The Florida Way: Diversity Without Affirmative Action

Federalism is one of our nation’s greatest virtues; states’ discretion to pursue their own policies is a hallmark of the American republic. And state schools offer potent examples of how states can dramatically differ in their quality of governance. Consider higher education. Florida’s remarkable success with its top-ranked public colleges and universities stands as a testament to how higher education can thrive and achieve real diversity without affirmative action. For nearly a quarter of a century, Florida has maintained color-blind admissions to its post-secondary schools while still yielding a diverse student body. The genuine diversity of the Sunshine State’s public colleges and universities serves as a valuable corrective to those who argue that diversity is threatened by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which ended affirmative action.

In November 1999, via executive order, then-governor Jeb Bush prohibited affirmative action in Florida under the One Florida Initiative, a program that explicitly eliminated racial preferences from public university admissions. The policy granted admission for the top 20 percent of all Florida public high school graduates to at least one state university and aggressively invested in merit and need-based financial aid. Since 2001, state public financial aid in Florida has increased by 71.4 percent per full-time enrolled student.

The results are clear: data from fall 2021 show that 42 percent of Florida’s public undergraduate students identify as black or Hispanic, significantly higher than the national average of 29 percent. Even more notable is how many minority students decide to attend an in-state, public institution of higher education. Fifty-one percent of Florida public high school graduates completed a college preparatory curriculum and identified as black or Hispanic. Many other minority students attend out-of-state institutions or choose to attend private institutions.  

It’s worth looking at how individual school enrollment has changed since racial preferences were eliminated with One Florida’s enactment. In 1999, at the University of Central Florida—a public research university with the second-largest on-campus student body of any public university in the United States—the total percentage of non-Hispanic blacks enrolled was 7.6 percent. In 2022, that figure had grown to 9.7 percent. The 2022 enrollment percentage of minorities and non-resident aliens – including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and students of two or more races—at UCF was 54.9 percent. This figure is dramatically up from around 25.7 percent in 1999 – an increase of about 114 percent, making UCF today a majority-minority school. All this without race-based discrimination.

In 2020 at the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville – the state’s flagship school and most selective public university, ranked in the US News Top 30 – non-Hispanic black students made up 5.7 percent of the student body, a slight drop from 1997, when that portion was 6.6 percent. But while black student enrollment has marginally slipped, UF has become far more diverse overall in the past quarter century. In 1997, 23.9 percent of UF’s student body was in the non-white minority. By 2020, that figure jumped to almost half, at 45.7 percent – a 91 percent increase, again without resorting to affirmative action or racial quotas.

While these numbers show real growth in diverse enrollment, matriculating on campus is only half the battle. Thriving on campus and completing a four-year degree is the next hurdle, and on this metric Florida is also hitting the mark. The most recent data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System show that Florida’s four-year graduation rate for students who identify as black or African American is 15 percentage points higher than the national figure. For those that identify as Hispanic or Latino, the four-year graduation rate is 17 percentage points higher than the national average, and both black and Hispanic students, respectively, have at least a 40 percent graduation rate. In fact, nearly half of all bachelor’s degrees awarded by the State University System of Florida during 2021-22 went to students who identify as African American or Hispanic/Latino.

Florida has created a diverse student body through a combination of efforts focused on merit, financial aid, performance-based funding, and state investment in higher education, not racially based quotas. The state’s race-neutral admissions strategy underscores to students that they are admitted to one of Florida’s universities not because of the color of their skin but because of the excellence of their academic performance. Students earn their spots across schools in the state by virtue of their accomplishments. Florida has proven that achieving a diverse, high-quality, and low-cost college experience can be done without affirmative action.

Ray Rodrigues is chancellor of the State University System of Florida. Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.