Affirmative action was gutted by the Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court of Justices ruled no discrimination against Asians or that the Harvard case was a case of a state law school
The chief justice exempts military academies from the ban on race preferences in light of their potential to make a difference.
Baker at Southern Methodist University said “We have to think beyond just who gets in and who gets out.” Financial aid decisions, including targeted scholarships and efforts by campuses to create communities of students from diverse backgrounds could be affected by the ruling.
The Harvard case has some resonance because of the school’s past of having a quota on the number of Jewish students. SFFA’s lawyers can claim that Asians are the new Jews due to their history. Perhaps because of that asserted link to history, Harvard decided to have a full-blown trial that lasted more than two weeks, involved years of production of documents, and hundreds of thousands of emails. The district court judge and the appeals court found no evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans after the dust had been cleared.
The Harvard case hit a variety of nerves for the justices. Five of them have deep connections to the school. Justice Jackson was not involved in the case because she was on the Harvard Board of Overseers. She graduated from Harvard College and the Harvard Law School, along with the other four justices. The dean of the law school for six years was Justice Elena Kagan, who also taught there.
The two cases overlap. Because UNC is a state school, the question is whether its affirmative action program violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee to equal protection of the law. And even though Harvard is a private institution, it still is covered by federal anti-discrimination laws because it accepts federal money for a wide variety of programs.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday rejected race-conscious admissions in higher education at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, overturning more than 40 years of legal precedent.
Roberts stated that the policies at Harvard and UNC were well-intentioned, but they didn’t meet the narrow restrictions imposed by past court rulings.
Is there a pathway forward for achieving racial equity in college admissions? A study of California after statewide bans on race and ethnicity
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 that you can give an admissions officer about an individual’s education, the more they will be able to understand who is going to be qualified in the end.
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.”
This echoes previous research conducted in several states that have banned race-conscious admissions from ballot measures. Those statewide bans include Michigan since 2006, California since 1996 (and reaffirmed in 2020), and Washington since 1998 (and reaffirmed in 2019).
She wonders if the program to increase the number of Black doctors with support to complete pre-med and get into medical school will be challenged.
Changes to what was once more targeted ” race-conscious scholarships, race-conscious programming, race-conscious recruitment” followed after the statewide bans went into effect, according to Mitchell Chang who studies diversity in education at UCLA.
OYan Poon, a visiting education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, argues for an end to any use of race or ethnicity in the educational setting.
“That tells me that there are some pathways forward,” Baker says. Are the pathways forward the most effective way to achieve racial equity in college admissions? No.”
After California banned race-conscious admissions in 1996, the proportions of Black and Latino students at UCLA, one of the most highly selective schools in the state’s system, fell drastically. A decade later, a small number of black students were in the freshman class. They became known as the “Infamous 96.”
The University of California responded to those numbers by recrafting its admissions policies to take a more “holistic” approach, considering several factors including whether students were the first in their family to go to college, what high school they went to, and their family’s income. The university has spent more than 20 years, and hundreds of millions of dollars in new programs and scholarships, in efforts to restore that level of diversity.
The University ofTexas at Austin admits Texas students in the top six of their high school graduating class if they participate in a diversity program. Lotteries have also been proposed, where eligible students with high qualifications would be randomly selected for acceptance.
The University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley admitted in their brief to the Supreme Court that efforts to meet diversity goals without using race were not successful.
The University of Oklahoma remains a more diverse place today than it was when Oklahoma banned affirmative action in 2012, the attorney general of Oklahoma stated in a brief filed in support of the case. The Norman main campus of the university has a white and black student population.
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.
She said “we don’t have anything that works as effectively at enhancing racial diversity as affirmative action.” There are over 20 years of data and research on that.
