Whether colleges and universities should consider race or ethnicity as part of the admissions process has been widely debated in higher education for decades.
However, the fate of affirmative action based on race was officially sealed June 29, 2023 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the deliberate use of race by schools in college admissions by deeming such practices at both Harvard University in Massachusetts and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unconstitutional.
The high court originally heard these challenges to race-conscious admissions in October 2022 in two cases: Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The lawsuits argued that admissions policies taking race into consideration discriminated against Asian American applicants and, in the case of UNC, also white students.
Experts say the ruling will have far-reaching implications for diversity on college campuses and in the workforce pipeline.
“Fifty years since the passage of civil rights legislation has not been nearly enough to address or correct more than 350 years of discriminatory practices intended to keep people of color away from higher education institutions or, starting in the 19th century, severely limit their prospects of increasing their educational attainment,” Mildred García, chancellor of California State University, said in a statement at the time.
Here’s some history on race-conscious admissions and what could lie ahead for colleges and applicants.
What Is Affirmative Action?
In a higher education context, affirmative action — which stemmed from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s — is the practice of considering some student background characteristics, such as race, as a factor in deciding whether to admit an applicant.
Schools that engaged in affirmative action were more often selective colleges, which recognized that there is unequal access to education opportunities in the U.S., says Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the governance studies program for the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.
[Related:Americans Have Less Confidence in Higher Ed: Why?]
“Students’ exposure to high-quality schools and the kind of preparation necessary to gain admission is unequally distributed across ZIP codes,” she says. “So affirmative action is one way to contextualize the opportunities that a student had during their K-12 experience and the disadvantages in access to high-quality teachers and high-quality advisers that they may have had during high school.”
How Affirmative Action Has Played a Role in College Admissions
The use of racial quotas, in which colleges reserve a designated number of spots for students based on their race and admit them exclusively on that basis, was ruled unconstitutional in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The court determined that such practices violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Until June 2023, the high court had consistently ruled that race may be considered along with other factors in the admissions process based on a “compelling interest” — the educational benefits of fostering a diverse student body on college campuses. College admissions officers say they review applications through a holistic process, also paying attention to academic records, high school course rigor, extracurricular activities, essays and letters of recommendation.
There’s long been public skepticism of these policies, however. In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 73% of American adults said colleges should not consider race or ethnicity as part of a college’s admissions decisions. Four years later, American public opinion was more mixed: half of adults said race should not be considered and about one-third said they approve of affirmative action policies, according to a 2023 Pew survey. About 16% said they’re unsure.
Post-decision, 68% of Americans in a recent Gallup Center on Black Voices survey said they believe the Supreme Court’s ruling is “mostly a good thing.” However, half of Black adults — the highest percentage of all racial groups sampled — said the ruling will have a mostly or slightly negative effect on higher education in the U.S.
Critics have previously argued that race-conscious admissions amounts to racial discrimination, harming white and Asian American students. Many conservatives against racial preferences in college admissions have pointed to former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s statement in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling involving theUniversity of Michigan–Ann Arbor Law School: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
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In the court’s 2023 opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch concurred that “Harvard and UNC choose to treat some students worse than others in part because of race. To suggest otherwise — or to cling to the fact that the schools do not always say the quiet part aloud — is to deny reality.”
“The United States Supreme Court correctly called discrimination what it is — wrong, regardless of the skin color of the intended beneficiary,” Pam Bondi, chair of the Constitutional Litigation Partnership and co-chair of the Center for Law and Justice at the America First Policy Institute, wrote in a statement at the time.
But many in higher education denounced the decision. It “will have negative consequences for all Americans and diminish our society’s economic and social development,” García said at the time in a statement. “The civil rights movement inspired the development of this life-altering policy that has supported all students since the late 1960s. We must not lose the important ground that has been gained. We must not revert to an inequitable society.”
What Does This Ban Mean for College Admissions?
The Supreme Court has heard several race-conscious admissions cases since Bakke. The two cases resolved in 2023 were spearheaded by Edward Blum, a conservative legal activist who opposes the consideration of race and ethnicity in the U.S. and who helped bring a similar but ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the Supreme Court in 2016 in Fisher v. University of Texas.
