SCOTUS overturning affirmative action
The Supreme Court heard the Harvard affirmative action case. The consensus is that it will overturn affirmative action.
Interested to see what the court actually says. How broad will its directive be? Will it say that colleges cannot use race as a factor whatsoever? Will it apply to graduate programs?
The data is stunning though as it clearly shows that Harvard discriminated against Asian-Americans by subjecting them to an admission standard that is far higher than for Blacks and Latinos. It's weird that liberals support such discrimination. Will be fascinating to see how colleges respond when AA is overturned.
It took the conservative legal movement decades of work to get this SCOTUS majority, and during those years elite university administrations went further and further left. The result is that conservatives are finally in a position to actually ban affirmative action at a time when elite universities hold up Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as their highest values. There is just no way that, say, Brown is going to select its incoming freshman class on the basis of SAT scores and grades, and wind up with black students as 1.4% of the student body and Hispanics 3%. That's unthinkable to them now.
We can already see in broad strokes what's likely to happen. Rather than apply colorblind academic standards and wind up with a demographic mix they find unacceptable, they'll just water down the standards. More and more schools will go test optional, and more and more smart kids will be passed over and end up at state schools or less prominent private schools.
This is a LT issue for top 25 colleges which for so long had a pretty unassailable moat (HYP, Wharton, Georgetown, Cornell, Stanford, etc) as being the place with the most rigorous standards across many different metrics. Thing is, college education has been declining since 2011 and there's no end in sight given insane price inflation (which accelerated in past few years) outstripping wages. Even though many don't end up paying the sticker price, even 50% of that price is exorbitant for middle / upper middle class families (esp. when you have multiple kids). College is slowly but surely losing its value
Now when the Top 25 colleges continue to water down standards and no longer even hold the veneer of exclusivity / rigor, they'll continue to lose access to the best future talent / donors. Going to Stanford 5yrs ago vs. 5yrs from today will mean very different things in the quality of candidate, and as more actually deserving students (defined as those that earned it through academic + extracurricular excellence) consider alternatives the student body degrades in quality over time...letting colleges that are behind T25 catch up to the head of the pack. All under the backdrop of declining enrollment with fewer dollars to go around.
Ultimately nothing lasts forever, but watering down standards (which I think T25 schools will likely do) will accelerate their path to irrelevance over the next century. Some rare few can likely make it (Harvard is still Harvard) but I would guess not that many
What you’re saying isn’t actually how things are playing out. It’s not the T25 schools that have or will suffer but the smaller , no name colleges.
This is a good article on it (although there are several others you can view online)
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/23428166/college-enrollm…
California got rid of affirmative action in 1996. UCLA is 5% black and UC Berkeley is 3.4%, largely because of this. So it is possible that a school like Brown would do the same.
Not an expert on the minutiae of the UC admissions system. But my understanding is that they've had a longtime policy in place under which the top 10% or so of CA high school students are guaranteed admission to a UC school. But the top students by test score tend to be concentrated in certain locations, so that policy intentionally gives a boost to the high-GPA students in weak schools who would not qualify based on their test scores alone. Those schools/students tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic.
This policy is an attempt to do an end run around the 1996 Prop 209 ban on affirmative action. The UC administrators would much rather just use affirmative action, since this end run only partly got the URM numbers back to the levels where they really wanted them. But if they had used only test scores, the numbers would have been even lower.
Also, the UC system has gone test free as of 2020. And, in totally unrelated news, "the UC system admitted its “most diverse class ever” in 2021".
Great points.
I do interviews for my alma mater, one of the top colleges. The admissions staff is highly concerned with SCOTUS overturning AA and wondering how they can achieve the racial diversity they want without it. The most obvious option is to make standardized test scores optional, but the risk there is that it will undermine their academic prestige & student caliber vs their competitors.
What's most preposterous is that Harvard is arguing, essentially, that it doesn't use AA in admissions in a manner that discriminates against Asian students. I don't know how they can get away arguing in a courtroom something that is obviously false--it's literally perjury. They're making certain statements out of court and then other contradictory statements in court.
Studied this issue a lot in law school. Some questions easier to answer than others. Easiest ones first:
1. Would it apply to grad programs: 100% yes. Not saying they'll overturn AA, but whatever decision they make will apply to all types of degrees.
2. How broad will it be: in addition to education, it will almost certainly impact government hiring. Again, not saying they'll overturn . . just saying that any decision will extend across higher education and government hiring. Any government benefit really (jobs are benefits).
