned above demonstrates, and the <em>Grutter </em>precedent demands, it is still the <strong>only </strong>effective tool for the task of achieving robust racial and ethnic diversity. for our goal of building a talented and diverse class. When I have been discussing this case with MIT community members in advance of the anticipated Supreme Court ruling, I have often used the metaphor of building a home: a project that has certain goals⁠19 Like shelter, and warmth. and which requires certain tools⁠20 Like a hammer, or a saw. in order to construct it well. Likewise, we have goals for each class,⁠21 Like robust diversity, and academic excellence. and we also use tools to achieve them.⁠22 Like <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">standardized testing</a>, and race-conscious admissions. If you take away a carpenter’s tools, they will have a much harder time building a well-formed house; if one of our important tools is taken away,⁠23 As I said above, the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the cases in question; it may yet come to pass that we can continue to use our processes and practices to make an MIT that is as broadly diverse as the nation and world we hope to serve. I’m sharing these concerns, and this research, ahead of time because I want to illuminate the potential scale and complexity of the challenge that would face MIT should the Court further restrict our abilities to achieve the kind of diversity that advances our educational mission. MIT is full of brilliant people who love to take on and solve hard problems, and our admissions office is full of incredibly dedicated and hardworking staff. However, we cannot ignore the data that shows difficult it has been for other similarly situated institutions to pursue diversity to be when their ability to consider race has been curtailed. The fundamentally unequal and inequitable distribution of resources linked to race and ethnicity has deep roots in the United States, and affirmative action itself provides at best a patch for any given institution. There are no easy solutions or innovative hacks to the challenge of true equality and justice; it requires transformative change. then it may become very hard for us to meet our goals, not because our values⁠24 As we put it in the <a href="https://www.mit.edu/values/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">MIT Values Statement</a>, “Valuing potential over pedigree, we know that talent and good ideas can come from anywhere – and we value one another’s contributions in every role. Together we possess uncommon strengths, and we shoulder the responsibility to use them with wisdom and care for humanity and the natural world.” — or the qualities of our applicants⁠25 We are particularly concerned that some may interpret any future significant changes in the demographic composition of the MIT student body as a referendum on whether students admitted in the past really ‘belonged’ at MIT, as has been the experience in California and Michigan, according to their amicus briefs. So another reason I am writing this blogpost is to reaffirm, in the strongest possible terms, my unshakeable conviction that every student we have admitted belongs here, and that their academic excellence and individual contributions to campus life demonstrate those <em>bona fides</em> beyond a shadow of a doubt. I think this is widely understood at MIT — people here know how hard it is, and how great our students are — but it may not be as salient to members of the broader public, and I think it deserves to be said. — have changed, but because our equipment has.

In the public discussion of these court cases, it has been suggested by some that the educational benefits of diversity are diffuse and abstract, but I have felt them personally and concretely. As a Jewish kid from an immigrant neighborhood in Queens — with parents who never attended college and taught me to count in Ladino — I still remember when I got a scholarship to a math camp in Wichita the summer after my sophomore year of high school. I felt as if I’d been transported to another planet. We were all so different from each other,⁠26 It was the first time I had been surrounded by so many non-Jewish students (and so many students from all across the country); meanwhile, for some of my fellow campers, I was the first Jewish person they had ever met. but we all loved math and science, and we bonded over both what brought us together and what set us apart. Most of all, my fellow campers opened my eyes⁠27 And because I was surrounded by so many different people, it was a much more valuable and life changing experience than if I had stayed in a program closer to home, with people more like me. to all the wildly different ways one can be in the world: can dress, can speak, can believe, can learn, can love, can live, can thrive.

Later, when I was applying to college, the dynamic diversity of MIT drew me to the place⁠28 Indeed, in survey after survey, our admitted students tell us that a primary reason they choose MIT over peer schools is the community, in all of its colorful heterogeneity. This is true for students of all backgrounds: whether under-represented or not, the vast majority of our students cite the diversity of the MIT community, specifically, as a strongly positive factor in their decision to enroll. and enriched my education. I felt that enrichment as an undergraduate, learning as much from those who were unlike me as I ever did in lecture or lab; I depended on it as a crew coach, when I’d have a boat full of athletes from across the country and the world;⁠29 A few of them had been rowing for years, but most had never touched an oar before; by the end of the season, they would be rowing together in total harmony. I saw it as director of the Educational Council, leading progressively more diverse generations of alumni⁠30 It is perhaps worth noting, here, that <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/legacy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">we do not have a legacy preference.</a> to represent the Institute to prospective students.⁠31 In that role, I saw how both our alumni and our applicants were mutually inspired by their differences and similarities, as I once was all the way back in Wichita. Now, as Dean of Admissions & Student Financial Services, guiding the team that recruits, selects, and enrolls our outstanding undergraduates, I appreciate it when someone with a background different from mine will understand an applicant’s context in a way I couldn’t have.

