Virginia Tech, in its annual examination of its admissions process, has recently announced several changes to its undergraduate admissions procedure. Starting with the 2023–2024 application season, the university will remove its early decision option for applicants, as well as legacy, race and ethnicity as potential factors in the decision-making process.
These changes are aimed at “leveling the playing field” for all applicants, according to a Virginia Tech News article by Juan Espinoza, associate vice provost for enrollment management. Similar decisions have been made by several other universities following the Supreme Court’s controversial June 29 ruling to ban race-based affirmative action in college admissions processes. Though the Supreme Court decision does not address legacy and early admissions, Virginia Tech and several other schools throughout the country are already taking measures to eliminate such preferential practices.
The early decision option allows students to apply to one school several months before the regular decision deadline in January and locks them into a binding commitment to the university should they be accepted. This option has been argued to disproportionately impact low-income students and students of color since typically only students who are financially well-off will feel comfortable committing to one school before they are able to view their offered financial aid package.
Virginia Tech has historically given approximately 20% of its spots to students accepted through early decision, according to the Virginia Tech News article. This means that wealthier students tend to receive an unbalanced advantage in admissions. Furthermore, according to Education Reform Now, early decision applicants tend to be over three times as likely to be white as those applying through regular decision. Espinoza explains that these issues were prime factors in the decision to eliminate the early decision option.
“The previous expectation in the early decision plan that students lock in their commitment to Virginia Tech well before the regular decision deadline was not a good option for all of our applicants, particularly those needing financial aid, and created unneeded pressure on students,” Espinoza said.
Virginia Tech will still keep its early action deadline on Nov. 15, and its regular decision deadline on Jan. 15.
Another area of potential bias that the university is attempting to eliminate is legacy admissions. According to Espinoza, roughly 12% of Virginia Tech’s applicants are legacy students, meaning they had a close family member who had previously attended the university. Despite this, over 20% of those accepted into Virginia Tech each year are legacy students, demonstrating the inequitable advantage that legacy students have in receiving admissions offers. To address this, Virginia Tech is formally discontinuing the option to consider students based on legacy. However, Espinoza stated that in the past few years, legacy has already not been “factoring into admissions decisions in any significant way.”
Finally, Virginia Tech has formally announced that it will be complying with the Supreme Court’s decision to end the practice of explicitly factoring race and ethnicity into admission decisions. University officials and students across the country, and even Supreme Court members themselves, have expressed drastically divided opinions on the ruling. Justice Clarence Thomas, who had been advocating for an end to affirmative action for many years, has called such practices “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”
As part of Virginia Tech’s goals to “increase representational diversity,” “increase cultural competency” and “address critical societal issues impacting humanity and equity,” the university committed to bringing in an incoming class of which 40% constituted “underrepresented minority or underserved students” by 2022. This was achieved at the start of the 2022–2023 academic year, according to VT News, as 40.4% of the university’s incoming students represented individuals from such backgrounds.
In light of this progress that many schools across the country have achieved, many have expressed concern that the elimination of race-conscious admissions will only further limit opportunities for minority students and only serve to decrease the diversity and representation that many schools have worked so hard to build up. However, President Tim Sands has stated that other strategies will be instituted and expanded upon to ensure that students are provided with a diverse and inclusive academic environment.
“Much of our recent success in attracting and graduating students from underrepresented minority and underserved backgrounds (including low-income, first generation and veteran students) has been achieved by lowering barriers to admissions, creating effective pre-college programs, and supporting our students while on campus,” said President Tim Sands in the VT News article. “We will increase our emphasis on those programs and support mechanisms going forward.”
