 Hi, my name is Deshaun Karn, I'm a Policy Analyst on the Higher Education Team at New America. And hi, I'm Olivia Checkie, a Program Associate on the Higher Education Team at New America. Two cases currently sit with SCOTUS, Student for Fair Missions versus Harvard College and Student for Fair Missions versus the University of North Carolina, which could likely ban colleges and universities from considering grace as a factor in their admissions process. If SCOTUS decides to overturn affirmative action, we can expect to see many damaging interpreting effects throughout the higher education system and other institutions. Here at New America, we acknowledge that we are not experts on affirmative action. However, we are dedicated to making higher education more equitable and accountable, fighting for inclusion rather than exclusion, so that everyone can obtain an affordable, high quality education. Therefore, we are very committed to using our platform to uplift those deep expertise and knowledge to raise awareness and spark cohesive dialogue on creating future policies to ensure that higher education institutions are a guiding light in embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today, we are very excited to talk to USC Capitol Hills, a front of action coalition, a group of students who are very outspoken about their support for action policies and committed to diversity, equity, inclusion on their campus. They were kind enough to speak with us and tell us more about their organization work and what these Supreme Court cases mean to them. First, I want to just start the conversation by learning more about you all and what year you are, what is your major, and what brought you to UNC Chapel Hill. Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah Zhang. I use she and they pronouns and I am in the class of 2025, so I'm a rising junior. I'm currently majoring in computer science and political science with a minor in data science, and I came to UNC mostly because I want to go to a school far away from where I'm originally from, which is Pennsylvania, but I also grew up in a predominantly white community, and I wanted to go to a school with a large student body and one that was more diverse than where I originally came from, which I think I found at UNC. I'm Christina. I'm a class of 2026, so I'll be a rising sophomore, and so I'm majoring in political science, and I think I'm double majoring in information science. Like Sarah, I'm an out of state student, and I came to UNC because also of the diversity of the student body coming from probably white community. I wanted to see more diversity. I wanted to go to a school with a really good liberal arts program, and I think UNC was a perfect fit for me. I'm Julian. I'm a class of 2025, which makes me a rising junior. I'm a group in New York City and then in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I'm majoring in public policy and minoring in urban planning, and I had to explore and was excited about the possibility of moving out of state and going somewhere else for college, but at the end of the day, the opportunities, financial, extracurricular, and curricular activities at UNC were hard to beat. Hi, everyone. My name is Adela. I am also a class of 2025, so rising junior. I'm majoring in business and computer science, and like Julian, I was also an in-state student, but being in-state, I was able to meet a lot of people that also went to Chapel Hill, and they told me about the open-mindedness and accepting culture of the school, which really drew me towards UNC at the end. Awesome. It's so great to be talking with y'all today. I was wondering if you could tell us more about UNC's Affirmative Action Coalition. How did it start? What was the turning point for your campus needing an organization like UNC Affirmative Action Coalition, and what plans do you have for the upcoming academic school year? Yeah. We first began our organization in September of 2022, which was only a month before the actual SFFA versus UNC Supreme Court case. The motivation for starting the Affirmative Action Coalition came from me seeing on a newsletter that the case was about to happen in a month. The newsletter was run by North Carolina Asian Americans together, and they were looking for Asian American activists in North Carolina to do some mobilization work around affirmative action. This was at the beginning of my sophomore year, and I've always been really interested and involved in community organizing. However, I realized that nobody on campus was really talking about the case, and that was kind of frustrating to me because it had really huge implications not only for our campus, but for public universities across the country. Obviously, I decided to do something about that. The original members of our group were me, Christina Adela, and another one of our members, Joy, and because we kind of only had a month to get things figured out before the case happened, a lot of our initial work was just on tabling and talking to as many people as we could. Our kind of primary objective was just to educate students on the fact that this case was about to happen, why it was so significant, and just talk to targets about what diversity really meant to them. We were really lucky to be guided by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which is a nonprofit based in DC, and also worked a lot with the Lawyers Committee, who was representing UNC in this case. They were able to help us actually get up to DC for the case, which was really awesome. That happened, and then after the actual case occurred, we were like, wow, we really need a break because we were just organizing for months. We kind of shifted our