A conservative mainland group whose lawsuit against Harvard University ended affirmative action in college admissions is now building support in Hawaiʻi to take on Kamehameha Schools’ policies that give preference to Native Hawaiian students.

Students for Fair Admissions, based in Virginia, recently launched the website . It says that the admission preference “is so strong that it is essentially impossible for a non-Native Hawaiian student to be admitted to Kamehameha.”

“We believe that focus on ancestry, rather than merit or need, is neither fair nor legal, and we are committed to ending Kamehameha’s unlawful admissions policies in court,” the website says.

Kamehameha’s Board of Trustees and CEO Jack Wong said in a written statement that the school expected the policy would be challenged. The institution — a private school established through the estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to educate Hawaiians — successfully defended its admission policy in a series of lawsuits in the early 2000s. The trustees and Wong promised to do so again.

“We are confident that our policy aligns with established law, and we will prevail,” the statement said.

The campaign also drew criticism from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, established in the late 1970s for the betterment of Native Hawaiians. OHA’s Board of Trustees called it an “attack on the right of Native Hawaiians to care for our own, on our own terms.”

“These attacks are not new — but they are escalating,” the trustees said in a written statement. “They aim to dismantle the hard-won protections that enable our people to heal, rise, and chart our future.”

Several groups have tried and failed in the past to overturn Kamehameha’s admissions policy. Federal courts, siding with Kamehameha, have ruled that giving preference to Native Hawaiians helps alleviate historical injustices they faced after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893.

In the 2006 decision upholding Kamehameha Schools’ admissions policy, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel pointed to longstanding challenges Native Hawaiian students have faced in schools. 

“It is clear that a manifest imbalance exists in the K-12 educational arena in the state of Hawaiʻi, with Native Hawaiians falling at the bottom of the spectrum in almost all areas of educational progress and success,” Judge Susan Graber wrote in the majority opinion. 

These disparities persist. Just over a third of Native Hawaiian students in public schools were proficient in reading in 2024, compared to 52% of students statewide. Less than a quarter of Native Hawaiian students were proficient in math.

The state education department has also fallen short of providing families with adequate access to Hawaiian language immersion programs, according to two lawsuits filed against the department this summer. The Hawaiian immersion programs are open to all students, not just those of Hawaiian ancestry.  

Moses Haia III, a lawyer and former director of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., said that improving outcomes for Hawaiian students is Kamehameha’s primary reason for existing. He said this new challenge appears to be based on ignorance of Hawaiʻi’s history.

“Ultimately, what I see is these people being uneducated,” Haia said of the mainland group. “Not knowing the history of Hawaiʻi, not knowing the reasons for Kamehameha’s existence, and just once again trying to push Hawaiians into this box… and wanting to be on top.”

Past Challenges 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that private schools can’t discriminate based on race in a case called Runyon v. McCrary, which involved Black school students trying to gain admission to private schools that had yet to integrate non-white students.

An anonymous student sued Kamehameha in 2003, invoking the 1976 ruling and alleging that the school’s policy of giving preference to Hawaiian children was discriminatory. The case eventually landed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A majority of the appeals court judges sided with Kamehameha. They used a part of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in the workplace as a legal framework for looking at the admissions policy.

Judge Graber wrote that a preference for Native Hawaiian students “serves a legitimate remedial purpose by addressing the socioeconomic and educational disadvantages facing Native Hawaiians, producing Native Hawaiian leadership for community involvement, and revitalizing Native Hawaiian culture, thereby remedying current manifest imbalances resulting from the influx of western civilization.”

But it was a narrow victory for Kamehameha, an 8-to-7 vote. Dissenting judges wrote that admitting mostly Hawaiian students didn’t create a diverse student body; others said that the policy was clearly discriminatory.

The anonymous student appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But Kamehameha entered a $7 million settlement with the student and their mother before the court decided whether to take up the case.

While the settlement safeguarded the admission policy from a ruling by the nation’s highest court it also meant lawyers punted the issue.

Another group of anonymous students challenged the admissions policy a few years later and again took that case to the Supreme Court. But the court declined to take up that case in 2011.

Students for Fair Admissions previously brought two landmark cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that the two schools’ race-conscious admissions policies discriminated against Asian American and white applicants. The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that colleges cannot use race as a factor in their admissions, although the decision didn’t specify what this could mean for K-12 schools.

Last fall, the number of Black students  fell, although some researchers cautioned that colleges might not see the full impact of the Supreme Court ruling until a few admissions cycles have passed. 

The challenge to Kamehameha Schools’ admissions policies comes amid national pushback on efforts to promote diversity in schools. In February, the U.S. Department of Education said any colleges and K-12 schools using race-based practices in hiring and admissions could lose federal funding, although a court subsequently prevented the department from enforcing those requirements. 

Kamehameha receives no funding from the federal government, according to its tax filings. The school, which is the state’s largest private landowner, has assets valued at about $15 billion.

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While the policy has since been replaced, a group of white and Asian parents sued the district, claiming that although it appeared to be race neutral, in practice it disproportionately harmed them and violated their rights under the Equal Protection Clause. The families were seeking damages, as well as spots at the schools for five students who argued they would have been accepted under the pre-COVID policy. 

The decision, handed down earlier this month, lets stand a lower court’s ruling that the policy did not violate the rights of white and Asian students. It was closely watched for signs of how eager the high court might be to apply to K-12 admissions elements of its landmark 2023 decision overturning affirmative action in higher education.

In a five-page dissent, justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said that in declining to hear the case, the court “refused to correct a glaring constitutional error that threatens to perpetuate race-based affirmative action in defiance of” that earlier case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina.

Writing in favor of the decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the fact that the policy is no longer in place at least partially convinced him it was unnecessary to hear the case. That being said, he cautioned against reading into his reasoning an approval of the lower court’s decision and encouraged future judges to consider the concerns raised in his fellow justices’ dissent. 

Advocacy organizations in favor of race-conscious policies considered the court’s decision a victory.

“Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard affirmative action case, right-wing groups have unsuccessfully tried to extend its reach to challenge diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of said in a statement. “But today’s action by the Supreme Court sends a clear signal: there’s no appetite for extending the affirmative action decision beyond its narrow scope in college admissions.”

Bethany Li, executive director of The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, was part of a multi-racial coalition of community organizations and families that joined Boston Public Schools in defending the policy. She felt it was particularly important for her organization to get involved to signal that the Asian community is not a monolith and that many support affirmative action.

“Asian Americans wanted to very visibly show that we were standing in solidarity with the Black and Latino community on this issue,” she said in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “I think there’s always this story that’s told that Asian Americans, for example, aren’t as supportive of affirmative action, or aren’t supportive of policies that increase diversity — and that’s actually not the case.”

Li also argued that the challenge should have been dismissed long ago, since the policy is no longer in place. Under the new policy, students receive an admissions score — their GPA accounts for 70% and a standardized test for the remaining 30%. Students may be eligible to receive additional points if they meet specific criteria, like living in public housing or attending a school with an enrollment of 40% or more economically disadvantaged students.

Boston Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.

Christopher Kieser, a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented the plaintiffs, pushed back on the defunct-policy argument. 

“It was unfortunate to see that that was cited as a reason not to take the case,” he said, adding that “actually this is a really good vehicle to address this question, because it’s a really concrete thing. There’s no future moving parts that are going to be coming up. We already know what happened, and all we’re asking for is to send it back and for the district court to be able to give a remedy to these five kids.”

Historically, the three schools — Boston Latin Academy, the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, and Boston Latin School — solely considered a student’s grades and a single standardized test score to determine admissions. Critics had long argued this criteria meant few Black and Latino students were selected for the coveted positions, and the Boston School Committee — the governing body for Boston Public Schools — began considering amendments to the policy in 2019.

These changes came to fruition in the 2021-22 school year, when Boston Public Schools temporarily suspended the entrance exam, and instead prioritized grades and geography. Under the new, two-part policy, one-fifth of seats were given to the top academic students across the city. For the remaining 80% of the entering class, geography was included in admissions criteria: each of the city’s zip codes had the opportunity to send their students with the highest GPAs, a move meant to diversify the schools. 

Advocates say the policy was a success: between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years, Black students increased from 14% to 23% of total enrollment and Latino students grew from 21% to 23%, while white students decreased from 40% to 31% and Asian students shrank from 21% to 18%. A lower court ruled that this did not disproportionately harm Asian and white students, since they were still overrepresented in the sought-after schools compared to their numbers in Boston Public Schools’ overall enrollment. In his dissent, Alito wrote, “This reasoning is indefensible.”

This type of case is not unique: earlier this year the firm representing the Asian and white families in Boston asked the high court to hear a similar one surrounding an admissions policy at a prestigious magnet school in The court ultimately denied that request as well, but the Pacific Legal Foundation is currently litigating other cases against admissions policies in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools and in New York City. 

New York City’s eight specialized high schools — including Stuyvesant High School and The Bronx High School of Science — are of particular prominence. They almost exclusively only look at a student’s score on a single standardized test to determine admissions, which critics say drives lopsided demographics. Last spring, just 4.5% of offers went to Black students and 7.6% went to Hispanic students. In 2024, only 10 Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant’s first-year class of 744 in Lower Manhattan, according to reporting by  

In attempting to bring this latest batch of cases to the Supreme Court, plaintiffs were hoping to establish a similar precedent in K-12 schools as was laid out in Students for Fair Admissions.

“Overall the precedent we want to set is that you can’t make race-based decisions in K-12 admissions … whether you do it through a proxy or you do it explicitly, it’s the same,” said Kieser.

“We’re going to keep going as much as we can,” he added. “Like I said, we’ve had issues where it’s taken us 10, 12 times to ask the court to hear a case before they’ve done it. So it’s not over.”

The district’s $120 million had a clear goal: lifting the academic performance of Black students, who trail behind other groups in assessments of reading and math, providing students extra tutors, and added training for their teachers.  

The program is now in doubt after Arlington-based filed a civil rights complaint arguing it violates federal law by using race “solely” as a criteria for admission, prompting the district to change its policy.

“At bottom, the Black Student Achievement Plan and its benefits are open to some students but not others — and that exclusion is solely based on an individual’s race,” the group’s said. 

In response, LAUSD said it’s no longer using race as a factor in choosing which schools participate. But the program’s future remains murky even with the changes because it could still be open to future legal challenges. 

Still, it’s a dramatic turn of events for LAUSD’s signature Black initiative, and shows the powerful influence out-of-town interests can have on local policy.  

