Hildreth Institute in The Boston Globe

Diversity fell at many competitive Mass. colleges this fall. Panel recommends ways to boost it.

This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe.

Governor Maura Healey’s administration on Wednesday released recommendations to bolster diversity at Massachusetts colleges following last year’s US Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action in university admissions.

The recommendations, from a committee of higher education experts appointed by Healey, said the state should do more to help K-12 students understand their options for higher education, reach more adult learners, and conduct a statewide assessment of admissions practices to identify barriers for some students. The panel also said the state should prioritize need-based financial aid and offer more support services to help underrepresented students graduate.

“The messaging around this particular document is a strong one, signaling to all students, but particularly those who’ve been historically underrepresented in institutions of higher learning, [that] you deserve to be here,” state Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler said in an interview. “We’re going to support you getting here and getting through.”

The Boston Globe recently reported that enrollment of Black first-year students declined this fall at many competitive colleges across the nation, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Amherst College, and Harvard University, following the end of affirmative action.

Leaders from local private and public colleges and universities collaborated on the 34-page report with student representatives, civil rights advocates, researchers, and higher education administrators with expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. For over a year, the committee, called the Advisory Council for the Advancement of Representation in Education, researched and discussed how colleges in Massachusetts can safeguard and expand diversity in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, Tutwiler said.

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It is unclear who will be responsible for ensuring the recommendations are implemented, or the timeline for the work, but several higher education leaders said the report offers a road map for schools of all stripes to follow.

The state’s goal, Tutwiler said, is to increase the share of historically underrepresented students attending and graduating from local universities. To pull that off, colleges, high schools, and state officials will need to work together to increase access to higher education, and make it more affordable for those with the fewest resources, Tutwiler said.

The new report found that immediate undergraduate enrollment among Massachusetts public high school graduates has been declining in recent years, with sharper declines among African American/Black and Hispanic or Latino students.

“That tells a pretty concerning story,” Tutwiler said. “Our North Star is [to ensure] that graph looks a lot different as a result of these efforts.”

The state has already started acting on some of the report’s recommendations, including growing need-based financial aid, adding early college programs for high school students to gain college course credits, and expanding free community college earlier this year.

Enrollment at Massachusetts community colleges, including North Shore Community College, is up. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

While individual campuses across the state have adopted programs to help underrepresented students gain access to higher education in recent years, the report outlines a more systematic vision that would ideally make it easier for students to move between two and four-year institutions and streamline financial aid offerings.

Linda Thompson, president of Westfield State University, said in an interview that colleges and universities should work more with public school systems “to ensure that we are aware of what is going on in K-12 system, but also looking at ways that we can support a pathway that’s smooth and easy for people to be able to achieve their dreams.”

The Department of Higher Education will bring together representatives across the higher education landscape to discuss admissions processes, support services, DEI programs, campus climate, and more. The department, with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Executive Office of Education, will submit an implementation plan to Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll by January.

Moving forward, the report recommends providing students with more preparation for and access to SAT and ACT exams; increasing offerings of college-level courses such as Advanced Placement classes, dual enrollment, and other early college opportunities in high schools; offering more career preparation for K-12 students; and helping families understand and fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The report said reaching more adult learners could help address workforce shortages “in high-priority industry sectors such as manufacturing, clean technology, healthcare, bioscience, and information technology.”

Bahar Akman Imboden, managing director of the Hildreth Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit focused on college affordability and equity, said in an interview that the committee researched practices that worked and did not work in other states to increase diversity and boost graduation rates. She said the report is a “nation-leading example” of a state studying how its campuses can maintain diversity within the bounds of the law.

“I’m pretty optimistic this approach really will lead to improvements in our system,” Imboden said.

College admissions practices and processes, including legacy preferences and binding early decision offerings, should also be reevaluated, the report said, to ensure there are not barriers for certain students. The state should also improve transfer pathways between two-year and four-year schools, and establish “direct admission” programs, in which students who meet certain criteria are proactively offered admission to local colleges.

Massachusetts should “investigate the potential of a guaranteed automatic admission program” to four-year public campuses for students graduating in the top 10 percent of their high school class, the report said.

As part of an effort to ease the transition between community colleges and four-year schools, the University of Massachusetts announced Wednesday that its undergraduate campuses in Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, and Lowell this semester enrolled 66 community college graduates who are the first to be awarded the UMass Community College Advantage Scholarship. The two-year $10,000 scholarship is given to students in the top 10 percent of their class who enroll in the university system.

One challenge the state will face as it pursues the report’s recommendations is the disjointed higher education sector. Massachusetts has dozens of private colleges that operate independently, and for years, students and higher education watchers have bemoaned the fragmented nature of the state’s public universities and community colleges.

Tutwiler said he is optimistic schools will work together to bring new students into the higher education sector.

“When there’s an issue that everyone cares about, it becomes the rallying call,” he said. “We all care about student experience and some of the disjointedness, a lot of it is felt by the very people we intend to serve, and so that is an impetus to be better.”