Court rules against affirmative action
Race-conscious school admissions has been outlawed in California since 1996, but Supreme Court decision will affect its student population
In a historic decision that upends decades of practice to diversify America's higher education system, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against the use of affirmative action, barring colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in student admissions.
Conservatives cheered the decision that comes after two elite universities — Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — were challenged by Students for Fair Admissions, an anti-affirmative action nonprofit that claimed the institutions discriminated against Asian American and White students in their admissions decisions.
But the ruling from the court's conservative majority elicited scorching dissents and passionate responses from campuses across the country and even from the White House, where President Biden, in response to a reporter's question about the court's legitimacy, said, “This is not a normal court.”
While the ripple effects will extend across the country, it won't change things in California for schools in the University of California and Cal State University systems. Affirmative action has been banned for the Golden State's public colleges for nearly three decades since voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996 to strike down the practice for public employment, contracting and education. California was one of nine states to have banned race-conscious admissions at its public institutions.
But the Supreme Court's decision will impact California's private universities — which serve roughly the same number of students as the UC system — and have been exempt from Prop 209. Now, some of the state's most highly selective schools will need to reshape their admissions process to eliminate considering an applicant's race. Both Stanford and Santa Clara University said Thursday that they will begin expanding their outreach to prospective students and exploring all legally permissible means to maintain a diverse student body.
“Undergraduate admissions are the entry point to training our future leaders — our teachers, lawyers and doctors,” said Maria Ledesma, a professor and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at San Jose State University. “This is going to leave a long-standing impact.”
Thursday's decision, like last year's momentous abortion ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, marked the realization of a longsought conservative goal in finding that race-conscious admis
sions plans violate the U.S. Constitution and — in the case of private colleges — a law that applies to recipients of federal funding.
The 6-3 decision in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard case were largely expected with all six members of the court's conservative bloc affirming. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
An applicant for admission still can write about, and colleges can consider, “how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise,” Roberts wrote. But the institutions “may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” he wrote.
The fight over affirmative action showed the deep gulf between the court's three justices of color, each of whom wrote separately and vividly about race in America and where the decision might lead.
Justice Clarence Thomas — the nation's second Black justice who had long called for an end to affirmative action — wrote that the decision “sees the universities' admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's first Latina, said the majority decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the court's first Black female justice — called the decision “truly a tragedy for us all.”
President Biden said he “strongly, strongly” disagreed with the court's ruling and urged colleges to seek other routes to diversity rather than let the ruling “be the last word.”
The nation's colleges “should not abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies of diverse backgrounds and experience that reflect all of America.”
He said colleges should evaluate “adversity overcome” by candidates — similar to a strategy that helped UC Davis become one of the country's most diverse medical schools despite the restrictions of Proposition 209.
Affirmative action was intended to remedy historical discrimination and boost diversity. Just more than 60% of Americans felt the Supreme Court should not block colleges from considering race or ethnicity in their admission decisions, according to a recent poll from the Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research. But a larger majority said factors such as grades and standardized tests were more important to consider.
While advocates say affirmative action is needed to close enrollment and equity gaps among minority groups, critics say these programs result in reverse discrimination and a policy that overlooks applicants' academic merit in favor of race.
“Admissions should be based on merit and I think that's the best way forward because that's what America was built on,” said Utkarsh Jain, a spokesperson of the Berkeley College Republicans.
Months before Thursday's decision, many California universities signed amicus briefs in support of affirmative action, including Stanford and Caltech. UC also weighed in to highlight the impact after Proposition 209 was passed. Over the past 25 years, the brief said “freshmen enrollees from underrepresented minority groups dropped precipitously at UC and dropped by 50% or more at UC's most selective campuses.”
“Since then, UC has implemented numerous and wide-ranging race-neutral measures designed to increase diversity of all sorts, including racial diversity,” the brief said. “Yet despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.”
But Wenyuan Wu, the executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, an anti-affirmative action nonprofit, said the argument is more nuanced.
“Common sense indicates that if you have someone who is not prepared ... giving them preferential treatment so that person gets a spot in a college they would have otherwise not qualified for is not going to solve the pipeline issue,” she said.
Wu pointed to an uptick of minority students at UC campuses since Prop 209 passed. While Black and Hispanic students made up 33% of those admitted to all UC schools in 2022, the same group accounted for just 19% in 1995, a year before Proposition 209 was rolled out.
But Ledesma said a closer look at the rates of admission — those who applied versus those who were accepted — across all UC campuses shows how Proposition 209 inhibited some prospective students from bothering to apply. Whereas just less than 60% of Black and Hispanic students were admitted in 2022, 80% of the same population were admitted in 1995.
“That's due to a number of factors, primarily being the fact that they felt they weren't welcome on these campuses,” she said. “It had a chilling effect on applications and that's something UC themselves will tell you they're still trying to recover from.”