focus in the meantime before the case decision release to instead create a list of demands to maintain diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, or DEI at UNC, just in the very likely scenario based on the court's previous decisions that affirmative action was overturned. We also really focused on building connections and solidarity with other student organizations, professors, advocacy groups around the area, just to kind of expand our network and really get people talking about affirmative action. So our current plan is we're kind of trying to build our organization on what the results of the case will be. However, we know that even if affirmative action is maintained, there's still a lot of diversity programs at UNC that are under threat due to the conservative state legislature. So we're hoping to just keep organizing, see where things go, and make sure we're able to protect DEI policies in that way. And finally, we're keeping an eye on other court cases that may threaten the ability to use socioeconomic status for equitable admission, which has been proposed as a solution for overturning race conscious admissions. So there was a lot going on, but we're kind of just playing it by ear and seeing what happens when the Supreme Court released their decision. Yeah, thank you for sharing. Yeah, seems like the world is kind of on fire, but y'all are still trying to take the fire out. What does affirmative action mean to you? And when you hear that it will be banned, what is that risk for students of color? And what issues do you foresee unfolding across your campus if affirmative action is overturned? Yeah, I think affirmative action means a lot to me, and I think as well as my other color leaders, we've had this discussion before that we all believe that our applications affirmative action played a big role in why we got admitted to UNC, and it's a big reason why we are here today doing the work that we're doing because of policies like affirmative action. And so when we hear that it'll be banned, it does startle me a little bit because affirmative action has been used for more than roughly 40 to 50 years, and the Supreme Court over and over again has established that race can be one of the many factors in college admissions and diversity is an important issue on college campuses. And so it's crucial that we continue using affirmative action to create diverse campuses and communities that benefit not only students of color, but all students on campus. And so since affirmative action has been used, we see a large increase of students of color on college campuses. And so without a holistic approach to admitting students to campuses, you know, entire generations of Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian American, Pacific Islander students will be have less chance at any schools and we shut out of these selective programs and universities. And it's not because they are not capable, it's just that you're not taking a whole holistic view of them as a student. And I think it's important to also note that racial discrimination is not over. Like just because we have visual policies trying to end racial segregation and in schools, it's still a lot of it still exists today. Sarah and I in D.C. got to meet from Cassit Jr., whose father was one of the first Black men to study at UNC Chapel Hill Law, which if you think about it's not that long ago. And so we are not that removed from segregation and racial, no systems of racial discrimination. And it happens today and policies like affirmative action addresses these issues that exist, including segregation, underfunding of schools, systems and discrimination in the classroom. And so we need these policies and these race conscious policies to kind of look at the student as a whole and to uphold diversity on campus because a lot of students that come onto these campuses do so much heavy lifting with the activism that they do. A lot of our academic centers are student driven. And a lot of the programs that make students feel belong, belonging on campuses are upheld by students. And so if we have programs that are threatened like the Indigenous Studies program at UNC, there were students who got 5,000 signatures in a year and were able to make sure that the Indigenous program maintains on UNC campus because UNC is built on Native land. And so thinking about the future without affirmative action is frightening to see about the safety and what kind of academic programs and resources are going to be on campus for students. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with everything that Kristina said and just to add on a little bit with some of my own thoughts, but affirmative action is an imperfect solution. There are flaws with it and we can all see that but it is a solution. It's the best one we have right now and it's undeniably just crucial for diversity on campus. Without affirmative action, it's already been obvious that other schools who have overturned using affirmative action that their diversity numbers have gone down. The effects are visually noticeable and we're terrified that our own student body is also going to lose our diversity like these other schools if the Supreme Court case is overturned. And so it's just absolutely necessary for us to have this kind of diversity and which we're more than happy to go into another question as well, but diversity is so important for all of us on campus to have this kind of experience and this amazing college experience that we have. Thank you both so much for your insight. To go on to the next question, across many conservative leaning states, we're seeing that many bills are being introduced to ban campus-based programming that embraces