Prior to the most recent ruling, nine states had banned affirmative action at public colleges and universities. California, for instance, voted to ban affirmative action more than 25 years ago. Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington also previously banned the practice.
To ensure diversity on campus without affirmative action, some colleges chose to automatically admit a certain percentage — often the top 10% — of a high school’s graduating class.
“I think these policies do increase the racial and socioeconomic diversity of particularly the flagship institutions in a state,” Meyer says. “But when comparing them against the decline in socioeconomic and racial diversity that happens after affirmative action is banned in a state, they aren’t able to overcome the loss in diversity from banning affirmative action.”
For instance, a 2020 study — which examined 19 public universities in states that had affirmative action bans starting around the mid-1990s — found that the number of Black, Hispanic and Native American students enrolled at the nine surveyed flagship universities was 11.2 percentage points less than the share of high school graduates from these demographic groups in the states where the schools are located. This gap rose to 13.9 percentage points immediately after the ban and, by 2015, to 14.3 percentage points.
The latest Supreme Court ruling will be “pretty devastating in terms of higher education,” says Natasha Warikoo, Lenore Stern Professor of humanities and social sciences in the sociology department at Tufts University in Massachusetts. “I think we will start to see a decline in representation at a lot of different levels as a result.”
Some research indicates that diversity benefits all students. A 2019 study by the American Council on Education, most recently updated in 2024, indicates a correlation between racial and ethnic diversity in education and the workforce, and greater productivity, innovation and cultural competency.
College is an opportunity for students to hear from people who have different views, says Christopher Rim, CEO and founder of Command Education, an admissions consulting company. “You want a diverse opinion. You want people who have different experiences than you. I think that’s going to be lost.”
But “at the same time, you want to be able to get into a school because of your merit, not because of your race,” he adds. “There are too many students who are ‘similar’ or have very similar academic and extracurricular activities. So there’s no way to really say what the right decision is. It’s very complicated. But the decision was made and now we have to figure out how we’re going to move forward from here.”
[Read: Consider Faculty Diversity When Applying to College.]
How Colleges May Respond to the Ban
Experts predict that colleges may increase outreach in communities of color and rural areas in response to the Supreme Court’s decision.
Towson University in Maryland — which had not used race as a factor in its admissions decisions — has implemented other strategies over the years to enroll and retain more students of color. This includes going test-optional; focusing student recruitment in certain areas of the state, like Baltimore; spending more than 50% of their aid on need-based grants; and having resources in place to help with the college transition, says Boyd Bradshaw, the school’s vice president for enrollment management.
As of spring 2024, 43% of students are white, 30% are Black, 10% are Hispanic and 7% are Asian. The three minority figures are a slight increase over the prior year.
“We do benefit from being in the state of Maryland, which is also a very diverse state,” Bradshaw says. “And so we have seen tremendous increases in diverse student populations. We believe we have the mechanisms in place currently in order to be successful.”
Some colleges are reevaluating legacy admissions policies, which give a preference to the children of alumni and donors and therefore advantage students who already come from advantaged backgrounds.
“I think we were already started seeing a downward trend with (legacy admissions) to begin with, just over the past three to four years,” Rim says. “But with this ruling, legacy admissions is really going to start not having much of a factor in admissions.”
Some states, like Virginia and Maryland, have taken legal action to prohibit public colleges from considering legacy status in admissions. In 2021, Colorado became the first state to ban the practice.
Another potential effect of the ban on racial preferences in college admissions is reconsideration of athletic recruiting, which tends to favor white applicants, particularly at elite schools.
However, the “court leaves a considerable gray area when it comes to understanding race in the context of a student’s life,” Meyer says.
“They note applicants might reference race in their essays and colleges could consider students experience of discrimination in their holistic review of essays, but that such consideration must be done at an individual level,” she wrote in an email. “This ambiguity likely leaves room for future legal challenges around exactly how colleges strike this delicate balance.”
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What the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ban Means for College Admissions originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 08/08/24: This article was published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
