Harvard ends decades-old diversity program that encouraged minority students to apply

The Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program ended in May due to pressure from the Trump administration to eliminate DEI and race-conscious admissions.

Harvard University quietly ended a program—the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program (UMRP)—in May whose purpose was to encourage minority students to learn more and help them apply to the prestigious institution in Cambridge, Mass., according to the university’s news outlet, the Harvard Crimson. 

Founded in 1971, the UMRP helped aspirational students in middle and high school with the university application process. To do this, the program employed counselors who addressed questions from prospective students about life at the school and about the application process. According to the Crimson, as of 2012, between 75 and 90 percent of all minority students who had matriculated through Harvard had some interaction with the UMRP, though the UMRP had no bearing on application decisions. 

The efforts of the university to reach prospective students will now fall under the Harvard Recruitment Ambassadors program. 

While the UMRP program officially shuttered in May, according to a Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesman, James Chisholm, the university hadn’t been doing many of the activities conducted by UMRP in recent years, including “contacting underrepresented minority students, fielding emails and phone calls, coordinating campus visits, and hiring students to recruit applicants from their hometowns.” 

“The activities that were no longer occurring when the UMRP ended will continue to no longer occur in the unified undergraduate admissions group,” said Chisholm, though he wasn’t specific about when those activities stopped or what activities the UMRP was conducting when shuttered.

He said that the new program will allow prospective students to contact current undergraduate students with questions, but will not include any in-person outreach. 

Still according to the Harvard Crimson, the university remains part of a group of 25-30 colleges called the Small Town Outreach Recruitment and Yield consortium, that sends representatives into small towns to educate young people about their universities and applying to college.

Harvard, like many institutions of higher learning in the United States, has been under increased scrutiny from the Trump administration to end programs that could be tagged as diversity, equity, or inclusion-based. A 2023 Supreme Court ruling also banned the use of race-based admission practices for schools securing federal funding, effectively ending affirmative action on college campuses. Universities with diversity goals were forced to find new ways to find high-quality candidates in order to reach university objectives for all forms of diversity, often turning to recruitment programs that centered on other metrics that allowed for a diverse student body.