LASUD officials said the district will still give BSAP the same resources as previous years and its programs are staying the same; and all students — not just Black students — are eligible for the help. 

The five-year-old BSAP had seemed to be headed for success by targeting Black kids. 

With broad support from LA Unified’s board, teachers and families, the program deployed counselors and social workers at roughly 50 schools, which together enrolled more about a third of the district’s Black students. 

And this year, the district’s Black students made gains on that outpaced those of other student groups. The district’s Black students also this year outscored Black students around the state on the annual exams.  

Since PDE filed its complaint, superintendent Alberto Carvalho said LA Unified was “able to reformat the program without sacrificing impact.”

“Our solution is one that preserves the funding, the concentration of attention and resources on the same students and same schools,” he said with the Los Angeles Times. 

Representatives for , which has lodged more civil rights complaints against at least ten other school districts around the nation, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A website for the non-profit says it is a “national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas,” including critical race theory and restorative justice. 

PDE’s board includes , the conservative litigant who previously founded an organization that won a 2023 Supreme Court decision against Harvard University to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. 

In with the federal Office for Civil Rights, PDE argued the BSAP violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by using race to decide which students get extra educational services.

After LA Unified dropped race as an official factor in those decisions, OCR dismissed the group’s complaint, heading off a potential legal battle. But PDE could revive its complaint. 

The district’s strategy has drawn fire from its , and an Oct. 22 board meeting. An online letter-writing urges LA Unified to “reinstate Black student population as a criterion for BSAP school allocation.”

Without race to guide which schools participate in the BSAP, University of Southern California education professor Julie Slayton said LAUSD will have to use other factors in deciding how to distribute extra resources to students. 

“They’ll take away the language of ‘Black,’ ” Slayton said. “But it doesn’t have to change, profoundly, the way that they’re thinking about the distribution of these resources and the schools that will receive them.” 

At least seven Ohio public universities are reviewing scholarships in the wake of comments Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost made about race-based scholarships after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious admissions.

Cleveland State University, Kent State University, the University of Akron, the University of Toledo and Youngstown State University all said they are in the process of reviewing their scholarships. This is in addition to Ohio University and Ohio State University, .

“The University of Toledo has paused the distribution of scholarships that consider race as a part of their award criteria following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the use of affirmative action in higher education admissions,” university spokesperson Tyrel Linkhorn said in email.

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This affects 6% of Toledo’s nearly 1,200 donor-supported scholarships, which is worth $500,000, he said in an email.

“The University and The University of Toledo Foundation are actively working with donors to explore potential revisions to scholarship agreements so we can continue to support our donors’ goals in a way that fully complies with the Supreme Court decision,” Linkhorn said in an email.

Kent State and Youngstown State mentioned the Supreme Court case and “guidance from the state of Ohio” as reasons for their review. Cleveland State just mentioned the Supreme Court case and Akron didn’t give a specific reason.

The Capital Journal previously reported that awarding race-based diversity scholarships and that Ohio State University is in the “process of updating scholarship criteria to ensure compliance with the law,” according to the .

Ohio University has 130 gift agreements that are currently under review that represent $450,000 in potential scholarship awards, university spokesperson Dan Pittman said in an email.

“The review is to ensure language in the gift agreements remains lawful,” Pittman said. “If deemed necessary, the University will work with donors to make revisions to language in the agreements.”

Ohio State University expects to give away approximately $448 million dollars in financial aid this fiscal year, university spokesperson Ben Johnson said in an email.

Bowling Green State University, Miami University, Northeast Ohio Medical Center, Shawnee State University, the University of Cincinnati and Wright State University did not answer questions about the status of their race-based scholarships.

A university spokesperson for Central State University, Ohio’s only public historically Black university, said in email they don’t have race based scholarships.

Supreme Court decision

The next day, Yost sent a letter to Ohio colleges and universities saying “employees must immediately cease considering race when making admissions decisions,” according to the letter. It also said his office won’t legally protect someone at a college or university who uses race as a factor.

The topic of race-based scholarships came up on a Jan. 26 call with universities, said Yost’s spokesperson Bethany McCorkle.

“What was said in response to a question was after the recent Supreme Court decision, scholarships will need to be looked at to ensure compliance with the law,” McCorkle said in an email. “Although the Court did not expressly prohibit race-based scholarships, it indicated that ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ Race-based scholarships discriminate on the basis of race in awarding benefits. Therefore, it would follow that such programs are unconstitutional.”

The Harvard Supreme Court decision is being “weaponized to intimidate and create fear,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors.

“We obviously disagree with the Harvard decision, and we also disagree with how the Attorney General is trying to extrapolate it to apply to virtually anything that touches race,” she said. “We hope that institutions are not being pushed into a direction that ultimately will harm students.”

If race-based scholarships are removed from universities, Kilpatrick said it could prevent Ohio students from earning degrees.

“This is a dangerous slippery slope, and they should be cautious about how far they’re trying to push this,” she said. “This will undoubtedly dry up desperately needed revenue streams for institutions.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Legislation banning Virginia’s public colleges and universities from providing special treatment in admissions decisions to students related to alumni and donors is on track to head to Gov. Glenn Youngkin later this session.

On Tuesday, the Virginia House joined the Senate in passing on a unanimous vote. Both bills, which are identical, must now pass in the opposite chambers before they are sent to the governor for his approval.

Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez has signaled the governor is likely to sign the measures.

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“The governor will review any legislation that comes to his desk, but believes admission to Virginia’s universities and colleges should be based on merit,” he said.

The proposed ban comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action at higher education institutions nationwide in June. Since the court’s ruling that race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina were unconstitutional, schools in the commonwealth have begun changing their admissions policies.

by think tank Education Reform Now found “most beneficiaries of legacy preferences are white.” It also identified Virginia as one of five states where a majority of public colleges and universities offer admissions advantages to the children of alumni.

“All that House Bill 48 says is that in considering admissions to college and our public universities here in the commonwealth of Virginia, whether your parents went there or whether your parents are donors to the institution will play no role in deciding who is accepted to the college,” said Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax, who is carrying the House bill, during a subcommittee meeting earlier this month.

Both Democrats and Republicans have supported the change.

“I think it’s absolutely discriminatory to grant special privileges to people based on what their parents did, what they gave, where they went to college,” said Del. Thomas Garrett, R-Goochland, at the same meeting.

Garrett said he’s supporting the proposal to “address discrimination and create a level playing field for all Virginians.”

Last week, the Senate version of the , patroned by Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Richmond, also passed with unanimous support.

Education Reform Now says more than 100 colleges and universities have ended legacy admissions since 2015, but 787 still used the practice as of 2020.

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Maryland will consider joining a number of states that guarantee admission to certain first-year students at one of the state’s four-year public colleges and universities.

Proposed legislation – , sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Malcolm Augustine (D-Prince George’s) — would require institutions to adopt an admission policy and accept Maryland high school students, from a public or private school, who are in the top 10% of their class.

The 10 “constituent” higher education institutions that would be required to accept those students are those in the University System of Maryland: University of Maryland, Baltimore; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; University of Maryland Eastern Shore; University of Maryland Global Campus; Bowie State University; Coppin State University; Frostburg State University; Salisbury University; Towson University; University of Baltimore. Two public schools not in the system would also be required to admit those sudents: Morgan State University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

The bill comes after the that affirmative action in college admission processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The court’s decision effectively ended consideration of race as a part of the higher education selection process.

“That made me concerned because other states that have gone to a race-neutral policy for selective schools immediately saw a drop in diversity of their student body…” Augustine said in an interview Thursday. “I want to make sure that our higher education schools are filled with the talented students from across the state that look like our state.”

There’s no current state law specifically focused on admission standards for institutions, according to the bill’s , which analyzes the legislation. However, schools aren’t permitted to discriminate against a prospective student’s race, sexual orientation, religion and other characteristics to admit that person.

The bill mirrors a law in Texas, which went into effect more than 20 years ago.

Recently, schools in other states, including , began the guaranteed admission program, not only to diversify its student body, but to keep afloat enrollment, which shrunk during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), a coordinating body, noted that 409,075 students were enrolled in the state’s colleges and universities in 2012. That figure decreased to nearly 369,200 in the fall of 2021.

Bob Spieldenner, a spokesman for SCHEV, said in an interview Thursday that the organization doesn’t track the number of schools that offer guaranteed enrollment. He said schools are permitted to choose whether or not to use such a  program.

In Maryland, Augustine had one major supporter speak on the legislation during a Wednesday before the Senate Education, Energy and Environment Committee: state Board of Education President Clarence Crawford.

Crawford acknowledged that not every high school reports class rank, but he said the legislation still would help increase student diversity in higher education.

“The board is encouraged by the steps taken in SB 5 because it emphasizes and signals the importance of GPA [grade point average], grades and student performance throughout high school,” he said. “We like the focus on academics. We like the focus on giving parents, students clear indicators early on that student performance is important and there are positive outcomes for achieving the best possible grades.”

Although two officials with the University of Maryland College Park support a diverse student population, they still don’t agree with the bill.

James B. Massey Jr. — director of undergraduate admissions at University of Maryland, College Park — said the legislation would eliminate the school’s admission philosophy and additional criteria in accepting prospective students.

According to Massey’s written testimony, the school uses about two dozen factors to assess an applicant, including grades in academic subjects, geographic origin, community service and recognition of special achievements.

“We employ a wholistic approach in our evaluation of applications for admission,” he said before the Senate committee Wednesday. “We admit students that have not only excelled in the classroom, but students that have gone far beyond that. We believe that merit is not a singularly defined measure to merit our students.”

Andy Clark, assistant vice chancellor for government relations with the University System of Maryland, wrote a letter of “information” to the committee. One detail in the letter highlights that the non-partisan Education Commission of the States has noted that 12 states have guaranteed admission for eligible students, but that results vary in terms of enrollment impact and demographic composition.

Clark wrote that the system respects the “ambitious” bill, but is concerned that, if the bill gets approved, it would go into effect July 1.

“Admission materials are prepared and distributed over a year in advance of when students enter, and the outreach and communication associated with changes in processes need more lead time,” Clark wrote. “We believe that a bill with so much potential impact on our state and its public institutions requires more time to understand the divergent impacts it could have.”

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When the Supreme Court in June 2023, it forced colleges and universities to rethink how to maintain and increase diversity in their student bodies. It’s a topic that had been exploring in her new book, “.” Below, Foley expounds on what she sees as the future of diversity in higher education now that college admission officials can no longer consider race.

