“Beyond the Box” recommendations:
Delay asking about prospective students’ experiences with the criminal justice system until after an admission decision is made
Clearly inform potential students as early as possible how to respond to questions about criminal pasts
Ensure that questions are narrowly focused, avoiding overly broad requests about criminal history
Give students the opportunity to explain criminal-justice encounters and their preparedness for college study
Train admissions personnel and counselors to use criminal-history data effectively
Colleges and universities that ask applicants about criminal histories could be keeping those potential students from pursuing higher education, federal education officials said Monday.
To make college more accessible for all, the U.S. Department of Education is recommending alternatives to these questions, as part of its new "Beyond the Box" initiative announced Monday.
The guidelines “talk to colleges and universities about how they recruit and attract a very diverse student body, while also not creating barriers for those who’ve been involved in the criminal justice system,” said James Cole, general counsel acting as deputy secretary with the education department. “When we think about the overwhelming majority of (incarcerated people) will be returning to their communities and the issues of recidivism, Beyond the Box becomes very important because we know that once they’ve returned to their communities they have to have good jobs. They have to have access to education.”
The initiative follows the “ban the box” campaign by civil rights groups to have employers remove the criminal-record check box on hiring applications. Questions on college applications about criminal records can have the same negative impact, officials said.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that requesting this information may prevent potentially well-qualified applicants from enrolling in college or training programs beyond high school, education officials said. The department could not provide specific numbers of people who have been affected by criminal-history questions on college applications, as the program is just beginning.
A 2015 report by the Center for Community Alternatives, a nonprofit organization in New York, found that two-thirds of people with felony convictions who started applications to State University of New York schools never finished the process, in part because of the requirement for detailing their convictions, according to the education department. In 2010, the same organization found that 66 percent of colleges ask for criminal history information in admissions.
The initiative also encourages colleges and employers to think of ways to move questions about criminal history later in the process. Asking them early in the process, on college or job applications, can cause people who have been in the criminal justice system not to apply, Cole said.
Cole and other education officials were in Atlanta on Monday discussing “Beyond the Box” and touting other Obama administration initiatives to help improve access to college and reform the criminal justice system.
Beyond the Box follows work done this year by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group, which found that application forms at 17 universities in the South, including the University of Georgia and Clark Atlanta University, included questions about any contact with the legal system or police.
Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee, called the “Beyond the Box” program a good preliminary step.
“This is an area where there was an absence of federal guidance and leadership on what schools can and can’t do,” Clarke said. “This is a first step. The true test will be what happens from here, whether colleges modify their policies in response and most importantly whether the Department of Education takes action against those schools that fail to conform.”
Since that group began contacting schools about their application policies, a few have agreed to remove the criminal-history questions.
Clark Atlanta said it has removed a question pertaining to arrests but still asks about convictions. “The former question (arrests), in our estimation, does not necessarily translate into the proven commission of a crime and, therefore, is not pertinent to an applicant’s evaluation,” a spokeswoman said in an email. CAU does not automatically exclude people who have been convicted of a crime, but asking about that “allows the University to assess an applicant’s history, including their own explanation of a conviction, holistically and comprehensively,” it said.
Morehouse College, which hosted Cole and the other education department officials, also uses criminal-history questions, said President John Wilson, but that could be changing.
“In light of this announcement, I took a look at this as soon as I got here and consulted with two of my predecessors, and I said I think we need to change this and was kind of urged to be careful about that because you might want to have a broader platform when you do something like that,” Wilson said. “But I think it’s time and we’re going to take a hard look at that … because we believe we have the right context now in which it makes a whole lot of sense.”
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