diversity, equity and inclusion. So what are your thoughts on these bills emerging out of state legislatures? How should campus administrators and staff react? And how can they ensure students of color feel supported through their post-secondary education? Yeah, so I'll kind of tackle the first part of this question which is anti-DEI legislation coming out of state houses. So North Carolina is currently a state with a conservative majority in the North Carolina General Assembly as a public institution that means a lot of our funding and who's in charge of our university is controlled by the legislature. So our Board of Trustees is a bit more conservative leading at the moment and that's extremely dangerous because it has been kind of made clear that DEI is something that is on the line. So we've looked at a lot of other states like Florida, namely in Texas, who have had state legislatures really crack down on DEI policies, critical race theory, just things that expose students to the inclusivity of our culture. And we kind of call this the Florida effect because Florida has been kind of one of the leading states in cracking down on these pieces of legislation. So a really big concern for us as well is the lack of solidarity that we've kind of seen within communities and organizing groups to get their way. So one really big thing is Christina and I worked with an organization prior to coming to college that has been working to pass API education bills and state legislatures, which seems really great on the surface. However, the passage of an API education bill in Florida was negotiated by actually passing the don't say gay bill in Florida. So there's a lot of dangerous rhetoric and just not a lot of solidarity when it comes to organizing around the state legislature. So we're kind of just trying to keep an eye on the situation in North Carolina and talk to as many administrators and professors as we can to make sure we're prepared for any potential attacks from the board of trustees. To add on, I would say that even within my tenure as a student, there have been a couple of things that like state government and university leadership have done to make students feel unwelcome. I'm comfortable on campus, for example, the failure to tenure Nicola Hannah-Jones and her consideration to come to UNC or more recently, the opening of the School of Civic Life, which is kind of like a school of conservative thought that no one had seen coming and was kind of a surprise to all students. And so that means that a lot of like the need for mentorship and support comes to the faculty level and it's pretty unfair to require professors and faculty to be educators and mentors. And I know a couple of professors who have dedicated themselves to such work, but you can't ask that of everybody. And so at the end of the day, students who need close support, intimate support, end up having to seek that out on their own. And it's not very easy. And so some of the things that I've seen that are good are like community centers. Christine was mentioning the Native American Center, the Center for Black Students, there are plenty of centers that students can go to. But I personally would like to see an increase in one-on-one mentorship as opposed to community events, which you can kind of go to maybe once a week, once every other week, but it's not really life-changing as it would be to have somebody in your life who looks like you and can kind of walk you through your experiences. As for in the classroom, I mean, there are plenty of ways that teachers can make, professors can make students feel more welcome in the classroom, adding small things to the syllabus to make sure that students know explicitly that everybody is welcome. But whichever it is, whatever it is, I think the most important thing is that professors know that they are always learning in the classroom just as much as students are. Yeah, thank you for sharing that conservative think tank thing. I've seen that pop up a lot of different campuses. Even popped up when I was a grad student at UT, I was like, whoa, what are you all doing here? And it's like, we're paying tuition to these places and you're thinking that the resources are going to be used appropriately and correctly that's going to serve you, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to happen. So y'all did talk a lot about diversity, equity, inclusion, how it's important, but I also want to talk a little bit more about how, you know, it's basically it's an essential asset for students. We know that it's needed in post-secondary education, but I'm curious to hear y'all thoughts on should DEI be, diversity, inclusion, belonging, be included in the basic needs conversation, and what should policymakers and campus administrators know about the importance of DEI? Yeah, I can get started with this question. And I'm going to be talking about one perspective for the students that are currently in post-secondary education and then Julianne will follow up with another perspective. But to all of us, I think we have all felt the effects of how important diversity actually is for a well-rounded education. We see so many different things coming into college like we get to experience so many new cultures and it fosters new ideas and it fosters growth for all of us, whether that's like educational, whether that's personal, and it's genuinely just incredibly valuable for this experience and this learning experience specifically. I think something really important to note whenever we talk about affirmative action is that no one is lowering the bar. Like no college is going to want to accept worse or non-qualified students and colleges whenever we use affirmative