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Well, the share of black students in the incoming class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plummeted after the Supreme Court effectively banned considering race as a factor in undergraduate admissions last year. Matt, you really, you know, like you got to look at the stories? Is like the great for a setup with our next guest.
I sent you this story.
You did, you did? That's what I said I was giving you.
I thought you said I should look at the story. I send you this. No, I think it's absolutely fascinating.
Well in the university said, they put this out yesterday. The class of twenty twenty eight is five percent blackt down from an average of thirteen percent in recent years. The share of Hispanic students in the class is eleven percent, and that's down from fifteen percent. I am sure.
Well, the share of Asian students is now forty seven percent and it was forty two percent. So on the one hand, you know, it's a it's it's to their detriment this new class that they won't have as much representation from black people or from Hispanic people. On the other hand, you think what happened to the Asians before that we're getting we'ren't getting in like you know, they're getting the test scores.
So you know, I know, I know.
So all right, let's see what our next guest has to say about this. I'm sure he's got some thoughts. Let's head to Atlanta and Ed Smith Lewis. He's senior vice president of strategy at UNCF. Of course, the United Negro College Fund, and they support thousands of students and also HBCUs close to forty of them historically black colleges and universities. Ed, great to have you here. We do believe you've got some thoughts on this. You hear those MIT statistics and you think, what.
When I hear those MIT statistics, I think, where's the
opportunity in all of it? How do we start to sort of maybe reposition sort of the deficit or the change and the percentage of individuals that may or may not enroll in our Mits of the world and start to think more intentionally about how do we create more robust institutions that compare to MIT and such as such as not a conversation about who got into the Ivy League, but how is our higher education system really serving the needs of all of our students, regardless of which sort
of medallion institution they may have gone to. How do we think about investing the resources of MIT and the opportunities that MIT provide and really start developing those in the other spaces and places where our students have been enrolled.
I mean, ideally, any higher education institution is going to want to have a diverse class that benefits everybody in the class, right, and you want it to be so somewhat representative of the society in which you live. So if there's a deficit of black students or a deficit of Hispanic students, admissions Admissions is going to have to try and fix that. How can they fix it if they can't take, you know, race or ethnicity into account.
Race may be one indicator of whether or not a student has or has not had the right set of opportunities or scored the right test or scored the right score or on the right test. But the reality is, if we look at other differentiating factors, like lived experience, where people are born, what high schools they've gone to, and really look at the institutional context around an individual's experience, you can likely get to some of the same results
whatever without ever really having to say race. And while that's a good how do you do it?
How do you do it well?
Will you do it by looking at what schools individuals go to?
Right?
How about we move away from the idea that we're going to take the highest s T score from the number one prep school as an admission requirement and say, well, if we want diversity, let's ensure that we're pulling students from all the types of institutions public, public high schools, private high schools, rural high schools. And you'll likely get to the same place if you diversify your geographic approach or your institutional type.
So is this about looking at somebody who's maybe at a school system that isn't so great but did really well compared to their peers. Is that what you're talking about or something else? Or just being much more diverse in terms of where you look for students.
Well, I think it's where you look and what you're looking for. At present, we're putting a lot of energy into test scores, and we all know, or at least higher education knows, that test scores actually are an indicator of success. You can look at what other opportunities was the student engaged in based on his or her contexts. Now, is it great that you have a high test score
and someone who played the piano and an orchestra. Perhaps, But maybe that student who come from a rural area where they didn't have access to the same types of opportunities, but led a student organization or participated in community service heavily has the same type of tenacity and desire to grow and learn, maybe without the opportunities. So what you're looking for is trying to write size expectations on outcomes with expectations or inputs or opportunities those individuals have had.
So are you like you're talking about the standardized testing? Is that in particular you're thinking is not a good thing?
For sure?
Yeah?
I think suthardized testing is just rooted in sort of a systematic approach to getting an understanding of one's aptitude, And I think We've learned through differentiated approaches in K twelve that not everyone learns the same and if you don't learn the same, you likely don't test the same. And so how do we start to think about differentiated models of assessing a student's readiness to learn? And that's what we're saying. We're just looking for differentiated approaches here
at UNCF we're a scholarship organization. We're actually looking at more cognitive opportunities, and we're moving away from sort of raw quantitative understanding to a qualitative one where we're educating our readers or our scholarship application scores on what can you look for and how a student thinks about his or her lived experience, what opportunities they had, how do they think about loss and failure as well as their wins in their writing, and how they communicate their experience
and less about the test score.
