I teach at an elite college

The Justice of the Supreme Court: Black Tutors, Black Students, and Black Students: Why Black Students cannot be the Touchstone of their Identity, nor the Color of Their Skin

Universities “have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin”, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

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 struggled to meet its goals even though it has tried outreach programmes and otherholistic admissions policies.

The intensity and duration of the attack is sad confirmation that many Americans remain unwilling to reckon with the barbarity of our racial history. Every period of progress for Black people has been met with a racial backlash. The Civil War and Reconstruction were developed by Southern whites in response to Reconstruction. More than a century later, this insistence on denying history lives on. The truth about racial oppression is no longer taught in some conservative states, with dismissal and even jail for teachers who refuse to teach about it.

Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. The college admissions process was converted to performance art for these students, in which they were given either to maximize or minimize their identity in exchange for a thick envelope from their dream school. It was a game I was soon compelled to play myself: A few years later, as a Black Ph.D. candidate in search of my first gig as a professor, I agonized over how — and whether — to talk about my race in ways that would mark me as a possible diversity hire. It felt like cheating to check the box and like self-sabotage not to.

“We have to think beyond the who- gets-in and who-gets-to-enroll piece.” says Baker at Southern Methodist University. Targeted scholarships and efforts by campuses to create communities of students from diverse genders are possible consequences of the ruling.

“However well-intentioned” the policies at UNC and Harvard were, Roberts wrote, the universities failed to use them within the confines of the narrow restrictions that previous court rulings had allowed.

Roberts also wrote that schools could still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, “be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” He wrote it through a specific application essay.

“That tells me that there are some pathways forward,” Baker says. “But are those pathways forward the most effective ways of trying to achieve more racial equity within college admissions? No.”

There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., and only a small portion — slightly more than 200 — have highly selective admissions, where fewer than 50% of applicants get in. There are over 200 schools where the ruling on race-conscious admissions process could have a significant difference.

They remain a key gatekeeper to access at high levels of government and industry. As just one example, currently eight of the nine Supreme Court justices attended law school at Harvard or Yale.

Why should black students with race or ethnicity be allowed in higher education admissions? Comment on “Infamous 96, California’s infamous 96”

In the simulations, removing race and relying on different combinations of high school grades, test scores, or social-economic indicators did not yield more ethnically diverse classes.

The more information you can get, the better you as an admissions officer will be able to comprehend who is going to be a qualified applicants.

Mabel says current admissions criteria reinforce disparities in educational opportunity that exist in the K-12 system, and that research has shown that at highly selective colleges, “students admitted with lower grades and scores are just as likely to succeed as the rest of their classmates.”

Several states have banned race-conscious admissions for ballot measures. Those statewide bans include Michigan since 2006, California since 1996 (and reaffirmed in 2020), and Washington since 1998 (and reaffirmed in 2019).

A program to increase the number of Black doctors, with support to complete pre-med and get into medical school, will be challenged.

OYan Poon is an education professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. He argues that Harvard’s case shows that race and ethnicity can’t be used in admissions.

Baker agrees: “We want to make sure that we don’t overstate what the legal contours are, because that might create a chilling effect where institutions restrict themselves further than the legal limits.” She’s interested in the line in the majority opinion regarding how schools can still consider race in deciding to accept an application.

Black and Latino students at UCLA, one of the most expensive schools in the state’s system, had their proportions slashed after California banned race-conscious admissions in 1996. By 2006, a decade later, only 96 Black students enrolled in a freshman class of nearly 5,000. The group became known as the “Infamous 96.”

The University of California reculturated its admissions policies to take a moreholistic approach by considering factors such as family income and high school graduation rates. The university has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new programs and scholarships to restore the level of diversity.

University of Texas at Austin has an automatic admission system for Texas students who are in the top six percent of their high school graduating class. Lotteries have also been proposed, where eligible students with high qualifications would be randomly selected for acceptance.

Both cases were very similar, but both are very different in their admissions environments: UNC is a state school that favors in-state students, and Harvard is a private school that only accepts about 5% of all students.

In amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court ahead of the arguments in these two cases, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley both admitted that their efforts to meet their diversity goals, without using race, were falling short.

In the absence of race in the admissions process, Kelly Slay, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies affirmative action, expects to see colleges increase targeted recruitment, expand financial aid including free-college programs, and go test-optional, in an effort to maintain their ethnic and racial diversity.

“We have nothing that works as effectively at producing and enhancing racial diversity as race-conscious affirmative action,” she says. There are over 20 years of research and data on that.

The right decision to rule in favour of Donald Trump is important for the future of higher education in the United States, notes University of Maryland researcher Julie Park

The court turned to the right under Donald Trump when they ruled 6-3 in favour of the president.

This decision will not only have sweeping effects on the composition of student bodies, but it could also affect the make-up of staff, says Julie Park, a researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park, whose work focuses on racial equality in higher education. “For better or for worse, these elite or name-brand institutions are a big part of the pathway into the professoriate,” Park says.

In September of last year, a study published in Nature2 showed that 80% of tenure track faculty were supplied by institutions that gave PhDs in the United States. 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.

Without race-conscious admissions, the diversity of future generations of scientists, who are trained at universities, might suffer too, Park says. Black and Hispanic workers are already under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), making up only 9% and 8%, respectively, of the total STEM workforce in the United States, according to a report by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC. (Black people make up around 14% of the US population, and Hispanic people account for nearly 19%.) Park is very concerned, since she says that the subject of science hasn’t been doing so great, even with race conscious admission policies in place.

Other steps that elite colleges can take is to stop legacy admissions, which give students a chance to get into the top schools if they have alumni family members to back them up, and to no longer require standardized testing for some students. Both practices have been shown3 to favour white, wealthy applicants.