Harvard Ends Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program as Trump Targets Race in Admissions

Facing pressure from the Trump administration to eliminate any consideration of race in admissions, Harvard quietly ended its Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program in May — shuttering a more than 50-year-old initiative to encourage minority high school students to apply.

Harvard’s efforts to connect prospective applicants with current undergraduates will be housed under a new program, called the Harvard Recruitment Ambassadors. A webpage for the program lists few details and no names of undergraduate employees.

Since 1971, the UMRP guided minority middle and high school students through Harvard’s application process. As of 2012, the UMRP reached out to between 75 and 90 percent of minority students who matriculated to Harvard, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 at the time. The UMRP was not involved in making admissions decisions.

The program employed a team of undergraduate coordinators who answered questions about Harvard’s admissions process and life as a Harvard College student. Around 2012, UMRP student employees began their recruitment efforts in the summer, using a list provided by the College Board to contact rising seniors who identified themselves as minority students and received high scores on the PSAT.

The UMRP’s undergraduate coordinators would then answer questions and staff a dedicated phone line for recruits. Roughly 10 coordinators each year would travel to around a dozen high schools near their hometowns to provide Harvard application advice.

A 2018 article in the Harvard Gazette, a University-run publication, described similar UMRP initiatives, including contacting underrepresented minority students, fielding emails and phone calls, coordinating campus visits, and hiring students to recruit applicants from their hometowns.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm wrote in an email that the UMRP “wasn’t doing any of these activities in recent years.”

“None of the roles mentioned in the 2018 article were occurring in 2025 when the program ended,” he wrote. “The activities that were no longer occurring when the UMRP ended will continue to no longer occur in the unified undergraduate admissions group.”

Chisholm declined to specify which activities had ceased in recent years, why Harvard cut them back, or what the UMRP’s work involved shortly before it was dissolved.

The new, unified program allows prospective applicants to contact current undergraduates with questions about life at Harvard, but currently does not include in-person outreach to high schools or target specific groups of students, according to Chisholm.

The change, made without any public announcement, follows years of scrutiny over the role of race in Harvard’s admissions process. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard and struck down its use of race-conscious admissions — but did not eliminate targeted recruitment and outreach programs, as long as they were not solely based on race.

Since the ruling, Harvard has walked a careful line, fearing repercussions if it either saw sudden drops in its Black and Latino enrollment — or demographic continuity that could raise suspicions it was not complying with the Supreme Court’s order. Black and Latino enrollment in Harvard’s freshman class fell slightly last year, and Harvard Law School’s entering class saw larger drops.

Harvard has yet to release data on the race of admitted or enrolled students for the Class of 2029.

Recruitment programs like the UMRP were one way for Harvard to navigate competing demands — potentially expanding the pool of qualified applicants from underrepresented minority backgrounds, without drawing accusations that the College’s admissions decisions were discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

“I would say that these recruitment programs are really a form of soft affirmative action, where they’re designed to increase the pool of of highly qualified applicants,” said Lisa M. Stulberg ’92, an education sociology professor at New York University.

But pressure from the Trump administration has destabilized that balance. In February and March, the Department of Education issued two rounds of guidance that expanded the government’s interpretation of impermissible “race-based decision-making” beyond the previous scope of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The Trump administration’s letters rescinding Harvard’s federal funding repeatedly questioned the role of race in its admissions processes.

In July, months after Harvard scrapped the UMRP, the Department of Justice issued guidance describing “recruitment strategies targeting specific geographic areas, institutions, or organizations chosen primarily because of their racial or ethnic composition rather than other legitimate factors” as “potentially unlawful proxies” for race.

Recruitment programs similar to the UMRP are neither new nor unique to Harvard.

Stulberg said that minority recruitment programs “have been around at least since the 60s, and maybe even since the late 40s, in elite higher education and in schools like Ivy League schools and their sister schools at the time.”

Kevin D. Brown, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who studies race and education, said that recruitment programs “have been absolutely critical in increasing both the quality and the number of underrepresented minority students going to college.”

Though the UMRP was specifically targeted towards minority students, other recruitment conduct outreach to rural students and other underrepresented groups. Harvard is a member of the Small Town Outreach Recruitment and Yield consortium, a group of 25 to 30 to colleges that send staff to rural areas each semester to teach students about the college application process.

Stulberg said that recruitment programs can play a major role in convincing students that they could have a future at Harvard.

“Even just the idea of recruiting is a symbolic one that indicates to students that they are welcome on campus and that Harvard wants them there,” Stulberg said.

“Taking away those tools, I think, is really going to impact who sees Harvard as being open to them, which I do think will impact all kinds of diversity at schools like Harvard,” she added.

Brown said that programs like the UMRP can be valuable resources for minority students during the application process.

“The thing about having targeted minority recruitment programs is they know how best to communicate with minority students, what media outlets that they’re going to listen to — that they want to get the advice from — and in what to say and to respond to their particular needs, which really do tend to be different,” Brown said.

Harvard’s dismantling of diversity programs, which the Trump administration has accused of being illegal race- and gender-based discrimination, has extended beyond admissions. Over the summer, Harvard’s graduate schools renamed and restructured their diversity offices, and the College took apart its centers for minority students, LGBTQ students, and women in July.

“I understand what Harvard is responding to,” Stulberg said. “I wish it would have a different response.”

—Staff writer Cassidy M. Cheng can be reached at cassidy.cheng@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cassidy_cheng28.

—Staff writer Elias M. Valencia can be reached at elias.valencia@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @eliasmvalencia.