Is racial diversity in higher education about to suffer?

Yes, the likelihood of admission for racial minority students as a result of the in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. We know this from research done in states with existing affirmative action bans. Courts and ballot initiatives have banned affirmative action state by state in the last three decades. These states include , , , and . In 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in banned affirmative action across its jurisdiction: Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.

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Regardless of how selective a public university may be, if they are located in states that ban affirmative action.

The largest effects are felt at the most selective flagship universities, like and the . All of these schools self-reported dramatic declines in representation, particularly among Black, Hispanic and Native students. According to this data, underrepresented groups declined by 12% across the University of California system. At the University of Michigan, Black and Native undergraduate enrollment fell by 44% and 90%, respectively, in the years following the affirmative action ban.

Affirmative action was a precise tool in that it allowed universities to pay specific attention to specific populations of applicants. Without this tool, universities are left with blunt policy solutions and struggle to maintain and increase student racial diversity.

What lessons does your book offer for colleges and universities?

A ban on the method is not a ban on the goal.

Nationally, universities can as a way to maintain racial diversity among their students. This does not mean, however, that universities will abandon their commitments to racial diversity.

Even in before the Supreme Court banned the practice, universities . They also reaffirmed that they would both comply with the ban and find ways to prioritize diversity.

Still, I believe affirmative action bans could have a chilling effect on the willingness of some universities to explicitly mention race in their discussions and policies regarding diversity and inclusion. Bans on affirmative action discourage university administrators from as a criteria in admissions, even to do so. This research demonstrates how universities that are less selective have adopted broader statements about diversity and student recruitment that do not explicitly mention race.

How are colleges responding?

When colleges use race-neutral strategies to increase racial diversity, that they did with race-conscious affirmative action. There simply are no policy tools as affirmative action at producing racial diversity.

Nevertheless, universities will now seek out race-neutral methods to maintain or increase racial diversity on campus.

One example is . This involves assessment of an applicant’s academic achievements using multiple factors. These factors include socioeconomic hardship, educational disadvantages or other forms of adversity. universities in making demographic factors like the educational backgrounds of parents, the number of students on free or reduced lunch at the schools an applicant attended and the family’s socioeconomic status part of the admissions review.

Other states have tried legislative solutions, such as at state universities to graduating high school seniors in the top percent of their class.

Following the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling, some colleges and universities have pursued creative solutions to comply with the Supreme Court decision. For example, at Sarah Lawrence College, the admissions application when it asks students to comment on the role race has played in their lives.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Now research evidence demonstrates that they face racial isolation simply by entering the classroom. A recent study of wealthy California suburbs finds that white families drift away from public schools as more Asian students enroll in them — and fears over academic competition, rather than outright racism, may play the biggest role in driving the departures. 

Circulated this summer by the National Bureau of Economic Research, offers an unusually granular view of population-level changes in a highly affluent and desirable milieu. It also reveals a stark and somewhat disturbing response to the presence of Asian Americans, one of and highest-achieving ethnic groups in the United States.

In measure after measure, Asian Americans are shown to be America’s top-performing student racial category. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, separating Asian students from their white, African American, and Hispanic peers. Asians achieved similar results on college entrance exams, tallying scoring over 700 on the SAT math section while making up less than 6 percent of all K–12 students. 

Older federal data also show that, apart from testing, Asian high schoolers than students of other backgrounds, and the proportion of Asians earning college credit through Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate coursework that of whites. 

While they’ve ascended to lofty altitudes in U.S. schooling — significantly ahead of whites, America’s most historically advantaged group, and vastly more so relative to other non-whites — Asian Americans have often received a frosty reception from policymakers and communities. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against Asian applicants in order to cultivate more racial diversity on their campuses, a historic blow to the legality of affirmative action. And for nearly two decades, news accounts have highlighted areas (including in California cities ) where white families following an influx of Asian children, with some parents openly complaining of from the new arrivals.

“I would have thought that a school district with a growing number of Asian students would be seen as a positive thing,” Boustan reasoned. “Because we have these perceptions — partially based on real data about the educational background of Asian parents, but also partially stereotypes that are expanded beyond the reality — that somehow, Asian kids would be better prepared, that they would be better peers who would elevate classroom discussion.”

‘White kids are generally falling behind’

Those assumptions may indeed have guided the white parents featured in the research, though perhaps not in a predictable direction.

Boustan and her colleagues collected public school enrollment figures from the California Department of Education between 2000 and 2016, which included demographic information about families’ racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. They focused on a group of 152 school districts that were suburban and comparatively well-to-do, determined by their local average incomes and percentages of students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch (a common measure of poverty in education research).
They also used U.S. Census records to determine the growth rates of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian students within those districts. Over 6 million people of Asian descent live in California, within the United States as a whole, and Asian students make up proportionally larger shares of suburban districts than urban ones. While large divergences exist between Asians of different national origin, on average, households headed by Asian Americans earn 38 percent more than the U.S. median income.

The results of the authors’ calculations were unmistakable: With each arrival of an Asian American student in a high-income suburban district, .6 white students left — mostly departing the community entirely, rather than relocating to a private or a charter school. After adjusting their observations for moving patterns (different sub-groups enrolled at schools at markedly different rates, with South Asian and Chinese populations growing faster than Koreans and Japanese) the effect was even greater, such that each Asian student was associated with the departure of 1.5 white students.

The strength of the correlation between Asian entrance and white exit was clear, even if the motivation wasn’t. The research team considered multiple explanations behind the trend, but found reason to doubt each.

First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics; therefore, white movement was a reaction not to the broader emergence of non-white neighbors, but to Asians specifically. 

But additional qualitative evidence indicates that the movement was unlikely to have been primarily generated by anti-Asian prejudice either. In responses to the , a long-running poll of public attitudes administered by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, highly educated participants were vastly less likely than their less educated peers to say they “feel cool” toward Asian Americans, or to say they don’t trust them. And yet the suburbs included in the study were overwhelmingly populated by high-income residents with college and advanced degrees.

“If we just look at the basic correlations, we don’t see this kind of white flight from low-income suburbs,” said Boustan. “To me, this very clearly rules out basic racial animus.”

But the out-migration could be related to another factor: relative performance in school. According to results from California’s mandated math and reading tests, as well as its high school exit exam, the presence of Asian students in a given school during the period under observation was tied to elevated average test scores in that school — but typically not for white students. In other words, the new Asian American pupils were bringing stronger academic performance to the schools they enrolled in, but also potentially making their white classmates look somewhat worse by comparison.

Boustan said that possibility could be viewed with dread during college admissions season, when high school seniors are often considered on the basis of their class GPA rank. 

“Someone is showing up in the district who scores better than they do. On some of the tests, maybe that pulls the white scores up a bit too, and on other tests, it looks like white scores might even be falling. But in relative terms, the white kids are generally falling behind.”

‘Race at the Top’

The theme of white and Asian families jostling for educational opportunity has been sounded more frequently in recent years, especially in highly educated, middle-class settings. This summer, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard showcased the comparatively superior academic credentials of many Asian applicants to elite universities, as well as the various alternative criteria — including legacy and donor status, racial preferences, extracurricular activities like sports — that colleges use to select their classes.

A similar dynamic plays out during the K–12 years. In 2022, Tufts University sociologist Natasha Warikoo published Race at the Top, an account of fierce academic competition among high schoolers in a wealthy, but unidentified, East Coast community. Some of the white parents she spoke with about the high-stakes atmosphere building in their local schools and fear that their own children would struggle to keep pace with their Asian classmates.

Lurking behind the discourse is the decade-old : a hyper-motivated Asian parent who pushes her child to excel in high-level coursework and seek extra instruction outside of class. Viewed as by some and an offensive stereotype by others, the notion appears to guide how some white parents perceive their Asian neighbors.

It may also reflect some bedrock truths about what different families prioritize in education and child-rearing. In this summer, researcher Ziyao Tian used microdata from consumer surveys for different families across the U.S. to show that white and Asian families differ dramatically in their annual expenditures on K–12 education. Not only did Asian families outspend white families overall, they were also more likely to direct their spending toward tutoring and instruction outside of school. By comparison, whites outspent Asians on sports and cultural activities like trips to parks, concerts, and museums. 

Notably, the gap in expenditures was at its greatest among highly educated families like those populating the California suburbs that Boustan studied. Asian parents with graduate degrees spent 22 percent more on tutoring for their children than similarly credentialed white parents; among parents with a high school education or less, Asians spent just 6 percent more on tutoring. In spite of the escalating disparities in spending, the Asian-white achievement gap is actually greater among families with less educational attainment.

Those findings provide an echo of looking at the incremental growth of private tutoring centers. The number of such brick-and-mortar centers (including many employing the popular ) more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, an explosion that was heavily concentrated in highly educated and high-income cities and towns. They were also disproportionately likely to be located in areas with larger percentages of immigrant and Asian residents.

Eddie Kim, a mathematics professor at Bentley University and one of the tutoring study’s co-authors, said that the purchase of additional learning opportunities outside of traditional schooling might be a partial outgrowth of middle-class status. While the top priority for many striving families is to move to a neighborhood with strong public schools, the same households must pursue alternate routes for their children’s academic development after that step has been taken.

“Once you’ve moved to a particularly good school district, and you see that everyone else is already [academically] good, how do you give your child an advantage? It can’t be through the school system because every child gets the same thing,” Kim posited. “The only advantage is to look outside the school system.”

The findings of the Boustan paper “clicked with” some of Kim’s own instincts about middle-class parents’ strategies around education and admission. If they feared that their children would be outshone in the classroom, they might well change schools — or even move — he said.

“When you say it out loud, it sounds very intuitive: Of course, parents aren’t just going to lie down and do nothing. If they notice something, even semi-subconsciously, they’re going to take action to support their individual child’s success.”

The , published in late September in the journal of the American Educational Research Association, effectively tests the usefulness of what its authors call “contextualized” indicators of academic performance: a university applicant’s grades, test scores, and course selection compared not just against those of his fellow applicants, but also the rest of the students in his own high school. Advocates say that this additional nuance allows admissions officers to view applicants with a more informed sense of the instruction available in their classrooms and the academic results that typical students see there. 

“I don’t think there’s any way to fairly evaluate a student from an American high school without knowing what opportunities are available to them at that school, because we have such a highly stratified high school system,” said study co-author Michael Bastedo. “We have schools that offer 26 APs [Advanced Placement courses] and schools that offer zero APs.”

