() – “Hundreds” of colleges across the United States are sending unsolicited admissions letters to students who never actually applied to them in a possible bid to boost their minority enrollment without affirmative action policies.
The Wall Street Journal reported that schools participating in “direct admissions,” through which schools make decisions on the basis of high school transcripts, have “more than tripled since 2023-24” on the admission application Common App. Other schools contact county officials to “get all of the will-be seniors in high school and evaluate every transcript,” then notify the highest-performing students they would be accepted, University of Nevada-Reno admissions director Steve Maples told The College Fix.
“Every school seems to have a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement about their school (…) yet very little of the college application process has anything to do with equity or diversity or inclusion or any of those concepts,” Maples said. “I’m more interested in finding students, especially underrepresented students, that might not think they can even get into college and bypassing that, like, you’re qualified (…) All we’ve done is tried to get out there and promote it to students that are definitely admissible to our university and try to make it as easy as possible.”
Educational institutions have been forbidden from using race-based affirmative action policies in admissions ever since 2023, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down as an unconstitutional form of racial discrimination. The U.S. Justice Department has accused some schools such as Duke University of illegally factoring race into admissions policies anyway, while others resort to subtler methods of advancing their identity-based priorities.
Heritage Foundation policy analyst Madison Doan criticized the tactic, arguing that by “not including standardized testing or essays as part of the college admissions process, it degrades academic standards, impairs institutional accountability, and can mask gaps in K-12 education (…) Institutions that can’t attract students should instead consider winding down low-enrollment programs, merging with other institutions, or closing.”
American institutions of higher education have long been recognized as heavily dominated by left-wing bias and especially a fixation on so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) metrics. This focus on identity groups permeates every aspect of many colleges and universities, including attempts to “diversify” the student body, often to the detriment of all involved.
Despite being framed as in service of “tolerance,” such efforts generally go hand-in-hand with rising intolerance of dissenting views. American institutions of higher education, even many that are private and/or nominally religious, have long been recognized as breeding grounds for anger and hatred toward mainstream conservative views, a problem taking on special alarm amid what conservatives call a rising trend of left-wing support for political violence, such as open celebrations of the September 2025 murder of populist influencer Charlie Kirk.
The toll of such an activist bent often extends well beyond politics. Last year, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.
