Justice Roberts’s Decision to Exempt Military academies from Race-Concise Admissions in the Light of the University of Texas at Austin

Chief Justice Roberts exempts military academies from this ban on race-conscious admissions in light of the potentially distinct interests they may present.

But 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 only issue before the court was race in admissions.

The Harvard case has a particular resonance because the school has a sordid history of imposing Jewish quotas in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s to limit the number of Jewish students on campus. The history allowed the lawyers for SFFA to make the claim that Asians are the new Jews. 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. And when the dust had settled, both the district court judge and the court of appeals found no reason to believe that Harvard discriminated against Asian Americans.

They remain a key gatekeeper to access at high levels of government and industry. Eight of the Supreme Court justices went to law school at Harvard or Yale.

The ruling in the two cases hands opponents of affirmative action a major victory. 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.

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. That’s just over 200 schools where the ruling on a race-conscious admissions process could make a significant difference.

Roberts wrote that the policies at UNC and Harvard didn’t use them within the confines of the previous court rulings.

Is Race Equality in College Admissions Discriminating? On the Failure of Michigan, California and Washington to End Race-Centric Admissions

Taking race out of the equation did not lead to more ethnic diverse classes in the simulations.

“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.”

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 that increases the number of black doctors will be challenged because there is now less support for them to complete the pre-med curriculum.

Changes to what was once more targeted “race-conscious scholarships, race-conscious programming, race-conscious recruitment” followed, after the statewide bans in Michigan, California and Washington, according to Mitchell Chang.

OiYan Poon, a visiting education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, points to early court filings from the plaintiffs in the Harvard case, arguing to end “any use of race or ethnicity in the educational setting” — not just in admissions.

“That tells me that there are some pathways forward,” Baker says. Is the most effective way of trying 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. By 2006, a decade later, only 96 Black students enrolled in a freshman class of nearly 5,000. They became known as the “Infamous 96.”

The University of California took a moreholistic approach to admitting students, considering factors such as whether they were the first in their family to go to college 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.

It is possible to promote campus diversity by automatically admitting top Texas high school students to the University of Texas at Austin. Lotteries have also been proposed, where eligible students with high qualifications would be randomly selected for acceptance.

In amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court ahead of the arguments in these two cases, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley both admitted that their efforts to meet their diversity goals, without using race, were falling short.

The University of Oklahoma, for instance, remains just as diverse today as it was in 2012 when Oklahoma banned affirmative action, according to the attorney general of Oklahoma. The university’s main campus in Norman currently has a U.S. undergraduate student population that is about 60% white and 5% Black.

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 says that we don’t have anything like race-conscious affirmative action that works as effectively as producing and enhancing racial diversity. We have been researching that for over 20 years.