I know, I went to some public school graduations in the Midwest this year, and I noticed that each of these schools with classes of two or three hundred kids
had one or two in the IVY leagues. And if you go to graduations here at you know, Nightingale, Bamford School, or collegiate if you look at you know, graduating classes at Deerfield or Andover private they're they're putting dozens of kids into the IVY Leagues, and I think that's part of their admissions process, and maybe the ivs need to rethink that at years.
Some of it, though, is I will also say it's you know, generateational, you know families that legacies legacies in a big way. Right.
Well, I mean, if these Ivy League schools really want diversity, they're going to have to really rethink that admissions process because you can't always take a dozen kids from the most expensive boarding schools in the country and then ignore all these private schools in Flyover Country and talk to us about a CLAIM Accelerated Learning in Asset Investment Management. You're working to get a robust pipeline of students from
historically black colleges and universities from HBCUs. So talk to us about this program and how you're doing it.
No, we're really excited about the support from at its capital at phil Grows and its investment in project ACCLAIM, where we are fundamentally focused on providing the right opportunities to our students to take advantage of the robust economy that we have in our country. Project Acclaim has three simple objectives. Think number one, provide student experiences from an academic perspective that really enables them to understand through hands on experience, what does it mean to be an asset
manager in this country? For many HBCUs, seventy five percent of our students are low income or come from low income families. Sixty percent of first in their generation in their family to go to college, their first generation students, and so the idea that you would have exposure to asset management careers are few and far between for many of the students. More importantly than having that exposure to
asset management is that real hands on experience. Because you can learn from the textbook all day, but until you have a real experience, an opportunity to sort of touch the opportunity, we know that our students don't do as well with sort of been thrown into the defense. And so the question becomes, how can we move upstream in the asset management pipeline and start to invest heavily in real experience. That's what Project Acclaim is set to do.
It will invest four million dollars into an investment fund that's madaged by students on the campuses of Morehouse and
Howard University in our pilot years. This real investment opportunity to understand what does it take to ensure the risk profile of your investment are appropriate, to do the due diligence necessary to make an investment, to track, monitor and assess the progress against your portfolio is a real opportunity just going to be provided to these institutions, and with the support Avtage Capital, an opportunity to scale that to
many more HBCUs over time. We're excited about this program not just because of that hands on experience, but the approach we're taken to do it. UNCF is leveraging a shared fund approach where Howard students and Morehouse students will operate under the same approach to understand what can we do to build the capacity of our institution stuff provide these kind of high relevant programs and so that also has the potential to scale well.
And I mean the idea ultimately is to get them basically on Wall Street or in global Wall Street. I wonder if what I'm watching is especially industrial companies in the Midwest, you know, John Dee or Harley Davidson a Jack Daniels are shying away from their DEI initiatives, but I feel like Wall Street and American you know, the American public still embraces these de I initiatives. Is that what you're seeing as well.
Well to your earlier point, to have diversity of perspectives is actually to have an organization that's well functioning and efficient. As you might imagine, when it comes to investment, it's always knowing where is the put going, And to have different perspectives sitting around the table means your due diligence is just better. And we've seen from minority asset managers sometimes one, two, three x outcomes compared to market rates.
And that's just because sometimes you're asking a different question which also leads to a different answer. And so that diversity of perspectives, we think is a benefit to all companies, not just our asset management.
Tons of research over decades have like pointed that out the importance of diversity in the boardroom, diversity to company. But having said that, you know, as companies, I do wonder at as companies increasingly are rolling back their DEI plans and strategies. As Matt just pointed, out. You know, Harley Davidson, you had Jack Daniel's maker Brown Foreman today
we had a story on it Deer in company. How does it make it more difficult for maybe what you're trying to do to get that pipeline that is more diverse, whether it's going into financial services or somewhere else. And we've just got about forty five seconds.
No, it's always been a difficult struggle, to say the least. We are trying to close systemic gaps and opportunity within organizations. But the reality is for those that are taking a step back at this moment, we're focusing our attention on
those who are leaning in. We fundamentally believe if we can find the coalition of the willing, prove the value, that it becomes a market differentiator than those who may have stepped back for the moment might realize the business opportunity associated with this and come on board and eventually realize not only is it beneficial to the business, beneficial to inclusion generally in our country.
All right, well, listen, super good to get some time with you. I really appreciate it. Good luck with your pursuits there. Ed Smith lewis a Senior VP of Strategy at the United Negro College Fund, joining us here on Bloomberg Business Week.
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