3. Would an overturn say colleges cannot use race as a factor at all: Probably. The current law is that race can be a factor but you can't have a strict quota. The concern of conservative justices is that when you allow schools to make race a factor, they abuse it so it becomes an effective quota. Harvard doesn't officially limit the number of Asians, but it sure does feel like they're aiming for a low ballpark figure and reverse-engineering the process to get there. So I don't think there can be a decision that leaves wiggle room for race. It's either overturned completely or not.
4. So will they overturn it? I'd lean toward yes, but I'm not as certain as some. I read the transcripts from the 2003 Gratz case that is the current precedent. That court was also skeptical of the school (Michigan) and grilled the shit out of them. Yet they still upheld AA, and that was a conservative court although less conservative than the current one. Conservative judges are nervous to pull the trigger on AA because the data shows that URM enrollment plummets in the short term.
I think the facts around Harvard are so ugly that it probably gets overturned. But Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito are the only guaranteed conservative votes. Roberts and Kavanaugh already have mixed track records of voting conservative, and Barrett's questioning in the case was evenly split. So you've got 3 overturn votes and 3 right-leaning judges that I wouldn't bank on.
5. If it gets overturned, what do schools do next: agree with the post at the top saying the schools will find a way to get what they want. Especially the wealthy ones. If they're no longer allowed to favor certain races just for their race's sake, they'll de-weight the factors that White & Asian kids seem to outscore on. Whatever it takes. But their new process will be fairer to Asians since the game has been exposed at that point. Net loser in the end will probably be the non-legacy, non-donor, non-athlete white kid who was trying to get in on grades and SAT.
Less wealthy schools may just live with lower URM enrollment. They won't necessarily have the resource to get creative with the process. As a poster above said, Berkeley never really got their URM enrollment back up after Prop 209 over 20 years ago.
Sorry for long post, hope it was helpful.
here's my question though, does it become harder to sue schools if you're asian and were effectively discriminated against under the new regime where race "isn't" a factor? If colleges make their process more opaque and subjective, leaves way less wiggle room arguably to prove you were screwed because of your race
It's a good question. And yes, it's probably going to be a bit harder to prove discrimination if the school re-engineers its discrimination mechanism through indirect means rather than just saying they used race as a factor. However - Harvard did that already in this case. Their discrimination against Asians was largely through the "personality score" mechanism rather than a direct racial factor. So we've already seen that sort of indirect discrimination strategy serve as grounds for a winning lawsuit.
Roberts & Kavanaugh are certainly wild cards in some areas, but I would be shocked if the latter doesn't rule against AA. The empirical data on the Harvard case is significantly stronger than in Bollinger case. Even I was shocked at how big the credentials gap between Asians & Blacks/Latinos were.
OK so Kavanaugh gets it to 4. Roberts really shaky track record though, I bet Bush regrets picking him. And Barrett's opinions on the matter are almost completely unknown. I think Barrett will come through because she strikes me as reasoning from a common-sense-first perspective and it's hard to defend AA through that lens.
Question as I don't know this topic well...has AA been successful? I know I could research this but hope to just ask someone with some topical knowledge.
I write this with the belief the school should be able to make up the diversity class as there is more than just academic knowledge but cultural experiences and biases that should make up a diverse student body. If everyone in a class looks the same it seems like discussion/debate wouldn't be as interesting.
In China the Gaokao exam rules all and students study years for this test but you end up with cookie cutter students.
Depends how you define success. It's certainly created more statistically diverse student bodies, but that's probably not the success we're looking for.
We want success that translates to better job success after college, and generational success over time so that the racial gap closes. While I don't know the data on that, I also wouldn't bother looking because anyone doing that kind of a study has a political agenda anyways. Numbers don't lie, but people who lie love to use numbers.
I'd rather rely on the intuition that it's not really possible for an AA program to have a big impact on careers because (i) AA comes into play way too late in life, age 18, when brains and personalities are already well formed, and (ii) how much better is the education at a brand name college vs a less prestigious college anyways?
I would argue, getting boosted by AA into a more prestigious college does very little to help a person succeed in life. Parents love to think that these fancy colleges are the magic keys to success, elite little clubs where you rub elbows with the powerful and have it made. It's complete nonsense. The biggest reason, by far, that graduates of those schools are more successful is because they were already more successful before they got there.
So giving people this tiny boost, at age 18 when their most formative educational years are way behind them, it doesn't even seem remotely plausible to me that it could be very impactful on long term success. But that's just me. If someone feels differently I'd love to hear about it.