action in our admissions and even in the workplace when companies say that they're equal opportunity employers, they're just recognizing that working with different perspectives and learning from different people just creates better growth, it creates more ideas, and it creates better people for society in the future. Whether that's necessary and important to or it is definitely important to include in all of these discussions because the B and DEIB, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging is important for the mental health, the physical health, and just the success of all students. Obviously, race is not the only factor that contributes to belongingness or the feeling of belongingness but there's undeniably a sense of community within people that look like you people with the same ethic and cultural background and it's one of the reasons why BLM and Mi Pueblo and like the Asian American Student Association and cultural groups like these are so prominent on campus. Yeah, I'd like to echo that and especially the the B part, the belonging, I think it's super important when there are people who look like doing the classroom specifically professors too, that's quite helpful and definitely has been an issue at UNC for me and a lot of other students but I would like to add the other perspective which is to me DEIB is kind of the secondary success of affirmative action the primary success being students who would not have access to an education like that who are who are deserving then receive an education like that maybe their family does not have a history or something like that having access to those spaces and I think that's the primary thing and then the secondary success with that is once they're in those spaces they add so much more but I will say at UNC and most institutions around the country there are a set of privileged students who are going to succeed regardless of any DEI institutions any affirmative action institutions and so to put more focus on DEI in the affirmative action discussion kind of puts more focus on their success but I think a lot of us know that regardless of what happens at the university those students are bound to succeed and so for me it's more important to talk about the students who would not have access to that diverse environment in the first place and for me that's the primary success of affirmative action not to take away from Adele's point and not to say that that's not important. Thank you both so much for your responses to that question I did want to touch on something that Julian brought up a little bit because I think it segway is great into our next question about belonging and seeing others who look like you in the classroom including professors so I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about faculty diversity because across the nation we do see that university faculty are less racially diverse than their respective student populations and wondering if you could reflect on your own experience at UNC what are your thoughts about faculty diversity and what it means for you on campus and what connections do you see between affirmative action slash DEI bans and the importance of having a diverse faculty? Yeah that's a really good question because a lot of people think that affirmative action is like a silver bullet that solves all issues but in order to make things like affirmative action with implementation as effective as possible we need other policies to help it such as like diverse college faculty and staff as Julian said it's so important that students not only have a place in these universities but they have mentors and faculty who can guide them through their college experience and I know that I have one staff member that I look up to and I ask a lot of questions too and she is an Asian American woman and I think I've learned a lot from her and understand how to navigate the UNC system and what programs to look at and I've met with other like PhD students through her and it's fairly valuable to have as Julian said with things like Nicolana Jones where faculty of color especially women of color and Black faculty they are disproportionately not given deny their tenure even though they are overqualified and there's a lot of grad students when I speak to them they say I have to go to different school departments to look for faculty of color to work with which is crazy to think because we have 15,000 students with a diverse body and they can't find a single faculty that looks like them who understands their experience and they have to go to a trouble to a whole different school with a faculty that doesn't really specialize in their background and so when you're a student coming to a new university and you have to navigate all this by yourself it's hard to understand especially with students of first generation which I am and one solution that I can propose is cluster hiring it's something that the Asian American students have been pushing for a lot we have some of the most renowned Asian American faculty on UNC campus and most of them left because they were overworked they were told to do a lot more than they were supposed to and one faculty said that they had a few students come to them with mental health crisis and the administration said just go to this professor because she was Asian American but she's not a counselor she's not specialized in that field and it kind of shows what kind of labor she had to take on solely just because she was Asian American and this goes for all faculty of color they express this over and over again and a lot of our faculty of color are kind of leaving in large groups leaving UNC leaving behind like really important programs specifically for us for one