Here is a look inside the race of admissions at an elite college
The high-profile case of Grutter v. Bollinger: Students for Fair Admissions in the Era of the Ivy League
We have a system where rich kids dominate elite schools. The research done by Raj chesty found that students from families in the top 1 percent of income were more likely to be accepted to the Ivy League. And you’ve got school after school after school where you’ve got more kids from families in the top 1 percent than families in the bottom 60 percent.
Harvard University decided not to accept the sons of the elite in the 1950s. They needed to accept people who were from a larger swath of American society. So they decided: We’re going to take G.P.A. much more seriously, and we’re going to take the SAT test much more seriously, and everybody will be able to get in as long as they qualify.
The decision by the court will affect elite institutions, which can often be very expensive to attend, says an education researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “Affirmative action was the only tool that helped us bring in students that weren’t from wealthy families or wealthy institutions,” Flores says. “It certainly isn’t a cure-all, but if you remove it, you remove the last bridge to some form of opportunity for everyone.”
In a brief it filed with the Supreme Court ahead of the Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill cases, the UC system said that it has tried outreach programmes and other holistic admissions policies, but that it has struggled to meet its goals, admitting that, perhaps, “highly competitive universities may not be able to achieve the benefits of student body diversity through race-neutral measures alone”.
California, Michigan and Florida are the only states that ban race-conscious admissions at public universities. The 2003 Supreme court decision in Grutter v. Bollinger states that it is a constitutional violation for a university to consider race, grades, test scores and other factors when making admissions. The institutions at the center of the newly decided case do not comply with the limits on race-based admissions that were outlined in Grutter v. Bollinger.
The court decided in favor of Students for Fair Admissions in the cases against Harvard and the UNC in Chapel Hill. Created by activist Edward Blum, the group argued that, by considering race in their admissions process, both universities were discriminating against certain applicants, including Asian Americans.
The court is going to be rightward under Donald Trump, who appointed three of the nine justices.
No Historically Black or Hispanic-Serving Universities are Available for Faculty Admission to the U.S. Doctors’ Colleges and Universities
80% of tenure-track faculty members in the country were supplied by institutions that granted PhDs in the United States, according to a study published last September. These institutions include Harvard University and Stanford University in California, but the list does not have any historically Black colleges and universities or Hispanic-serving institutions.