Over the course of my 40 years here, as our doors have opened to more people from broader experiences, our education has grown stronger as our community has grown more richly diverse, at the same time and for that very reason. Indeed, because diverse teams are better at spotting and solving problems,⁠32 This is a consistent finding across a variety of disciplines in the social sciences, from <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421787">investigating the origins of good ideas</a>, to <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15534225/">generating better solutions to novel problems</a>, to <a href="https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/2wu7aft8/release/3">collecting more accurately grounded data</a>, to <a href="https://hbr.org/1996/09/making-differences-matter-a-new-paradigm-for-managing-diversity">managing teams of collaborators</a>, to <a href="https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/04/03/is-the-oculus-rift-sexist.html">being able to detect when technologies are working or breaking for different users</a>. As the late sociologist Susan Leigh Star wrote in her <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027649921955326" class="broken_link">classic study of infrastructure</a>, technical problems should always be understood as <em>socially relational</em>: “For the person in a wheelchair, the stairs and doorjamb in front of a building are not ⌈useful tools⌋, but barriers...One person’s infrastructure is another’s ⌈difficulty⌋.” the breadth of backgrounds and experiences among our student body has enabled the Institute to better pursue its mission to “advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.”⁠33 As Provost Barnhart <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2022/3-questions-provost-cynthia-barnhart-mit-community-excellence-0519">said last fall</a>, “What is powerful about our community is that we are bound by our collective mission and set apart by our individual experiences. I believe that the more we bring together people with different perspectives, experiences, and approaches — the more each of us learns and is able to do our best work. That is why a community of diverse, talented, and passionate people is critical to living up to our mission.” In addition to our <a href="https://ogc.mit.edu/latest/mit-submits-supreme-court-amicus-brief-harvardunc-admissions-cases" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">aforementioned amicus brief</a> coauthored with major corporations attesting to the importance of diversity in STEM education and workforce development, I would also draw your attention to the <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232539/20220801205901633_20-1199%20Harvard%20FINAL%20Revised.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">U.S. government’s brief on behalf of the military academies</a>, arguing that “highly qualified and broadly diverse” leadership is critical — both within and beyond the military — to improve both credibility and performance. Given MIT’s longstanding role in educating future leaders across industry, the military, and other sectors of the economy and institutions, we are acutely aware of how the composition of our student body affects systems downstream of us. The robust diversity of MIT is a legacy that we as an office feel responsible for, because of the benefits it provides to the community we are responsible to.

Nearly sixty years ago, my predecessor B. Alden Thresher wrote College Admissions and the Public Interest; I keep a well-thumbed copy next to my desk, and revisit it every summer, for it is full of striking insights⁠34 For example, Thresher presciently reminds members of our profession to never disregard or suppress “education’s greatest asset: the inherent diversity of talents with which nature has endowed individuals.” Thresher considered diversity “the chief source of progress” in both natural and human affairs; indeed, the driving force of <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/mit-progressions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">progressions</a> seen at MIT for many decades now. into the complexity, contingency, and crucial importance of the work we do. Early in the book, Thresher observes that in order to understand admissions, “one must look beyond the purview of the individual college and consider the interaction of all institutions within the society that generates and sustains them.” I often think of this humbling quote when I consider the constraints on what we can actually do⁠35 People often ask admissions officers a version of the question: “what is it like to determine someone’s future?” But this is not really what we do, since every prospective student passes through our process already traveling on a trajectory set by all prior opportunities they have (or haven’t) had well before their application reaches our desk. All we can hope to do is use the weight of our institution to positively inflect their flight, like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist">gravity assist</a> that accelerates a spacecraft already shooting through the stars. from within the committee room to serve MIT — and, through our alumni, the nation and the world — downstream as we are from the shape of the river. The prospect of more constraint fills all of us here at MIT Admissions with both more concern, and more resolve, for the important work that remains to be done.

Again, we don’t know yet what the Supreme Court will say, and even once they issue their decision, it will take time to interpret and implement its practical meaning. Immediately after the judgment is handed down, we will turn our full attention to understanding its impact on our work. In the meantime, I want to assure you that, whatever the ultimate disposition of the decision, our commitment to a vibrantly diverse and academically excellent MIT will remain undimmed; the North Star by which we will steer through uncertain waters ahead.