Long before the Supreme Court dealt its latest blow to affirmative action in college admissions, the practice had become a favorite whipping post for conservatives, who denounced it as an unfair system of “reverse discrimination.” Yet defenders of “race-conscious” admissions policies struggled to reconcile the liberal principles of affirmative action with the lackluster progress that selective institutions have made in creating student bodies that look more like the country as a whole.
The court’s June decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College embodied popular misconceptions about affirmative action, as well as its real, inherent limitations as a tool for remedying the impacts of racial inequity in elite colleges and universities.
The conservative majority’s opinion has, in effect, broadly prohibited schools from considering race or ethnicity as an explicit factor in admissions decisions, which will likely accelerate the shrinking representation of Black and Latinx students in elite institutions.
Higher education officials returned to school this autumn under a haze of political uncertainty, as rightwing attacks on “wokeness” in schools converge with a new legal blockade on efforts to make their campuses less white, wealthy, and culturally insular—at least statistically speaking.
In the coming months, admissions offices will retool their policies to fit the constraints imposed by the Supreme Court, most likely by emphasizing more subjective aspects of an application, such as the personal essay, rather than racial and ethnic data. In response to the decision, Harvard’s administration sent out an internal memorandum announcing that it planned to comply with the decision, but that the institution remained committed to “the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”
The statement elided the uncomfortable truth about affirmative action as it had been practiced by prestigious institutions.
It was a reiteration of the elite school’s conception of diversity as an educational benefit. The statement also elided the uncomfortable truth about affirmative action as it had been practiced by prestigious institutions: that race-conscious admissions policies were never enough to remedy the most enduring forms and historical legacies of racial exclusion on college campuses. The weakening of affirmative action raises the broader question of what the actual value of a “diverse” campus is, and who is or isn’t served by it.
Affirmative action was originally designed in the 1960s to give both government and private corporations a proactive role in advancing racial equity and “equal opportunity.”
Today, as part of an agenda for diversifying higher education, affirmative action has become vilified by the right as an ideological assault on meritocracy, a distortion of liberalism that gives racial preferences to undeserving minority students. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last spring, just one third of Americans support the use of race or ethnicity to increase diversity in college admissions and about half disapprove. Members of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an Asian American student organization that was presented as the public face of the lawsuit, embodied growing reactionary sentiment when they claimed to be victims of biased admissions policies that favor less qualified Black and Latinx peers.
Prior to the recent ruling, affirmative action had already been eviscerated by successive court rulings over several decades.
Prior to the ruling in favor of SFFA, affirmative action had already been eviscerated by successive court rulings over several decades which had effectively banned racial quotas admissions and allowed schools to only look at race “holistically”—considering race as one factor alongside other aspects of an applicant's background, including academics, culture, or extracurricular activities--without applying explicit racial preferences or quotas in admissions decisions. SFFA—which is not so much a student organization as a front group orchestrated by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation—was the latest attempt to turn Asian Americans into a wedge, pitting them against other minoritized communities, in the country’s fractious discourse on racism and its educational legacy.
But in contrast to the stereotype that minority students receive undeserved advantages in the admissions process for elite schools, Black, Latinx, and American Indian or Alaskan Native students have actually become more underrepresented among selective colleges and universities over the past two decades, according to researchers at Georgetown University. Moreover, the regression on college diversity is unfolding at the same time as racial and economic polarization deepens in K-12 school systems.
Still, despite intensifying conservative backlash, the implementation of affirmative action policies at selective colleges and universities during the 1960s and 1970s has been linked to gains in Black college enrollment and completion in subsequent decades.
Conversely, rollbacks on affirmative action in college admissions are linked to decreasing diversity in selective institutions. University of California, Los Angeles and UC Berkeley saw massive drops in Black and Latinx enrollment immediately following California’s affirmative-action ban in the late 1990s.