that I know is the Southern for oral history so we're trying to collect a lot of oral history because North Carolina is so rich in in history and we try to collect a lot of those oral histories but a lot of faculty have left and one including the person who's spearheading this entire initiative and so now a lot of our initiatives and programs are underfunded because they don't have the faculty and a lot of the information that they carried knowledge that they carry is now lost and so it's also so important not only that the faculty is diverse but also the administration according to a roadmap for equity UNC the administration is roughly like 80 to 84 percent white whereas the student body is a lot more diverse and if our administration who are making the big decisions are don't reflect the student body and don't reflect the faculty then it's going to be very hard to get programs and other things passed through so the leadership that we see in our universities are also so important we also see a lot of DEI bands which would hinder what faculty and administration would come in especially in the medical field there has been people trying to ban talking about diversity equity inclusion saying that no there's no racial discrimination in the medical school when we know that's not true we know things like the Tuskegee study and we also know like I learned about the SOFA score is how people try to pick who gets life-saving resources and a lot of these have discriminatory practices where they tend to choose white patients over black and brown patients and so we need to talk about how these conversations and if we don't talk about things like equity inclusion and indigeneity and other things like that that we we're going to see a very stark consequences for people of color and still it's a color yeah thank you for sharing and yeah I definitely want to point out I think the whole thing is like I think a lot of people are just focusing on this issue within higher education but actually don't see the actual ripple effects it's going to have in other different you know workforces like medical school and you know medicine of course housing discrimination like we have discrimination in other different places in the front of action is going to see into the other different institutions if we don't actually think about it kind of want to segue into now about y'all's advocacy efforts we are seeing more student advocates like yourselves emerge in the wake of affirmative action possibly being overturned in more states like we all we've been hearing about Florida and Texas trying to ban DI efforts what would you like to say to other students at other college campuses fighting for equal opportunity and for their identities to be embraced throughout higher education yeah so we have been trying to I know I talked about earlier some lack of solidarity in other organizing efforts and that's something that's really big for us is to kind of actually create solidarity with some of the groups that I think Adela was mentioning so we have been partnering with other campus communities and cultural groups because we know the effects of affirmative action are going to harm all of us so it obviously makes a lot more sense for us to work together and combine our efforts to defend affirmative action rather than work separately and we really believe that because the results of affirmative action are going to have lasting impact not only for UNC but also for public universities all across across the country that we think every student should get involved not only should college students now be worried about what incoming classes students are going to look like but they're also probably going to be concerned about what affirmative action policies look like if they maybe apply to grad school or apply to further education obviously high school students should be worried about what kind of campus climate they're going to come into when if they choose to pursue a higher education path so there's a lot of concern just in general and we really encourage a lot of students to get involved I actually got a DM from someone who was an incoming UNC freshman who wanted to get involved and that was really motivating and inspiring to hear that people had really been keeping an eye on the case so I would say this is a fight for everyone it is crucial for for us to achieve higher education to tackle all of the other problems that our generation faces so we really encourage everyone to get involved in the fight and also for us working with different advocacy groups and professors is so important we have been so lucky to receive such great mentorship and we hope to continue that and continue to network with other amazing groups to to form connections absolutely yeah please get involved it's all students across the country and I think something we've or most recently we actually had an event at UNC where we held a panel and then we just kind of had a discussion with a representative from the lawyers committee and a bunch of students came and talked about their experiences whether that was the minority experience or not being on campus and just sort of seeing talking about diversity at UNC and just one thing that came up was that like for a lot of minority students they kind of felt like they were constantly like I guess like laboring to like represent themselves and like constantly just fighting for themselves so whether you're actively organizing or not it almost feels like you're fighting just trying to fight for yourself which kind of comes into I think we've all heard of before but imposter syndrome and I think it's really important to like know and I want to like tell everyone and including myself I tell myself