Bastedo, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, has studied the huge divisions separating American schools along lines of spending levels, demographics, and academic achievement. Given those disparities, simply weighing aspects of one student’s college resume against another’s could yield “manifestly unfair” effects, he said.

That basic argument underlies admissions criteria that have been used for decades. University administrators have long focused on where applicants fall in their class GPA rankings, and states like Texas grant college slots to all high school seniors who place into the top 10 percent of their graduating classes. A few years ago, the College Board (the highly influential testing organization that administers the SATs) released , which provides colleges with background information on prospective students’ schools and neighborhoods. 

To analyze the success of the practice, Bastedo and his collaborators gathered an enormous bank of data from the education department of an unidentified Midwestern state. The figures included academic records from all public high schools within the state between 2010 and 2015, including student grades and course selection; individual scores on the ACT exam, which students in the state were required to take during the period under examination; and grades and enrollment status for all of the state’s 15 public universities. The team eventually developed a sample of over 77,000 subjects, amounting to more than three-quarters of all first-year, in-state students at each university. 

In the end, they found that high schoolers’ contextualized academic profiles were significantly correlated with their freshman-year GPA, retention (i.e., their likelihood of still being enrolled in college in the fall of their second year), and college graduation, with high school grades being a particularly strong predictor. College GPA was the outcome most reliably predicted by high school factors, with graduation and retention somewhat less associated.

Measuring applicants’ high school grades within the context of other students at their high schools proved to be an especially powerful approach. The authors found that applicants who earned grades that were significantly better than the median student at their high school ended up receiving an average GPA that was .66 points higher in their first year of college. 

ACT scores — both contextualized by high school and “raw,” or uncontextualized — were also correlated with college success, though less than high school grades. At one university, students with relatively higher high school GPAs were five times more likely to graduate within four years than former classmates whose grades fell at the median of their high schools; by comparison, students whose ACT scores were measurably higher than their high school’s median performance were just 1–2 times more likely to get their degree on time. 

Of all three factors measured, rigor of high school coursework (how many honors-type classes applicants took in high school) were the least predictive of success in college; whether or not it was placed in the context of applicants’ high schools, their choice of courses was not consistently related to later academic performance across 15 universities. 

The findings gesture toward one possible road for colleges to follow after the Supreme Court’s move this summer to disallow race-based affirmative action. With schools forbidden from relying on strict racial preferences when constructing their student bodies, many are looking toward novel means of assessing applicants’ backgrounds and experiences overcoming life obstacles. 

Consider two 18-year-olds with roughly identical GPAs and test scores: One might place directly in the middle of the pack at her well-resourced high school, while the other dramatically outpaces the rest of his class at a school that enrolls many more low-income pupils and employs far fewer high-quality teachers. By revealing the relative performance of each, colleges might gain a better sense of which is most likely to excel at the next level.

Bastedo, who has previously conducted fieldwork to study how admissions professionals consider applicants, said that contextualized indicators could help identify strong candidates who might otherwise be overlooked. 

“This is a good opportunity to evaluate students’ credentials contextually and hopefully provide some level of equity,” Bastedo said. “It’s very unlikely to fill the gap left by the elimination of race-conscious admissions, but it is a positive step toward equity.” 

The rankings backlash

David Hawkins, the chief education and policy officer for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, said that he had observed admissions practices transform over nearly a quarter-century, with an increasing number of competitive institutions attempting to take a holistic view of their applicants rather than simply admitting or denying them based on raw test scores and grades. Some have always attempted to gain a contextualized perspective on applicants through measures like GPA ranking, which indicates where a particular student falls within the rest of their high school class. 

But colleges and high schools have both on such metrics in recent years, partly because competition among students over highly public rankings has produced hurt feelings and unhealthy jostling. In some cases, families to contest their children’s ranks.

Hawkins said that admissions offices had to strike “a delicate balance” between conducting acceptable scrutiny of their applicants and encouraging invidious comparisons between young people.

“You might have to give something up in transparency so as to not provoke the negative behaviors that come with a class ranking scheme,” he said. “But at the same time, you have to be invested at some level in understanding how a student stacks up against their peers in high school.”

The balance can be extremely difficult to achieve. In 2019, the College Board an “adversity score” that would distill the degree of environmental advantage or disadvantage that prospective college-goers experienced in their families, neighborhoods, and high schools. Though hailed by its backers as a step towards leveling the playing field between students of different backgrounds, the idea provoked a backlash from both left and right. It was eventually withdrawn Landscape, which has since been adopted by dozens of colleges.

Hawkins said that tools like Landscape would likely grow in acceptance with the passage of time, particularly as schools look for alternative paths to socioeconomic and racial diversity.

“Holistic review will be with us for as long as we’re doing admissions. And yes, it will remain an intrinsic part of ensuring that there are opportunities available to people who may not have the same advantages as their more privileged peers.”

A prolific researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, Kahlenberg didn’t just welcome the end of affirmative action as we knew it — he served as an expert witness for the suit’s plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, in their successful efforts to strike down diversity plans at elite colleges as discriminatory and unconstitutional.

The 6–2 opinion represented the fulfillment of a generation of work for Kahlenberg, the author of 18 books ranging from personal memoirs to biographies to education policy tomes. For the last few decades, he has waged a long and sometimes unpopular campaign to broaden the focus of educational integration to make room for class, which he says represents the crucial divide in American life. Assembling racially heterogeneous students of identically middle- and upper-class backgrounds to learn together, while cordoning off the children of the working class and the poor, is the surest way to reinforce the advantages of the wealthy, he has argued. 

Just months after his argument carried the day at the Supreme Court, Kahlenberg is exploring a different facet of inequality in his new book, . 

Released in July, Excluded details how “exclusionary zoning practices,” such as bans on apartments or mandates for single-family homes, are used to restrict the supply of housing and further segregate neighborhoods as more hopeful buyers are priced out. What’s more, since most families choose where to live based at least partly on the quality of local schools, such tactics also push most of the top-performing public schools in the country out of reach of poor and working-class people.

It seems unlikely that convenings of zoning authorities will become as heated as school board meetings have in recent years. But to Kahlenberg, the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) instinct is of a piece with Harvard’s now-banned admissions policies: a means of capturing opportunity by those with the resources and wherewithal to grab them. 

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Kahlenberg spoke about the failure of ‘70s-era busing, his abiding admiration for Sen. Robert Kennedy, and what he calls liberalism’s “elitism problem.”

“Harvard gave large preferences based on race and created a majority-minority class, which I think is a wonderful thing,” he said. “But it also had many, many more wealthy students than low-income students. We’re beginning to see the ways in which racial preferences have propped up a much larger system that is biased against working-class and low-income people.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: How do the main themes of this book — zoning and access to housing — relate to schools?

Richard Kahlenberg: I come at housing from the perspective of education, and the architecture of educational inequality rests on two pillars. One is — bans on apartments, minimum lot sizes and the like — which keeps people apart by class and race. The other is mandatory neighborhood assignment for most students. Essentially, zoning rules determine who gets to live where, and that determines where children are allowed to go to school. 

There are exceptions to that in the form of public school choice programs that try to disentangle residence and school assignment. I’ve long been of those programs, but you bump your head against the reality that attend their neighborhood public schools.

Maybe I’m a slow learner, but I should have gotten into housing policy years ago. Housing policy is school policy. 

Reading the book, it made me think that education journalists should spend almost as much time following the agenda of local housing authorities as we do focusing on school boards.

You see an example of that in Montgomery County, Maryland, where there was a kind of natural experiment of what matters in improving the opportunities for low-income students. Around 2010, Heather Schwartz at the RAND Corporation that were pursued in this liberal, diverse county right outside of Washington, D.C.. One was to spend $2,000 extra for each pupil in high-poverty schools, for good things like extended learning time and reduced class size in early grades. 

At the same time, a local inclusionary zoning law mandates that when builders develop a certain number of units, they have to set aside a portion for low-income and working-class families. In essence, there was a random assignment of low-income students to different public housing units, which are spread throughout the county. Some of those students lived in the higher-poverty areas and received the extra $2,000 at school; the other group lived in more affluent parts of Montgomery County and didn’t receive the extra funding, but did attend schools with lower levels of poverty.

Over time, Schwartz found that the housing intervention, which resulted in economic integration, had a far greater effect on academic achievement than the school spending intervention. In seven years, the math gap was cut in half between low-income students and middle-class students, the reading gap was cut by one-third. It shows that housing policy matters enormously to student outcomes. 

Is it striking to you that land use is mostly a submerged issue in the K–12 agenda? After all, neighborhood selection is the way most people exercise school choice. 

Yes, people of means very often choose neighborhoods based on the strength of their schools. And everyone should look for what’s best for their kids. The problem comes when government actively excludes those of lesser means by rigging zoning laws to prevent lower-income people from living in certain neighborhoods.

So I don’t have any qualms with parents choosing housing in this way. I have a big problem with laws that effectively keep working-class families from exercising that same choice.

Do you agree that housing laws have gained this importance in part due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in , which made it extremely hard to mandate busing between cities and their surrounding suburbs? You’ve explored this fairly deeply in your writings about the socioeconomic integration of K–12 schools.

Busing became deeply problematic in the North, and it mostly worked in the South. The difference was that in the South, you often see countywide school systems, so there was no place to flee. There is that desegregation in the South had a much more positive effect on the achievement of African American students than it did in the North. 

And that brings us right back to the power of socioeconomic status. The research always suggested that the reason African American students did better in racially integrated schools was that, on average, whites had higher socioeconomic status. 

So in the South, there was cross-class and racial integration precisely because the districts encompassed cities and suburbs. In the North, that wasn’t often the case, and after Milliken, the power of racial integration to produce class integration diminished considerably. To be clear, I think there are social benefits to racial integration, even if it doesn’t increase academic achievement. It’s a good thing for children, but if you’re trying to raise academic achievement, it’s the socioeconomic mix that matters more than the racial mix.

The other piece of this is compulsion. Today, sophisticated integration plans — which, for legal and educational reasons, are built more on class than race — tend to rely on incentives and choice rather than compelling people. It’s because families with means are able to rebel, either buying out of the system or moving further out.

Intriguingly, the racial demography of urban areas has changed quite a bit in recent years, with both suburbs and inner cities than they were in the ’70s and ’80s. Is the same true of socioeconomic status?

Black-white segregation has declined by . While we haven’t made enough progress on racial segregation, and it’s still really prominent in many cities, we’re headed in the right direction. But Sean Reardon’s research at Stanford shows that, by contrast, income segregation has over the same time period. 