Nonetheless, the progress in higher education diversity parallels a regression in the social vision behind affirmative action as a political project. The shift toward promoting diversity as a way to improve higher education represents a retreat from the goal of racial justice. Racial diversity is now a byword for a culturally enriching college experience, like studying abroad or learning a new language or rooming with someone with different political views.
While that may be a laudable goal for a school that promises students an optimal liberal arts education, an almost singular focus on how diversity benefits students (particularly white students) or enhances campus life sidesteps the less comfortable issues of how higher education has profited from the enslavement, colonial subjugation, and economic exploitation of the communities from which it is now seeking to recruit its “diverse” students.
The Supreme Court’s ruling against race-conscious admissions policies does not necessarily mean top-tier colleges will no longer pursue racial and ethnic diversity as a general goal. Schools will just face tighter constraints when they seek to confront and redress legacies of racial exclusion—a task for which affirmative action has over time proven to be an overly simplistic tool. How should these institutions try to create representative student bodies if they are barred from using race-conscious admission protocols?
Maybe, rather than explicitly focusing on racial data, schools could emphasize applicants’ personal experience coping with discrimination or related socioeconomic barriers. Liberal critics of affirmative action like Richard Kahlenberg have argued that institutions could continue to pursue diversity without race-conscious affirmative action by integrating socioeconomic background more heavily into admissions decisions, since Black and Latinx families have disproportionately less wealth compared to white families.
But applying nominally race-neutral, wealth-based affirmative action would only partially offset the affirmative action ban. Socioeconomic status is not necessarily an accurate proxy for race. According to the Economic Policy Institute, under a wealth-based admissions strategy, the sheer numbers of eligible Black students who would benefit would remain a relatively small minority of total enrollment.
And while some rightwing and even left critics of affirmative action would champion a class-focused approach, the political thrust behind the race-conscious policies has always been to compel organizations to acknowledge and deal with institutional racism head on; it is that consciousness—which combines understanding both the mechanics of racism and its material consequences—that must be strengthened when designing higher education policies going forward.
Elite colleges must cultivate more equitable learning environments.
Elite colleges must cultivate more equitable learning environments: providing culturally competent programming for students of diverse backgrounds, offering financial and social support systems for first-generation and socially disadvantaged students; public university systems should leverage state or federal funding to encourage schools to make sure their student bodies match the demographic composition of the populations they should be serving.
Racial equity should be central to the intellectual and cultural life of a campus, by expanding the study of race and ethnicity, incorporating anti-racist principles into teaching and developing a diverse, inclusive faculty and workforce (in 2020, nearly three in four full-time college-level faculty were white but just four in ten of the students they taught were).
If elite schools are serious about socioeconomic diversity, eliminating tuition altogether would arguably be a far more direct (and egalitarian) way to make the student body as economically and racially inclusive as possible.
Still, pursuit of racial diversity by selective colleges will always be limited by the fact that these institutions embody an educational establishment created by and for the most privileged. The current debate around affirmative action applies only to a tiny swath of the higher education system: The case affects only about 200 selective institutions nationwide, for which diversity is typically more of a branding exercise than a matter of historical recompense.
The majority of students, of all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, have only a remote chance of attending an elite college with an admission rate in the single digits and a tuition that dwarfs their annual household income. These institutions are not representative, and debates on how “diverse” they are distract from a core problem with higher education: the most powerful and prestigious schools are exclusive by design. Race-conscious affirmative action did much to make the students of elite schools look somewhat more like the general population. But no amount of statistical diversity could make an ultra-competitive college genuinely “inclusive.”
The system must reorient its mission around serving the needs and aspirations of the communities it has long ignored and shut out.
Affirmative action has helped broaden the pipeline to privilege by incrementally changing who is admitted into elite institutions and awarded professional opportunities.
But when it comes to trying to democratize institutions rooted in inequality, higher education will fail to truly advance racial justice until it redefines diversity to mean something more than just allowing new people in. The system must reorient its mission around serving the needs and aspirations of the communities it has long ignored and shut out.