By Marty Meehan, President, University of Massachusetts
and Lane A. Glenn, President, Northern Essex Community College
NOTE: This article appeared in the October 23, 2024 edition of Commonwealth Beacon.
A year after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions programs, colleges and universities around the country now see the predictable outcomes: Brown, Columbia, and MIT, among others, all reported declining enrollments for Black and Hispanic students for incoming classes this fall.
In Massachusetts, public colleges and universities remain deeply committed to ensuring that all students have access to a high-quality education, and the results speak for themselves: A majority of students at the state’s fifteen community colleges are students of color. At UMass this fall, 50 percent of all new students identify as students of color, making this incoming group of students the most diverse in the university’s history. UMass Amherst, UMass Boston, and UMass Law welcomed their most diverse classes ever.
Massachusetts community colleges and UMass campuses also serve a large proportion of low-income students, and first-generation students, those who are the first in their families to go to college.
Recognizing the challenges last year’s Supreme Court decision would create for historically marginalized students, we worked together to launch the UMass Community College Advantage Scholarship. The scholarship guarantees admission to a UMass campus to students in the top 10% of their community college graduating class. Students awarded the scholarship will also receive $10,000 in scholarship funding over two years of continuous enrollment at UMass.
Years of working closely together on effective transfer experiences has shown that students who complete degrees at the state’s community colleges and transfer to the University of Massachusetts are well-prepared and just as successful as students who start at UMass in their first year.
This fall, UMass awarded 66 recent community college graduates this new scholarship, adding to the rich diversity on the university’s Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell campuses.
Roberto Mercado, a recent Northern Essex Community College graduate, is one of those students. After crossing the stage with his associate degree in computer science last spring, he wasn’t sure if he would be able to pay for a bachelor’s degree. But the UMass Community College Advantage Scholarship helped him enroll at UMass Lowell, where, as Mercado gratefully reports, he is “able to work less and concentrate on my classes more.”
For Mercado and more than 73,000 other students from 351 cities and towns in the Commonwealth, all 50 states, and more than 160 countries, access to a UMass degree is about a lot more than just taking classes.
This year, U.S. News & World Report ranked UMass Lowell, where Mercado is enrolled, as one of the top 100 public universities in the country, because of its diversity, learning environment, and student outcomes.
This success is mirrored at the nationally ranked UMass campuses in Amherst, Boston, and Dartmouth as well as at UMass Chan Medical School and UMass Law School.
And, at a time when the state faces real challenges to retain its talented workforce, the roughly 19,000 who graduate from UMass every year are overwhelmingly more likely to stay in Massachusetts than the graduates of private schools and to contribute to our workforce. In short, UMass is indispensable to Massachusetts’s goal to secure our position as the most educated and innovative state in the nation.
Through the UMass Community College Advantage Scholarship, we are ensuring that everyone, regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic background, has access to the world-class education that UMass provides.