There have been two periods in this country when exclusionary zoning has accelerated. The first arrived in 1917, when the Supreme Court struck down racial zoning in . Black people were explicitly prohibited from living in white neighborhoods under these plans in Baltimore, Louisville, and elsewhere, and the Court said that was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. But very quickly, towns figured out they could achieve much the same result through economic zoning. You know, “You’re welcome to live in this neighborhood so long as you can afford a detached, single-family home on half an acre of land.” 

The second came in the 1970s, and its timing was suspicious in that Congress had just passed the Fair Housing Act. Communities doubled down on exclusionary zoning during that time as well, though it was less effective because by that time, there was a growing African American middle class. In some cases, they were able to buy homes in neighborhoods that were more affluent. [U.S. Senator] Cory Booker, whom I interview in the book would be one case; his parents were executives, and because of the Fair Housing Act, they were able to move to a Newark suburb called Harrington Park. He was able to attend strong schools and go off to Stanford, but he also had lots of friends and cousins who weren’t so economically fortunate. They remained behind.

The main point is that the two big expansions of this practice of exclusionary zoning came in response to advances for civil rights.

We’ve seen some modest wins recently for the YIMBY [“Yes in My Backyard”] in , but so many homeowners are really resistant to the idea of densifying their communities. Isn’t it likely that flooding resources to poor schools, while apparently less effective than socioeconomic integration, would be the easier way to effect change?

I do support putting more money into high-poverty schools, and I don’t think you have to choose between improving them and integrating them. You can do both.

My concern is that maybe 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make separate-but-equal more workable. I don’t want to abandon efforts to invest more resources in high-poverty schools, but we need this complementary strategy as well. For one thing, if your goal is raising achievement and the prospects of disadvantaged kids, a lot of evidence shows that it’s more effective to integrate than to provide extra resources.

Secondly, the two are connected in a reciprocal relationship. In theory, yes, you could try to invest tremendous amounts of money in under-resourced schools. But you’re asking the political system to support an effort whereby families with the least political power command the greatest resources. We do see that in states like New Jersey, where a state court for schools with high concentrations of poverty, and in a few other liberal communities like Montgomery County. But it’s not the rule. 

In other words, integration is politically difficult, but so is flooding poor schools with massive resources. The other thing is that when we take housing policy off the table, we miss the importance of neighborhoods in predicting life chances. Because it’s not just academics and schooling, it’s about who you know in your neighborhood and what social connections they have that could benefit you down the line. That social aspect is another reason not to pursue a neo-Plessy [v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision authorizing separate, but equal public accommodations] approach of accepting segregation and trying to do the best you can with it.

You’ve already mentioned your support for public school choice policies like . Do you think the rapid spread of Education Savings Accounts in red states is likely to temper or accelerate segregation along lines of race and class?

That stuff is a big step backward. My former Century Foundation colleague, Halley Potter, of whether private school vouchers increased or decreased segregation. Her answer was that they increase it, and certainly that was the of many of the early proponents of voucher programs in the South — to create more segregation, not less.

Here’s a good explanation for the necessity of public school systems. I wrote , the longtime leader of the American Federation of Teachers. One of the stories I learned writing it took place at a private meeting of education mucky-mucks. At a certain point, the president of Notre Dame stood up and asked, “What is the rationale for public education in the first place, as opposed to people just taking their money to a system of private schools?” There was a long silence, after which Shanker said, “The reason we have public schools is that they teach kids what it means to be American.” And it’s true that the charge of public schools is to instill the liberal democratic values that make our nation different from a lot of others, even if they don’t do it perfectly.

Private schools have different purposes, which usually include deepening a particular religious faith. That’s fine, but their purpose is generally not to create better citizens. I know there are studies that claim private schools do a good job imparting the values of citizenship. I’ve got some problems with some of those studies, but the point is that public education’s rationale is to make possible the continuation of our experiment in self-governance. I don’t want to give up on that lightly.

Robert Kennedy was a hero of yours, and you invoke his philosophy in the book as a corrective to what you call liberalism’s “serious problem with elitism.” What do you think he would have made of the end of affirmative action in college admissions?

Bobby Kennedy is a touchstone for me. In the 1968 presidential campaign, he made the observation that we have deep racial inequalities in this country, but that underneath them are even bigger class divisions that often go ignored. We use race as a proxy for class in a lot of political conversations.

That tendency serves the interest of my fellow highly educated liberals. If you take the example of affirmative action, Harvard gave large preferences based on race and created a majority-minority class, which I think is a wonderful thing. But it also had many, many more wealthy students than low-income students. We’re beginning to see the ways in which racial preferences have propped up a much larger system that is biased against working-class and low-income people.

At Harvard, 71 percent of the African American, Hispanic, and Native American students came from the richest one-fifth of the African American, Hispanic, and Native American population nationally. White and Asian students were even wealthier. There was even a way in which racial preferences propped up legacy preferences, in that people who supported lowering admissions standards for enormously advantaged applicants could point to racial diversity and say, “Look, the system’s fair. There are lots of different factors we take into account.” Now we see that legacy preferences, and I think a lot of other elite universities are going to give up that unfair, ancestry-based privilege. 

On elitism, Fareed Zakaria that the cardinal sin of the Right is racism, and the cardinal sin of the Left is elitism. One might expect that politically conservative areas would have more exclusionary practices — because, for instance, voters in those areas are more likely to support an exclusionary wall between the United States and Mexico. But in fact, there is substantial research to suggest that the worst forms of exclusionary zoning are in along the coasts. Even within states, there are more acute forms of exclusionary zoning in politically liberal communities.

Why would liberals, who generally consider themselves openhearted and inclusive of people of color and LGBT individuals, be exclusionary in this way? The more benign explanation is that liberals support environmental protection, regulation, and due process, all of which tend to make it harder to build housing and other major projects. At the very least, those have been weaponized by liberals to exclude. 

And there’s a less charitable explanation. As Democrats , there were both good and bad things that came with that. Some suggests that people with high levels of education have more favorable attitudes towards traditional targets of prejudice. That’s a good thing, but at the same time, highly educated people exhibit many more stereotypes and negative attitudes toward those with less education — the folks that Hillary Clinton famously described as “deplorable.” I think liberals like me need to take a close look in the mirror on some of these issues of class bias.

Do you think self-interest is playing a role as well? In my interview with Tony Carnevale, he basically said that most schools don’t believe they can afford to be more class-diverse. Obviously, many people also fear that new housing will lower their own home values.

Absolutely. The reason why universities have sought racial diversity without class diversity is that it’s cheaper. You can devote more resources to faculty salaries, expanded administration, new buildings, and the rest of the things universities want to do.

But there’s good news from states [such as California, Florida, and Michigan] that have previously banned affirmative action. The evidence suggests that universities won’t just give up on racial diversity; those with resources will reach into their pockets and provide more money to expand socioeconomic diversity as a means of indirectly creating racial diversity.

During the recent Students for Fair Admissions litigation, the University of North Carolina said, “We can’t afford to expand financial aid. It’s not a viable alternative to using race in admissions.” Lo and behold, after the Supreme Court ruled, that it will significantly expand their financial aid. And kudos to them for finding the money necessary to foster racial diversity!

Over time, universities will develop a number of new liberal programs to ensure that racial diversity is achieved — by giving a break to economically disadvantaged students, by expanding financial aid, by eliminating unfair preferences for the children of alumni. Then we can end up with both racial and socioeconomic diversity.

You’ve naturally got to be pleased to have prevailed in court in your capacity as a witness. But how is this ruling going to lead to more egalitarian colleges and universities? What needs to happen next, whether in colleges, statehouses, or Congress?

There’s a paradox in public opinion polling. On one hand, Americans are deeply opposed to counting race as a factor of who gets into college. Pew found to using race. At the same time, Americans want their universities to be racially and economically diverse, and they strongly support other efforts — such as giving an edge to students from low-income backgrounds — in order to create diversity. 

When racial preferences were banned in states like Texas and Florida back in the ’90s, Republican governors worked with state legislatures to come up with of . That is to say, states and universities did not simply give up on racial diversity when they couldn’t use race in admissions, because the political system does not want to see segregation in elite higher education. 

The other dynamic is that the Republican Party is increasingly the party of the white working class. White working-class people have been angry about affirmative action for a long time. But suddenly, universities are going to start saying, “We’re going to provide a meaningful break to working-class students of all races.” I find it hard to believe that Republicans will oppose those efforts at the very moment that their political base becomes eligible for class-based affirmative action.

It seems like your emphasis on integration raises questions about the nature of what we call “school quality.” If the socioeconomic background of your classmates is a major factor in determining what you can learn — as way back in the ’60s — then should we order our priorities to pursue residential and school integration over more conventional school improvement efforts?

I would broadly agree. If the dual purposes of public education are to create social mobility on the one hand, and social cohesion on the other, then we want to use housing policy and public school choice to bring kids of different backgrounds together. Economically segregated schools oftentimes defeat well-intentioned education reform efforts.

If you care about curriculum or teaching, as I do, having a system segregated by class makes it more difficult to provide equality. You want all students to be exposed to a good curriculum, for example, but we know that there are many fewer advanced classes offered in high-poverty schools. We also know that some teachers consider it a promotion to move from a high-poverty school to a middle-class school. 

You can chip away at that. I support paying bonuses to highly qualified teachers who agree to teach in high-poverty schools, and I support the expansion of AP classes in high-poverty schools. But at the end of the day, those efforts ignore the essential reality that Coleman detected in his study, which grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Separate schools for rich and poor are rarely equal. Rather than putting our heads in the sand and ignoring that central finding, which has been repeated and repeated again since Coleman, I think we need to face it head-on.

The need to mobilize against this threat is urgent. 

It is imperative to meet the “intergenerational transmission of inequality” that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote about in her with an intergenerational transmission of hope and opportunity. This means supercharging families’ ability to envision and plan for higher education with tangible workarounds to the systemic inequities that affirmative action was intended to correct. And this work needs to start early, while fragile aspirations are being formed.

Children’s savings accounts are a proven strategy that works. Even before the ruling, dozens of equity-focused organizations, municipalities and even entire states, California and Maine among them, had taken steps to nurture, validate and encourage parents’ long-term goals for their young children by providing them with this resource.  

These accounts are established as early as birth and grow over time. Typically, they are funded with an initial deposit of $100 to $1,000. Further savings by family and friends are encouraged, often with incentives, and account holders are offered financial education to help them understand the power of long-term saving. The accounts are typically used for higher education, but can also be applied to buying a home or starting a business.

