are under pressure to represent the ethno-racial diversity of their student bodies in the most favorable light via their websites. We analyzed the race/ethnicity tables and figures featured prominently on the websites of 158 colleges and universities. We found 3 practices that institutions undertake to enhance the appearance of diversity on campus: omission, aggregation, and addition of ethno-racial categories. Universities with the lowest levels of student diversity were the most likely to engage in these practices. We understand these practices to be organizational-level racial projects (Omi & Winant, 2015). That is, universities are actively transforming "the content and importance of racial categories" (p. 61).

Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria-excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations-that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehensive approach to admissions may do little to ameliorate-and in some cases, may exacerbate-existing enrollment inequities. We also find that moving away from test scores and focusing on academic rigor represent potentially promising strategies for expanding access at some institutions.

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It is well-documented that multiracial college students experience microaggressions in their everyday schooling experiences. However, little research has gone on to place these individual experiences in the overall organizational structure of educational settings. Using a racial formation theoretical frame, we explore how institutions make use of various racial projects when representing multiracial students. By applying a critical discourse analysis approach to the examination of 271 university website representations of student body diversity, we found that university websites erase and selectively reclassify multiracial students in representing their student bodies. These practices mirror multiracial microaggressions that occur routinely at the individual level, but are situated at the institutional level and perpetuate monoracial normativity, the assumption and centrality of monoracial identities.

Given growing disparities in college enrollment by household income, policymakers and researchers often are interested in understanding whether policies expand access for low-income students. In this brief, we highlight the limitations of a commonly available measure of low-income status—whether students receive a federal Pell grant—and compare it to new data on enrollment by income quintile to evaluate a recent policy effort within elite colleges aimed at expanding access. We demonstrate that Pell is a rough measure of low-income status and that without more detailed data on colleges’ economic diversity, policy evaluations focusing on existing Pell data will suffer from measurement error and potentially miss enrollment effects for moderate- and high-income students.