Good, it's one of if not the longest standing legal form of actual systemic discrimination there is in this country. If you are not a smart/compelling enough candidate to warrant receiving a spot at a school for any reason other than skin color, you don't belong or deserve to be there. It would be amazing if they found a way to extend that to employment law as well.
There should naturally be a trickle down effect as the pipeline for well paying white collar jobs (i.e. college) becomes directionally more meritocratic. It's overly optimistic to think it will be 100% meritocratic but it's maybe 50% today so even getting to 75% would be a huge win in solving discrimination against talented, hardworking students
Would be awesome if there was a more direct law for employment as well but can't have everything. This is a big step in the right direction, hopefully there are other cases out there that could make their way to Supreme Court that directly focus on employment law, are you aware of any?
But top schools should be able to pick their students. Which means race is a consideration.
Just as grades and scores, geographic diversity, having rich or famous parents, being a quarterback or point guard or French horn player the year those skills are needed are considerations.
As for hurting Asian applicants, when the plaintiffs were recently asked during Supreme Court oral arguments to identify an Asian applicant who got rejected for being Asian, plaintiffs couldn’t name one.
The plaintiffs’ case was statistical: This percent of applicants was Asian but a far lower percent of Asian applicants were admitted therefore only explanation is discrimination against Asians.
But if Asian applicants tend to cluster in ways that make a college want to limit the numbers of students who have those characteristics, the college should be free to do that.
Hard to feel sorry for a kid who doesn’t get into his first choice Ivy and decides to go to Duke over Penn.
Completely disagree, but I do find it interesting that there isn't as big a push against unmeritocratic legacy and donor admission. I guess we've unfortunately come to accept that is a part of life.
This is what the plaintiffs are fighting against. How exactly do Asians "cluster in ways" that is unappealing to colleges? Asian applicants are just are diverse and leadership driven as white candidates. The idea that most Asians are docile STEM-loving hermits is a complete myth.
The reason schools don’t get to discriminate is they get federal funding in two main areas.
First, any university with a med school, even the richest ones like Harvard, get federal medical research grants big enough that they can’t afford to turn it down.
Second, when the students at the school get a federal student loan, that’s deemed to be federal aid to the college even though it’s the student’s loan.
If colleges are willing to forego this funding, they can discriminate however they please.
Race being a consideration is the definition of racism
This is way off base.
These private universities still accept government funding and are hence subject to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Using disparate admission standard based on race is discrimination. Straight up.
I think we're heading to a place where a college education isn't even going to mean much in the next decade or two - especially as more millennials and gen-z get into positions of power and start having college-aged children and employing more people. Yeah, there will always be a place for the most educated people, from the most prestigious universities, entering the most rigorous fields; however, colleges are giving out way too many degrees. I know a girl who just got her degree in communications this year and went back to working at the strip club. And if I were a parent with a college-aged child today, I wouldn't push them toward college as my parents pushed me unless they had a clear plan that warranted a degree.
It's not just a given that you need a college education anymore. There are way too many people out there with useless degrees, and companies are laying off left and right. Most people are going to have to figure out a way to make a life for themselves without a degree. On a positive note, it's easier now to make a living - or get rich - without a formal education than it's ever been in history.
As for affirmative action, it's going to get to the point where colleges are going to accept who they can get to stay afloat. The top colleges might be able to survive off of their reputation and endowments, but most colleges are toast.
Good riddance. The idea behind affirmative action as a means of reducing the gap between those with less opportunities and those who were born with more opportunities is a good one in principle, but the way it was implemented in the US was just ridiculous with a whole bunch of major issues.
1. There's no denying that race is correlated with social-economic status in the US for historical reasons, but it is by no means a comprehensive indicator of one's background. Just because one is black / latino doesn't mean they were deprived of opportunities and vice versa just because one is asian doesn't mean they were born with the world at their fingertips. Under the current system Obama's kids would have an easier time (from a grades / extracurricular requirements perspective) to get into competitive universities versus a normal middle or lower class asian kid by virtue of race alone. It's hard to defend how this is a system that improves diversity of thinking or aims to equalise historical inequalities when it obviously just serves to entrench it. If the goal was to achieve either of these things, the system should have been set-up from the beginning with things like wealth or income as a differentiating factor rather than race along.
2. The system entrenches racial stereotypes, and enforces a way of thinking that differentiates different races at its core. Read through the UNC / Harvard supreme court cases and the current state of college admissions were just shocking and disgusting.