Book Harvest, a children’s literacy organization I founded in Durham, North Carolina, launched in 2021 to harness the potential of children’s savings accounts to expand hope and opportunity. Medicaid-eligible families who participate in our Book Babies program, which provides quarterly literacy coaching visits, a home library of more than 100 age- and language- appropriate books, and additional support during a child’s first five years of life, are invited to open a Bright Futures children’s savings account through a local credit union, with support from their literacy coach. Book Harvest contributes $100 per year to a child’s account for each completed year of Book Babies participation, up to $500, underwritten by private philanthropy. These funds, along with any additional deposits from families, interest, etc., can be used for the child’s education or career needs.

Our motivation for making these investments is grounded in evidence: research reveals that a child with school savings of less than $500 is more likely to enroll in college, and more than twice as likely to graduate, than a child who has no savings.  Students with savings earmarked for college report higher expectations for earning a degree and . Children’s savings accounts can serve as a powerful counterbalance to historic and present-day inequities by transforming how participating children of color see themselves and their opportunities, and creating a means for building assets over time. Parents can also grow more confident in setting high expectations and long-term goals for their children and themselves.

Programs like these are growing rapidly across the country.  At the end of 2022, there were in 38 states and the District of Columbia, reaching 4.9 million children — a 300% increase since 2021. 

Today, more than 160 families in Durham have Bright Futures accounts through Book Harvest, and the number continues to grow. We have expanded Book Babies to Forsyth County, North Carolina, where additional families are opening accounts. Programs like ours are scalable and replicable, especially when incorporated as a part of a larger coordinated strategy to advance educational equity and social mobility.

In response to the recent Supreme Court ruling, Book Harvest will double down on extending this resource to more young children and their families by expanding the program both in Durham and other communities. We are also talking with diverse stakeholders, including and especially parents, to better understand and address challenges to implementation and to address and resolve them. One example is working to ensure that the process for opening and maintaining accounts is family-friendly, particularly for those who may not have experience with personal banking.

We intend to share what we have learned with other organizations and with state and local governments, in hopes that together we can optimize the enrollment and engagement of families. We are connecting with elected officials and policymakers to provide research-informed findings that demonstrate the importance of the accounts and how they can effect big change on families’ goal-setting and planning for higher education. And we are closely following leaders in the field of family asset-building to incorporate their findings and guidance into our CSA work, in a spirit of continuous improvement.

A lot is at stake. As a nation that upholds values of liberty and justice for all, we can’t afford to lose a generation of children to lowered aspirations for seeking higher education because they feel unwelcome in the corridors of academia or are unable to get fair admissions considerations that value their experience.

Hope and opportunity, fueled by tangible programs making real investments in children’s futures, may be among the best tools communities have to offset and minimize the damage wrought by the Supreme Court’s dismantling of affirmative action. The specific programs deployed by organizations committed to educational equity will vary. But it is incumbent on leaders from nonprofits, community-led groups, local and state government, higher education, and public- and private-sector agencies to come together to send parents of color the clear, irrefutable message that their children are welcome and valued on college campuses — indeed, that they belong there — and that envisioning and planning for higher education for their young children is fully and legitimately their provenance.

The parsing is part of a package of materials responding to the June in admissions. The education and justice departments — which argued in favor of maintaining racial preferences in admissions — said summer enrichment camps for students from groups underrepresented in college are also allowed, as well as “pathway” programs that guarantee high school graduates a spot in the freshman class. Awarding slots in those programs based on race, however, would “trigger … strict scrutiny” from courts in light of the ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

“This moment demands a sense of urgency,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “This moment demands the same courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice we saw from leaders at the height of the civil rights movement.”

The release of the resources — a and a question-and-answer — is the second formal action the administration has taken on admissions since the decision. Last month, the Education Department held a day-long summit on ways colleges and K-12 schools can continue to legally foster diversity. And in a few weeks, Cardona said, the department will issue a report on strategies colleges already use. 

Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking Democrat on the House education committee, welcomed the guidance, but wants the department to investigate racial disparities in K-12 schools in areas like discipline, and college practices like legacy admissions that have historically favored white students. Following the court’s decision, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston nonprofit, over such policies. 

“This is important because race-conscious admissions policies were able to provide a counterbalance to factors — such as inequitable K-12 schools, racially biased admissions tests, and developmental and legacy admissions — that have discriminatory impact against students of color,” Scott said in a statement. 

He argued that some Republican leaders have misinterpreted the court’s decision, pointing to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s , for example, that racial preferences in scholarships and employment would violate the law. 

Biden officials did not specifically discuss scholarships Monday, but the document suggests institutions review policies — such as application fees, standardized testing requirements, early decision deadlines and prerequisite courses, like calculus — that could prevent Black, Hispanic and low-income students from applying to a selective institution.

Universities can still collect race and ethnicity data to plan which geographic areas to target for recruitment, for example, or where to participate in college fairs, the Biden administration said, so long as the resulting information doesn’t influence admissions decisions

Universities don’t have to “unsee” the racial makeup of their applicants, a senior department official said on the call. Students may continue to discuss race in their admissions essays, and guidance counselors can discuss a student’s battles with discrimination in a letter of recommendation. 

“Although this decision changes the landscape for admissions and higher education, it should not be used as an excuse to turn away from long-standing efforts to make those institutions more inclusive,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. 

Richard Kahlenberg, a school integration expert who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions and is a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said some higher education institutions have taken the court’s ruling seriously and are pursuing “authentic race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity.” Those “perfectly legal” strategies include increasing financial aid for low-income students and adopting plans like those in that accept a percentage of top students from every high school.

But he said he’s also hearing that some universities are taking the “much riskier route” of basing admissions decisions on what students say about race in their personal essays.

“If universities magically get similar racial numbers without announcing new race-neutral alternatives or showing an increase in socioeconomic diversity,” he said, “I think they’re putting a litigation target on their backs.”

Although the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in college admission decisions with its June 29 decision, the ruling will not affect tribal colleges and universities, administrators said.

The Supreme Court effectively ruled 6-3 in the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

The ruling means most colleges and universities can no longer consider race when it comes to the admission process.

However, that won’t affect tribal institutions.

“Nothing is going to change at tribal colleges, and tribal colleges are open-door institutions. They’ve always been open-door institutions. That’s going to stay their policy,” said president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium Carrie Billy, Diné. “They are place-based institutions, culturally grounded, chartered by their tribes or the federal government, but serving the local community, and they’re going to continue serving that community regardless of this decision.”

It’s difficult to compare Native student enrollment at tribal colleges and universities to mainstream institutions, Billy said.

“TCUs are required to collect information based on a student’s enrollment in a federally recognized Indian tribe,” she said. “Only a handful of other institutions are required to collect this type of data, and no institutions except TCUs are required by the federal government to verify that they are only counting as ‘American Indian/Alaska Native’ those students who can document their enrollment status.”

Most, if not all, mainstream colleges and universities rely entirely on self-reporting when it comes to determining tribal identity of students. This means if a Native student doesn’t indicate they are a tribal citizen, then they are not counted as such. This policy can be flawed, Billy said.

Nonetheless, the high court’s decision will impact Native students attending mainstream institutions, which concerns Billy.

“Our concern is for those students, you know, our children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, parents, who attend other institutions of higher education and also for you know, just for all people of color, and underserved communities. Everyone deserves an equal access to affordable higher education,” she said. “So we’re very concerned about that.”

Data from 2016 from the American Indian Higher Education Consortium showed that tribal colleges and universities accounted for 67 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native student enrollment in higher education compared to mainstream universities that collected similar data.

Billy added that she has not heard much from Native students, which she attributes to the decision having been handed down during the summer, and she expects to hear more after the school year starts.

At the time of the decision, national Native organizations shared their disapproval. The American Indian Higher Education Consortium said the court essentially attempted to “slam doors of higher education shut” but promised that its advocacy on behalf of Native students would not stop.

“We were here before affirmative action, and we will be here – strong, resilient, and sovereign – after the Supreme Court’s decision this week,” a  from the organization said.

Fawn Sharp, National Congress of American Indian president, Quinault, echoed that sentiment, calling the decision “exceptionally disappointing.”

“While everyone deserves to be considered on their merits, it does more harm than good to ignore the fact that Native people were subject to genocide, colonization, and assimilation,” Sharp said in a June 30 . “Only when these realities are confronted head-on will meaningful progress be made, which is why the National Congress of American Indians will continue to fight to bring visibility to these issues and look for solutions to ensure future generations have access to the education so many of our past generations did not.”

The decision comes closely after a trend in the last couple of years in which universities or states adopted tuition waiver policies directed specifically at enrolled tribal citizens. Billy said these waivers are tailored specifically to Native Americans not as a racial group, but as a nod to the political relationship between the states and the tribes.

A number of states and higher education institutions have long offered some type of tuition waiver for Native students. Both the  and  university systems offer a waiver.

The University of Maine has had one in place since the 1930s, and more recently, the University of Arizona offered free tuition to Native students enrolled in a federally recognized tribe in Arizona. Oregon State University offers in-state tuition to any student of a federally recognized tribe.

“The tuition discounts that state governments enact are for members of either federally recognized tribes or state-recognized tribes in their state that’s, again, a political relationship. It’s not a race-based program,” Billy said. “So this decision should have no effect on them.”

Partnerships between public institutions and tribes are going to be important moving forward. Appearing on  in early July to discuss the decision, Julia Wakeford, policy director for the National Indian Education Association, said the ruling will show how serious colleges and universities are about ensuring diversity on their campuses.

“A number of these universities and colleges have come out saying that they stand by and will do whatever they can within the letter of the law, to make sure that there remains diversity on their campuses,” said Wakeford, who is Mvskoke and Yuchi.

This story was originally published at .

That’s the question confronting university administrators, faculty, applicants and their families in the wake of in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The 6-3 ruling by the Court’s conservative majority at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, overturning the decades-old model of affirmative action in higher education.

That system — in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case — allowed schools to include race as a consideration in offering university acceptance, but only as a means of cultivating the benefits of a diverse student body. But after a series of failed legal challenges over the past 20 years appealing to the bench’s increasingly rightward tilt, a group of Asian plaintiffs prevailed in arguing that they were unconstitutionally disadvantaged by affirmative action as currently practiced. 

“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. 

But if the status quo of college admissions has been cast aside, a replacement hasn’t yet been offered. According to Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale, the future remains murky.

