In a public meeting last week, the D.C. Board of Education voted on local issues including the FAIR Act, a bill designed to prohibit several private universities from considering a student’s relationship to alumni or donors in the admissions process. A group of Georgetown University students saw this as an opportunity to make their voices heard.
After the Supreme Court limited the use of affirmative action in 2023, student advocates from Georgetown started a campaign called Hoyas Against Legacy, a group focused solely on getting the FAIR Act passed. Over thirty members of the group came together to attend the Feb. 19 public meeting.
Asher Maxwell, a junior government major at Georgetown explained why he feels legacy and donor favoritism needs to be done away with.
“Georgetown has more students from the top one percent than the bottom 60 percent and has some of the lowest levels of racial diversity in the country especially compared to the national enrollment levels,” Maxwell said, explaining he feared the issue may continue to get worse in the future if it goes unaddressed.
The statistics Maxwell cited are just some of the numbers the board was presented with during the seven rounds of testimony the representatives heard throughout the six-hour-long board meeting.
Many of the testimonials came from Georgetown students expressing why they believed legacy admissions hurt their school.
Students supported their testimonies with statistics from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System that have been compiled into a Google sheet document.
The document shows how Georgetown’s student body shifted from 47 percent white to 63 percent white following the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. They also pointed out there are more legacy students attending Georgetown than Black or Latino students, the number of Black students is lower than it was in 2003 and 10 percent of every admitted class is reserved for legacy students.
Students also referenced the “admit list” that resulted in a class action lawsuit against 17 universities including Georgetown which alleged these schools would mark certain applications from students of wealthy families with “please admit,” guaranteeing admission based on their financial status.
“The reality is that our current admission system does not reward merit. It rewards privilege. It’s important to remember that this system is not unfair due to a mistake in the policy or errors in its implementation. It is inequitable by design,” Sara Eyob, a first generation sophomore currently attending Georgetown, said during her testimony.
All of these factors may have impacted the board members in attendance, leading to seven votes in favor of the bill and one abstention.
The abstention came from Eboni-Rose Thompson, Ward seven’s representative, who wanted to urge everyone in attendance to focus more of their energy towards the schools themselves rather than focusing so much on the Supreme Court decision made a year and a half ago.
“That Harvard decision does not prevent any college from considering race as a factor. That is a common misconception that needs to be addressed because we should hold institutions accountable for what they can do,” she said.
Despite her apprehension, the rest of the representatives voiced overwhelming approval for the bill.
Jacque Patterson, an at-large representative at the state board of education, explained this bill represents a leveling of the playing field so those who may not come from as much privilege as others still have a chance to attend these prestigious universities.
“I felt [that in] voting this evening, I honored my parents, who didn’t have the opportunity to go to college, but really worked hard for me to get there,” Patterson said.
Even if the bill is passed, Patterson said he would still like to see schools reach out to students from lower income backgrounds.
“I think it is incumbent on us to actually seek out students who are first generation specifically to try to give them preference because we understand the sacrifice that their families have put into them to send them off to college,” Patterson said.
The bill will now be considered by Washington, D.C. council members who will decide whether to move forward with it.
Copy edited by Camiryn Stepteau