• “I just opened a brown girl who’s an 810 Sat.”
• “If its brown and above a 1300 Sat put them in for the merit/Excel [scholarship].”
• “Still yes, give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$.”
• “I am reading an Am. Ind.”
• “With these [URM] kids, I’m trying to at least give them the chance to compete even if the [extracurriculars] and essays are just average.”
• “I don’t think I can admit or defer this brown girl.”
• “perfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th” “Brown?!” “Heck no. Asian.” “Of course. Still impressive.”
• “I just read a blk girl who is an MC and Park nominee.”
Word-for-word quotes from UNC admission officers. A system that promotes this way of thinking cannot possibly be healthy or fair.
At the end of the day, I think what supporters of affirmative action as it is don't realise is that some people aren't against the idea of affirmative action - but the way affirmative action is done in the US is just broken and deeply in need of fixing. (Or more cynically, maybe the current system simply benefits some people more than others which explains the reluctance by those individuals to change the status quo.)
Open to hearing more thoughts on this - maybe there's just something which I'm not seeing which causes me to think this way.
Some of these comments are disgusting, America truly is insane.
What's most interesting is that none of those quotes sound like those that you would expect from people who have genuine altruistic interest in creating a better, fairer world.
I may get monkeyshit from some of my fellow alumni, but this is classic UNC. Some examples: KF admissions are infamous for being inconsistent and a crapshoot even if you meet all the publically stated conditions, admin has been screwing up for years as it tries to balance donor money and what students ask for (Silent Sam, locked up funding, housing costs), and the school as a whole has always sat in a rather incomfortable place due to its prominance as a top ranked public university, attacting students who want to use its 'prestige' to springboard themselves and really don't treat other people well, and allowing more of these students in because it is so much larger and less expensive than the top private universities.
Obviously there are still good parts, and these things alone shouldn't turn off applicants, but these are realities of the school. I saw more of this than the vast majority of other students, so I am admittedly a bit biased due to my exposure.
URM enrolment rates at T25 institutions will plummet in the short term if AA is overturned (which is likely). The enrolment disparity is not something you can fix at the college admissions level. You have to stop these kids being funnelled into schools where the education is so sub-par that most of a class won’t even graduate
Long time lurker but just wanted to add an alternative point view. For context, I graduated from HYPSM a few years ago and this was the biggest thing that came to mind when thinking about the impact of removing affirmative action.
People gravitate towards people that are most similar to them because that is comfortable. This leads to the formation of groups / clubs formed for specific groups of people (often based on race) resulting in people primarily hanging out with people that look like them. I am not saying these clubs are good or bad. I am just trying to highlight the reality at these schools. Now imagine if the Latino/Black population gets drastically decreased in these schools. Where will the students go to socialize and meet people when many of the clubs are exclusive by nature. The biggest resource at these schools are the people and if you are constantly being turned away from these groups that have access to networks, study resources, and mentorship and you do not have enough people to form such a group, then you will be at significant disadvantage from day 1. I would not be shocked if top URM students start to to go to more diverse schools if the population of URMs drops below a certain threshold at these schools.
You don't need other people to look like you in order to do well. People do gravitate towards their own race, but it's human nature to make friends even if you are surrounded by a different skin color. I know from personal experience. My high school was predominantly white and East Asian, but the few brown students (I was one of them) still mixed in with the rest. I'm closer with these friends than the ones at my more "diverse" T10 college.
Totally disagree. There will always be a few URM students who want to be with their own but vast majority of people go where they will find the best opportunities. It's why throughout history we've seen URM minorities fight to get into all white schools knowing they would find higher education quality.
You don't need to be around people who look like you to have a good college experience or to succeed. Certainly not in America. This is racial tribalism and wokeism at its worst.
The SCOTUS saying that race cannot be a factor in school admissions will not likely have an impact on the composition of colleges because the schools will create criteria to create a desired result.
I support real affirmative action--it would be so easy to do and to stay colorblind. The U.S. is the statistics capital of the world. Just go by zip codes and their household incomes, or by schools and their household incomes. We know this would disproportionately help black and Hispanic applicants, but using an income (or wealth) measure wouldn't have the ugly fallout of being openly racist. I'm convinced schools haven't done this in the past for two reasons: 1) the progressives in control of the institutions want to be openly racist because it makes them feel morally superior; and 2) schools would much rather admit upper class minorities than lower class minorities because, in the long run, it's better financially to admit rich students.
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