Carnevale is the longtime director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and one of America’s most-cited economists on the intersection of schools and the labor market. A former member of multiple federal panels on employment and technology, and a passionate advocate for additional K–12 funding and policy experimentation, he has long pondered the question of what might follow an abrupt end to affirmative action.

His observations and proposals fill published in June, which may help shape colleges’ and policymakers’ response to a new landscape of socioeconomic mobility. If elite schools can no longer act as an access point for historically disadvantaged groups to enter the middle and upper classes, he and his co-authors argue, the logic of broad-based education reform — including both dramatically boosted resources and an overhauled approach to college and career counseling — becomes inescapable.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Carnevale discussed the legacy of the Bakke case and multiple generations of racial preferences; the plausibility of class-based selection metrics replacing the vanished system; and the future of a higher education sector that could increasingly come to be seen as elitist. While lamenting the end of affirmative action as we knew it, he argues that colleges should step up efforts to become truly egalitarian.

“One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites,” he said. “If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What’s your perspective on this ruling and the legacy of race-conscious admissions?

Basically, affirmative action has been a Band-Aid that’s been used by politicians and the rest of us, so that we have a little racial access to elite colleges. And it’s stopped us from truly reforming education. Now the Band-Aid has been ripped off, and race is a gushing wound in America.

In the end, what disgusts me most about this outcome is that they’re demanding that minority applicants humiliate themselves. The best way for a minority to get into Harvard now — it’s allowed in this opinion — is to write an essay about the hardship you’ve suffered; that your parents abused you, that your neighborhood abused you, that you got beaten up going to school every day, and that was good for your character. I find that humiliating, to turn on everyone you know and care about so that you can get into Harvard. Telling your story in this way is kind of like racial porn: “Let’s see who’s got the sorriest story to tell, and we’ll let them in!” 

There are definitely going to be fewer African American, Latino, and Native American people on campus, no doubt about it. That’s what’s going to happen here. The question is, how does everybody respond?

How do you think they’ll respond? Are college admissions officers freaking out right now?

I’m not sure about “freaking out.” I go to meetings of college officials where this topic is the center of the discussion, and people basically don’t know what they’re going to do. In one of those meetings, a lawyer opened the conversation by saying, “The first question you have to answer is, do you want to get sued?” I thought, “Boy, that’s a good question.”

If you want to make your name in higher education, you can disobey this ruling and let them sue you. If you’re Harvard or Georgetown, and slaves helped build the buildings, maybe you should do that and make a point. But I don’t see any way out of this because the anti-preferences side is committed, and not all of them are racists — a lot of them are just idealists. They’re well-funded, they’re well-organized and they’re always three steps ahead. They’re already changes to Gifted and Talented programs, and if anyone’s wondering whether they’ll persist [in those challenges], I think the answer is yes.

If I were as rich as Harvard, I might simply disobey the ruling. What are they going to do? They’re like the pope — they have no army. Maybe they’ll sue you.

Deliberately contravening a Supreme Court order seems incredibly risky, though. I wonder if universities are entering a particularly dangerous period with respect to the law and public opinion.

It is risky because people’s feelings are easily aroused on this issue. One of the things that will happen is that the ACE [the American Council on Education, a nonprofit advocacy group representing 1,700 institutions of higher education] will take a beating. 

I think the [legislation re-introduced this spring, which aims to modernize data collection from universities and give families a fuller picture of schools’ enrollment, completion, and post-completion earnings statistics] will pass when there’s an opening for it. It has strong, bipartisan support, and one of the things you can do to whack higher education is to make them more transparent in terms of their employment and earnings effects. There’s also a push for expanding funding for workforce training, so we’re going to get transparency on degrees and accountability on training. All of that stuff will move now.

I worked on the Hill a long time, and higher education annoys politicians because they think it’s arrogant and ungrateful. Higher education leadership tried to stop the GI Bill, and they lost. They tried to stop student aid because they wanted that money to go to institutions, and they lost again. They lose at every turn when it comes to issues going beyond higher education. Whacking the elites is a common American sport that appeals to both parties for different reasons. 

So if I’m a lobbyist for higher education, I’m looking for another job.

What has been the final legacy of race-conscious standards of college admission since the Bakke case?

The importance of Bakke was that it saved race-conscious affirmative action just in time. There were questions even then about whether it could survive, and it’s . 

If you ask the American public straight-up, “Do you agree that we should give racial preferences in admissions to selective colleges,” a majority will say no — and that includes a majority of African Americans, Latinos, etc. If you ask them, “Do you think there are fundamental problems in the American system that are racist and need attention,” they’ll say yes. But if you give them anything specific, they’ll reject it.

So Bakke saved the day by deferring to the expertise of educators, the notion being that educators understood higher education better than judges do. What has now happened is that the deference is over, and they’re no longer going to defer to American education institutions on race. The argument is that race is too much; even if diversity is a good thing, we can’t base admissions decisions on it because that would be racist. 

Could there be any replacement measures for racial preferences? 

The courts have been chipping away at preferences in admissions for a long time, and we’re now at the point where they’re saying it’s the end. But it’s not clear that it is. In many people’s judgment — lawyers and others — courts will begin to defer to class instead. Many decent people argue that the real issue of concern here, across all our diverse peoples, is class. We believe strongly in striving and Horatio Alger, and we want to reward that. The polls make clear that the public still believes that, and it’s part of our culture. 

The classic story is Poor Kid Makes Good. Everybody likes that, you want to give that kid a break. But for some reason, we don’t recognize the connection of race to American history and the disadvantages that are still there. It’s a failure to deal with American racism, and it has been since Bakke. The hope among some people is that we’ll use class as a proxy for race, but class and race are not the same thing. They are two very different forces in disadvantaging people’s lives, though a lot of people notice that they often go together. 

We’ve done a over the years and discovered that, no, you don’t also get race when you screen for class. You can claw back a bit of the racial diversity you had before affirmative action was banned, but not much of it.

Nevertheless, a lot of people are celebrating a potential switch to class-based affirmative action, saying, “Finally, going to Harvard isn’t just going to be for rich minority kids anymore.” The truth is, it never was. Most of the African Americans and Latinos who go to the top 193 schools are from the bottom half of the income distribution. A lot of them aren’t poor in the classic sense, but they’re not a bunch of rich kids. 

The thing people don’t talk about when it comes to class-based admissions is this: A basic problem for people who are poor is, obviously, that they don’t have money. And with the exception of places that are filthy rich, like Harvard and Yale — they can do whatever they want, and their concern is prestige rather than money — colleges just can’t afford class-conscious affirmative action. There have been efforts, but what people forget about colleges, whether they’re selective or not, is that they’re businesses. What they’re always trying to do is find as many kids who can pay full tuition as possible, and if they’re lucky, more than 50 percent of your families will do that.

There’s a bargaining process that every middle-class family is familiar with, where families visit eight colleges and strike the best bargain they can within their kids’ preferences. The colleges will give them “merit aid,” but what it is is a bargain. You get all the full-pay parents you can get, and you haggle with the parents you have to haggle with. Then, whatever you’ve got left over, you can use it for athletes, legacies, the trombone player you need in the band. But you really don’t have room for many poor kids. 

You might say to these schools, “You’ve got an endowment of something like $2 billion. How the hell can you not afford it?” Well, if a college president takes money out of the endowment, the alumni are going to get him fired. 

How did this whole focus on diversity get started?

As a practical matter, this has always been about white kids. James Conant, who was the president of Harvard after World War II, determined that we needed 5 percent of kids to go to college. He that we should build a certain kind of high school nationwide, the “comprehensive” high school. It was comprehensive because it offered a college pathway to a small share of the kids; it offered vocational education, mostly for boys; and it offered home economics and typing for women. 

But one of the big moments in the history of education came in 1983. After A Nation at Risk, we decided to do away with the comprehensive high school and provide every American child a full academic education through high school. And the real political reason behind that reform was the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the disability movement. Basically, anti-tracking sentiment killed the comprehensive high school and, in the end, created an academic curriculum that assumed everyone would go to college. Since Obama, the battle cry has been to make every kid college- and career-ready, but of course, high schools don’t. A lot more kids are graduating high school and going to college, a lot of them are dropping out, and a lot of the kids who don’t make it are the ones you’d figure wouldn’t make it. 

Underneath all this, there’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between education and the economy. We needed an elite to run our military, our businesses, every institution in American life, and most of these people were going to be white males. We realized that if you’re going to run a diverse economy and be the global leader in a diverse world, you need to have some understanding of demographic diversity. The reason we did affirmative action was for them — they needed it! If you’re going to run a company in America, you need to have a diverse workforce, or Reverend Al’s going to show up. 

The way this will work out is that employers will need to have diversity in their leadership. They’ve got to “look like America,” as Bill Clinton used to say. So irrespective of what the court’s done, they’ll go to UMass instead of Harvard to recruit, and they’ll find plenty of talented minorities there. They’re serious about this, and they have no choice — you can’t run a company with an all-white leadership team. 

What about the political consequences?

It will be hell for the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court has effectively put a Band-Aid on racism for years, and now we’re ripping it off. If minorities are a core part of your coalition, you’ve got to come up with something for them. 

Joe Biden’s answer is: We’re going to go back and do what we should have done in the first place. We’re going to have preschool for everyone, we’re going to increase spending for Title I, we’re going to increase funding for low-income schools, and we’re going to make community college free. In other words, now that you can’t just mess around with the elite schools, you’ve got to focus on the whole damn system. That’s not very satisfying because you’re talking about 40 years of work. There’s going to be much more focus on making the education system produce minority elites who aren’t from rich families. 

This changes the conversation on education reform, which has run out of gas at the K–12 level. That discussion is about to get revived because there’s nothing else to do except go back to the beginning and get it right.

That sounds refreshing, but also potentially impossible.

In the end, K–12 has caused this problem, so we’ve got to go back to court cases in the states. There have been a lot of those, and they’ve been reasonably successful over the last few decades. But it’s a big, big deal. Politically, it’s going to be awful because what you’re talking about, in part, is screwing around with the local control of schools. 

The education system is now the primary pathway to a good job in America. That wasn’t true back when I was young. If you had an uncle working at Chrysler, he could get you in. 

You didn’t need to go to college; truthfully, you should drop out of high school instead of waiting. But in all the research — OECD [the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] was the first organization to start saying this, in the ’90s — the education system is now the primary institution that ensures the reproduction of advantage from one generation to the next. It’s a machine where you go to a good grade school, a good high school, a good college, and you get work-based learning and internships. Then you marry a college graduate, move to a neighborhood with good schools and the whole thing starts right over again. 