as well but getting involved as a minority student um and even just existing as a minority student on college campuses all the time like you feel imposter syndrome but that imposter syndrome comes from pre-existing systems and whenever you're having like these imposter syndrome feelings and you have haters and trolls out there who don't support diversity and who don't support this kind of work that we're doing I think the best advice to give people is to give people tips and not time we can do our best to educate others and we can do our best to let them know what exactly we're doing but in the end there's just going to be people out there who want to keep us from enacting change and they do that by basically taking up our time instead of doing instead of letting us do what we're actually doing and trying to create this kind of change so just keep keep fighting as Sarah said wonderful answers from both of you thank you so much I was wondering or hoping we could kind of continue on that wavelength um what would you like to say to the future generations of students and their families applying for college what should they be aware of when they embark on the path of looking for a school that is going to serve and welcome them no matter their background okay sorry this is a meeting but yeah I think that's a really good question and I want to answer as like from my perspective as a first-gen student applying so I didn't really know much about applying to colleges my parents didn't go to higher education so it was basically trying to get as much information from cousins and trying to get from friends and family just relatives about what does the college process look like and I think it's a very scary process because it does you know where you go really influences what career you're going to take in your path but I think as Adela said previously there's a lot of imposter syndrome but you know you belong at university there's a reason why you can go admitted and at UNC we have a specific program that tells you why you got admitted they'll look at your application and you can figure out they'll tell you what they loved about your application and that some programs like that are really helpful for students especially when you're having a rough time at an institution and you just need like a little boost and morale and I think just having confidence in yourself that like this is a scary process but you'll be where you need to be and as long as you're passionate about whatever it is that you're like you want to pursue you will find opportunities you'll have like you'll have research opportunities you'll have resources available to you just got to go look for them there's a lot of resources that you can see don't know that available to them and you just have to like kind of find out through a word of mouth or you have to just do a little research researching yourself and another thing that was really important to me was so I want test optional my year because that was a possibility because my test scores didn't really match the ones for out-of-state students and that was another thing like oh my test scores don't match my students and it made me feel a little like oh maybe I'm not as good but I'm still here today you know my application reflected on a lot of the activism I did and extracurriculars that I did and so I'm here doing here today and like many other students of color doing a lot of uplifting on this campus work in affirmative action I'm working trying to get a minor UNC started make faculty a not minor doing undergrad research so what things like affirmative action it's not that you know you're only there because of your race you're there because you're qualified you're there because you do amazing work and you are still a student and you are there because you belong there and I think that's something I keep wanting to echo to a lot of my friends who sit there like oh I'm only here because of affirmative action I'm like no that's not true you're here because you did stellar in high school and it's not only reflected in your test scores but other things that you've done and someone at the looking at your application saw something in you and that's why you're at the university you're at and another thing I really want to tackle is the Asian-American kind of argument the Asian-Americans are being discriminated against um Sarah Adele and I and I hear all these Asian-Americans and we don't believe that Asian-Americans are discriminated against um if there was studies saying that Asian-Americans were we would definitely be against affirmative action but there has not been a submission data to approve that in fact there's data to prove that Asian-Americans have benefited from affirmative action we saw Asian-Americans rise from 3 percent in 1980s to a 27.6 percent in the class of 2026 so it helps us all be more inclusive and make our campuses more diverse and I think this kind of this argument is rooted in anti-blackness and you know upholding the model minority myth that um uh even the um Royed Fredle who who worked on the creative of the SAT and looked at his research he was saying that yes you know he's looking at the test scores and said that there's a big reason why white students might outperform and it's because the languages that's on the SAT they tend to use colloquial terms that are used in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools whereas black students reading it never came across it and they saw that black and latino students were um did better on harder questions um that had to do more with like uh like reflecting like problem solving and those and it works on those that use words and colloquial terms that they didn't understand