Students for “Fair” Admissions: How the Supreme Court Could Harm Colleges
The Supreme Court will hear two cases that will have adverse effects across the nation’s colleges and universities. Affirmative action and college admissions will always be a tense subject, especially as colleges increase in competitiveness and people largely view college fit by prestige. With admissions rates at their lowest, college selection is largely based on which college has a more storied past or a more selective admissions process.
The Petitioner in both cases is Students for Fair Admissions, an organization led by conservative legal activist, Edward Blum. This organization connects students with lawyers who will represent them in anti-affirmative action cases. The two cases on the docket this year focus on Harvard University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Court briefly considered joining these cases to be heard together. However, they severed the two as they deal with different constitutional questions.
Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC has already lasted around eight years between the district courts and court of appeals. Petitioners claim that UNC’s race-conscious admissions processes violate the Fourteenth Amendment and have caused harm to white and Asain students who the University refused admission to in favor of creating a more diverse student body. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has already been used in the conversation surrounding affirmative action in admissions practices through the case Grutter v. Bollinger.
Grutter v. Bollinger acts as precedent in both of these cases, however, the Court’s conservative supermajority will likely turn their back on the three cases that established race-conscious admissions practices (Fisher, Bakke, and Grutter). Each of these cases contributes a valuable piece to the way colleges and universities currently run admissions.
Fisher v. University of Texas established that race-conscious admissions did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, but that the admissions system must stand a test of strict judicial scrutiny. The court must determine that the practices serve a “compelling governmental interest” in order for race to be considered. They also must find that a race-neutral approach does not provide the same diversity benefits.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was one of the preliminary cases on affirmative action. The Court claimed it was constitutionally permissible to consider race in admissions along with a variety of criteria. Although the Court forced UC Davis Medical School to accept Bakke, a white applicant, this ruling set the framework through which schools could legally start to create more diverse student bodies.
These three cases outline much of the constitutional questions and language that will be discussed in Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC. A compelling government interest as well as intense judicial scrutiny will indubitably take center stage in the Court’s questioning of UNC’s admissions practices.
Like Grutter, the Harvard case centers whether or not race-conscious admissions violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which states that the government “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
As college students know, diversity is paramount to the college experience and to creating an environment conducive to learning about different perspectives on campus. As the Court looks poised to strike down nearly 40 years of precedent, the California and Michigan university systems pleaded for the reinstatement of race-conscious admissions at their schools. They provided admissions and diversity statistics that corroborated the idea that race-neutral admissions harm campus diversity. These schools have been forced to implement highly expensive outreach programs for students of color, and they still do not provide a diverse student body come admissions time. This test case shows worrying results if the Supreme Court overturns precedent in the Harvard and UNC cases. Most universities would have to adopt race-neutral admissions and would likely suffer massive drops in student diversity.
In a time when colleges and universities preach a holistic approach to admissions, it makes little sense to bar students from adding a significant part of their identity. By refusing to accept race as the defining factor it is in academic diversity, admissions panels will increasingly struggle to gain a full sense of their student body. A major part of admissions is balancing your class, removing race or gender from this equation harms diversity outcomes which make college campuses the discourse capitals of the nation.
Critics of affirmative action as well as economists argue that socioeconomic status could be used as a proxy for race in admissions and, therefore, this decision will not be harmful. However, socioeconomic status does not serve as a valid proxy for race in college admissions. A modeling software suggests that admissions panels using socioeconomic status instead of race do not arrive at diversity levels near those using race-conscious standards. Although class skirts the legal challenges that could be presented by the Harvard and UNC decisions, it does not provide colleges with an equally diverse student body.
The decision of the Supreme Court in their next session about the reinterpretation of the Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment’s language in reference to college admissions will have major implications for the future of students, especially students of color. If the Court determines race-conscious college admissions to be unconstitutional, the quality of a college education will decline steeply. Diversity of opinion as well as experience are crucial to helping students figure out who they are going to be during and after college. Depriving students of this crucial step in social development harms not only college campuses, but workplaces after college graduation. This decision would also deprive many marginalized students from gaining access to prestigious institutions where social and occupational networks are formed. This decision has the potential to completely shift the college experience by fundamentally altering who colleges and universities can admit to their institutions. Students of color face more barriers to entry than their white counterparts on average. Cost of attendance/applications, strength of school districts, and lower legacy levels are examples of why students of color are historically underrepresented at these institutions.
Andreas Rivera Young is a Junior at Brown University, concentrating in Political Science and History. He is a staff writer for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at andreas_rivera_young@brown.edu.