It has been almost five years since Michigan voters chose to ban race-conscious programs from state-funded institutions. The impact of the decision was swift and painful for many, particularly in the state’s public higher education landscape. Minority enrollment in public colleges, which was already low, plummeted in many categories as state-funded minority scholarships disappeared and a bad economy made alternative funds scarce. Programs and services that were targeted solely toward minorities and women vanished.
Today, however, there are some signs of hope for minorities hoping to access higher education in Michigan. Five years after the racially polarizing campaign to pass the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative—widely known as Proposition 2—the state’s public colleges and universities are learning how to adapt to a colorblind campus.
From the University of Michigan to Grand Valley State University, Michigan schools are reinventing their recruiting programs and creating new scholarships aimed at low-income and narrowly defined demographic groups. They also are redesigning resource programs to make them more inclusive. Meanwhile, private donors and foundations are beginning to fill part of the financial aid void created by the loss of state-supported scholarships.
In a post-Prop 2 world, Michigan’s public institutions have been forced to get more creative when it comes to luring Blacks, Hispanics and members of underrepresented groups to their campuses. There are bolstered information campaigns aimed at low-income, urban and first-generation college prospects. School officials are quick to assure prospective students that, even without state-funded targeted scholarships, financial aid is available.
“Proposition 2 raised a lot of interesting questions,” says Paulette Granberry Russell, senior adviser for diversity to the president of Michigan State University. “It forced us to think, not about how to get around the law, because that’s not what this is. It forced us to look at our practices and see if those practices were helping us achieve the desired goal of having a diverse campus. You have to be a little more deliberate and strategic about where you focus your resources.”
For MSU—where minorities comprise 19 percent of the student body—that meant undertaking a more geo-centric rather than race-centric approach. The university sought out students in urban centers, low-income areas and in rural communities, for example.
At the University of Michigan, whose race-based admissions policy was the flashpoint for Proposition 2, previously minority-only scholarships and programs have been opened to a wider population. However, by carefully tailoring the eligibility requirements, UM largely has managed to circumvent the ban. For example, a scholarship is aimed at students from the Detroit public school system, which is overwhelmingly Black. Although non-minorities are eligible and have won the award in the past, the demographic disparity creates a very high probability that the recipient will be Black.