and he also said that like there's also other things where they consider extracurriculars um what are you doing outside of the classroom like what if you're the oldest of a family and you have kids um you have um siblings that you have to look after you're working a part-time job to support a family all this does not encompassed in test scores and so looking at the whole student is so important um and Asian Americans would also lose a lot of seats if we didn't have affirmative action um there was a george town study that uphold this um thinking that Asian Americans would lose um seats from a lot of prestigious schools if affirmative action was overturned and because test scores are again a flexion of some privilege you have to stay home and study whereas um looking at a whole application of student is a lot better if it reflects on what can the student bring to campus yeah thank you uh for sharing on all those notes um all is to say uh if you probably go back and look at my test scores and I've been out of college for like 12 years almost now my SAT score ACT score was not the best and if I was harboring on that I would not be probably talking to you all today um which is to show that we have to think about people's lived experiences um and they're more than just numbers in the GPA um the all the stuff that we come into the college is like those experiences those matter um so just now getting towards the end of our call I wanted to talk a little bit more about federal policy and you know what what can Congress in the White House be doing um so at New America we are very focused on federal policy um just given our location being in Washington DC what would you like Congress members and the White House to know about the fallout in front of actions overturned and how can federal policymakers maintain and improve access for students of color yeah so I'm I wanted to take this one because I'm currently working on Capitol Hill and I think higher education policy is something that honestly is not really being talked about outside of um the student loan payment uh situation so I think it's something that a lot of Congress people should definitely focus more on especially we're getting now that we're getting a lot of people concerned about quote-unquote the state of our education in terms of like critical race theory or the or LGBTQ indoctrination so if anything I think the legislative branch can kind of focus their efforts elsewhere obviously if affirmative action is overturned due to the Supreme Court's decision there's not that much that the legislative or executive branch can really do about that besides maybe release a statement in support of affirmative action and vowed to promise to um pursue pathways that make higher education accessible to all so maybe this is just kind of a personal belief but I think that um canceling student loans out or just significantly lowering the cost of tuition is a really huge way that we can reduce the barrier of people going to higher education one of the biggest problems with accessing higher education is the insane cost that is and obviously affirmative action is a policy that is trying to get more low income diverse students in into higher education spaces and if we lower the cost of how much it is then maybe that could open up um rules to a more wide range of students as we wrap up I kind of want to add um somewhat unrelated anecdote um that kind of sums up the way we feel as the affirmative action coalition um so this summer I'm actually in Mexico City working on the internship and it's a global city I've been meeting people from all around the world and a lot of that a lot of the discussion comes down to comparing education systems um that's where we are in our lives at this age right now um and so it seems like everybody I meet they talk about their test scores and they had a certain number of options if their test scores fall here then these are their options if they fall here these are their options um and the education system in the US leaves a lot to be desired um and being in the US for like years on end like you know that it's kind of hard to ignore that but speaking with other people I think the one thing that they kind of envy is the way that we have personalization in our system and that people are considered like as whole individuals and with that on the line I think it's really important to make clear as the affirmative action coalition that numbers don't define students that's the most important thing and then the second the second thing is that affirmative action does not prioritize people who don't deserve to be on college campuses it actually improves access for people who do wow that's that's a good way to end definitely good way to end um thank you all so much uh for being you know on this call with me and Olivia today to just to hear y'all's voices and uplift y'all's experiences um just want to say continue the work that y'all are doing um also self-care I know this work can be very tiring so make sure you have you know some treats or something that is gonna you know get you you know rejuvenated and all that stuff because yeah this work can be very tiring um but again thank you from myself um and new america and yeah any any other parting words Olivia that you want to say before um we end yes I just I am so appreciative of the opportunity to be able to talk with y'all Dishon and I were talking before um we started this and I was just like I'm pretty young so I feel like I don't know if I should be saving this but just y'all are the future and it gives me so much hope and I'm just so in awe of all the work y'all are doing so like Dishon said keep it up but self-care as well for sure all right thank you