"The only legal issue that was before the court was the consideration of race in admissions." She wonders, for example, whether a program designed to increase the number of Black doctors - with support to complete the pre-med curriculum and get into medical school - will now be challenged.īut Liliana Garces, a professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin, maintains that Thursday's opinion is limited to race in college admissions - and nothing else. The ruling could affect financial aid decisions, including targeted scholarships and efforts by campuses to create communities of students from diverse backgrounds. "We have to think beyond just the who-gets-in and who-gets-to-enroll piece," says Baker, at Southern Methodist University. Broader implications throughout higher educationĮxperts say the court's new decision could have implications beyond just admissions. Those statewide bans include Michigan since 2006, California since 1996 (and reaffirmed in 2020), and Washington since 1998 ( and reaffirmed in 2019). This echoes previous research conducted in several states that have banned race-conscious admissions from ballot measures. 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." "It boils down to: The more information that you are able to consider about the educational opportunities and disadvantages that an individual has had in their life, the better you as an admissions officer are going to be at understanding who is going to be a qualified applicant." Zack Mabel, a professor of education and economics at Georgetown and an author on the research, explained the findings like this: As just one example, currently eight of the nine Supreme Court justices attended law school at Harvard or Yale. They remain a key gatekeeper to access at high levels of government and industry. That's just over 200 schools where the ruling on a race-conscious admissions process could make a significant difference.Īnd yet, despite how few students these policies would actually affect, what happens at these elite institutions matters. 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. The ruling mainly affects a select number of colleges The conservative activist group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) was behind both the Harvard and the UNC cases. With UNC, the court considered whether the school was using race-conscious admissions in an appropriately limited manner. In the Harvard case, the court considered whether the school discriminated against Asian American students in the admissions process. But it's important to pay attention to the details, because those details are how we think about what institutions can do right now at the moment as they're gearing up to start working on admissions for the next year." "This is a very strident curtailing of the ability to use race-conscious admissions policies," says Dominique Baker, a professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University. 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." But not, he wrote, through a specific application essay or other means. "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. The opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, found that the admissions programs at both universities violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The ruling in the two cases hands opponents of affirmative action a major victory. 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.
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