The thing is, it’s hard to argue with. And if we weren’t a diverse nation, it would be an ideal system. But we are a diverse nation, and diversity clearly matters in terms of who wins. Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to reform the K–12 system, and they did good things, but it wasn’t nearly enough. 

What I’m hearing is that this change to college admissions is occurring in an economy with an increasingly ossified relationship between higher education and success in life.

The endgame now is much clearer than it used to be. According to , which run out to 2031, we’re going to have 171 million jobs. Forty percent will require a B.A. or more, and about three-quarters of those jobs will be good jobs. Meanwhile, 30 percent of all jobs will be middle-skilled, and maybe 40 percent of those jobs will be high-paying and secure. And then there’ll be jobs for high schoolers, only about 20 percent of which will be good jobs — largely . 

That said, there’s still quite a bit of variability. That’s why, in the United States, 40 percent of people with B.A.s make more than people with graduate degrees, and 30 percent of people with A.A.s make more than people with B.A.s. It’s a system, more and more, where what you study really matters. If you go to a community college and learn about HVAC, you’re going to get a good job. There’s movement here.

Why wasn’t affirmative action ever popular? You mentioned the fact that polling around it is terrible, but it was also striking that a ballot measure to bring back race-conscious admissions failed — in , of all places — a few years back.

Think about it: Every family has that guy — in my family, it’s a couple of immigrants — who came over and worked hard with a pick and shovel, and by the third generation, we all went to college. Everybody’s got that story about themselves and their families, and we’re almost neurotically tied to hard work and individual success. The idea that somebody who worked less hard or was less qualified could get the job over my grandfather, which they did, was anathema. The striving, the upward mobility, is what we reward.

Now, if you recognize racism in America, you ought to question that perspective somewhat. That is, in America, there were people who weren’t allowed to strive. But it’s a tough American problem because it creates the cultural contradiction of rewarding people based on the color of their skin. You put that to the average guy in a bar, he’ll say, “Hell no! Whoever works the hardest and does his homework should get the job.” To my mind, it’s a very superficial understanding of the United States and its history, but we are who we are. 

If I’m a Republican, I’m standing up to make a righteous speech about how the people who deserve advantages are now going to get them. Even if you look at Democrats, they tend to agree with that, so you’ve got to find a Plan B. I’ve worked for a lot of politicians, and boy were they happy that the Supreme Court handled abortion and affirmative action. Now it’s falling into their laps.

If you’re a Democrat, the abortion ruling last year was very advantageous. On affirmative action, not so great.

Is it possible that colleges will effectively ignore this ruling? They can just jettison the use of admissions exams, which were a big part of the evidence in this case, and admit whomever they like, right?

If you look at the data, test-optional [admissions] has increased the recruitment of high-income kids. White kids. If you take the test away, colleges and universities can admit more legacies, the quantity of whom is growing all the time. After this decision, they can admit anyone — except African Americans and Latinos. 

In an ideal world, if you’re talking to a student who wants to go to your college, you should be talking about the whole kid, not just their grades. There’s something to holistic admissions. But it also frees up colleges to do whatever they want, and what they want is not to admit poor kids. The flip side is that in American politics, elitism is not a good look. Americans don’t like elites, even if they themselves are elites. There are in Congress that would prevent colleges from admitting legacies. That won’t go anywhere, but we’ll get transparency on legacies; they’re going to have to report to the Department of Education how many legacies and donor kids are in their freshman classes. You can call it grievance, or revenge politics, but it’s going to happen. 

One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites. If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with. If you don’t have any African American or Latino students on campus, people aren’t going to like it. Resentment politics might become stronger in higher education because the class differences and race differences will get even more real.

Class has always been real — elite colleges have always done better with race than with class. If you walk around on a college campus, you can’t tell what a poor kid looks like. But you’ve got a much better chance of bumping into an African American or Latino kid than a poor kid on an elite college campus. They just don’t go there.

Combined with the decision to overturn the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness program, we’ve now seen big reversals for universities as engines of social and racial equality. It seems like higher education will increasingly come under some skepticism from the political realm.

Yeah. We’re going to get a big emphasis on training and career education because it’s a program that can reach the working class in a way that Harvard and a lot of four-year schools never could. The Democrats need it to shore up their working-class voters, and the Republicans need it to retain white working-class voters as well.

So higher education is going to get some competition from training. That’s good for two-year institutions, but not four-year institutions. now allow you to get bachelor’s degrees at community colleges. Higher education is being rebuilt, in other words. Pretty soon we’ll have a mandate to force higher education institutions to tell their applicants what happened to all the other students who took the program they’re in, whether they got a job, and how much money they made. The data is there for that.

Transparency and accountability is about to come to higher education. You can’t stop it now.

Is it possible this judgment will affect a school like Harvard much more than one like UNC? My guess would be that the types of students who are currently benefiting from racial preferences at the most selective institutions will just apply, and gain acceptance to, slightly less selective institutions. But the more elite the institution, the more challenging it could be to find top nonwhite students.

Yeah, it’s not a choice for these kids between Yale and jail. It’s a choice between Yale and Dartmouth, or Colby, or Bates. But it should change the demographics at the top, say, 40 institutions, and people will be pissed off about it. The newspapers will write headlines about the shrinking number of minorities enrolled at their local colleges, and that will get noticed politically. The decline in the number and shares of minorities at elite colleges will be a constant topic. The people who fund me already want me to get in and start tracking this.

Did affirmative action save America from racism? No, that’s pretty clear. But it allowed elites to operate in a way that made them seem like they were progressive and honoring America’s racial history. So the reputational effects are real. Parents are going to want their kids to go to diverse schools, and there might not be many.

States that have tried to enroll more Black and Hispanic students in state universities without using race-based admissions policies have seen the numbers of those students slip — especially at elite institutions.

Nine states had affirmative action bans before last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking it down nationwide. Those states and others have tried various strategies to maintain diversity without using race-based admissions. They include costly recruitment drives, guaranteed admission to high-ranking high school students and the elimination of preferences for relatives of alumni.

Those strategies have had an impact. But overall, they haven’t been as effective as more explicit race-based preferences, illustrating how difficult it will be to maintain diverse campuses in the wake of last week’s decision.

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Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington had affirmative action bans in place before the high court ruled.

California, the nation’s largest state and one of its most diverse, has received the most attention.

Shortly after affirmative action ended in California in 1998, state universities began guaranteeing admission to most UC campuses to the top-performing students from most California high schools. The state university system also shifted to a more holistic admissions review process that considered students’ academic achievements “

And California also began spending more on recruitment. In total, the state has spent about a half-billion dollars on more comprehensive reviews and recruiting since the ban was put in place, according to UC filed in the Supreme Court case. “But funding for these programs has declined over time, and resource constraints limit UC’s ability to expand these programs,” according to the brief.

At the state’s most elite campuses, Berkeley and UCLA, Black and Hispanic enrollment plummeted in the first years after the ban. But Black and Hispanic enrollment fell less dramatically, and recovered more quickly, in the rest of the UC system.

Today, in the UC system as a whole is 4.5%, compared with a statewide population of about 5%. Hispanics are 22.5% of UC students, compared with about 40% of the statewide population.

At Berkeley, Black students were 3.6% of new undergraduates , while Hispanic students were 21%. , 8% percent of new undergraduates were Black, while 22% were Hispanic.

“California has not identified a silver bullet that maintains racial diversity at the same level as race-based affirmative action,” said Zachary Bleemer an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, who has extensively studied California’s experience.

Bleemer estimates that California’s automatic admission program and its more holistic review process “tend to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment by about a third of what race-based affirmative action would be.”

He added that while states with less-selective schools, such as Oklahoma and Nebraska, have reported that ending affirmative action didn’t have much of an effect on minority enrollment, that’s because “most students were getting in already.”

The Supreme Court ruling will have the greatest impact at “quite selective schools with robust affirmative action programs,” Bleemer said, citing schools such as the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Georgia Tech and the Ohio State University.

Like California, some other states, such as and , have implemented automatic admission programs for top-performing students.

Texas implemented its Top 10% Plan after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996 banned affirmative action in college admissions in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In 2003, the Supreme Court nullified that decision, freeing Texas universities to consider race again. But Texas kept its plan in place.

The idea behind the plan is that since many Texas high schools are mostly Black or Hispanic, offering automatic admission to many state universities for the top 10% of students from every Texas high school would boost diversity at those schools.

But examining 18 years of data from Texas found that the program “did not result in meaningful changes” in which high schools in the state sent students to the flagship state universities, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. As a result, it had little impact on the racial diversity of the two schools.

“The purported high school representation benefits of the policy appear to be overstated and may not go as far as advocates might have hoped in terms of generating equity of access to the flagship campuses in the state,” the paper concluded.

In 2020, the at UT-Austin was 24.2% Hispanic, compared with 40% of the . The Black student percentage was 5.3%, compared with a Black state population of 13.4%.

����ǰ����岹’s , launched in 1999, grants automatic admission to one of a dozen state institutions to students who graduate in the top 20% of their class, regardless of SAT or ACT scores. The data on the success of the program is mixed.

From 1999 to 2007, the share of Black freshmen at the University of Florida increased from 11% to 14%, and the overall percentage of Black undergraduates increased from 7% to 10%. But at Florida State University, the percentage of Black students declined from 11% to 9%, and it dropped from 13% to 12% at the University of South Florida, according to statistics .

In 1999, Hispanics made up 16% of public high school seniors and 14% of university freshmen. In 2008, those numbers were 22% and 18%, respectively.

But in past decades, Black and Hispanic students have become increasingly underrepresented at state universities.

In the spring of 2021, 20% of seniors in Florida public high schools were Black. That fall, they made up 10% of freshmen at ����ǰ����岹’s 12 public universities. From 2010 to 2021, the share of Black freshmen at the University of Florida fell from 9% to under 5%. The percentage fell from 11.5% to 7.2% at the University of South Florida, the Times said.

Michigan voters in 2006 approved prohibiting state colleges and universities from granting “preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin.” In an filed in the Supreme Court case, the University of Michigan said that since then it has “discontinued even the limited consideration of race in holistic admissions programs.”

Instead, the university has employed what it described as “persistent, vigorous, and varied efforts to increase student-body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means” — with limited success.

Michigan did not pursue a percentage plan like California, Florida and Texas; except for the Detroit area, there are relatively few majority-minority schools in the state. But it did continue to give a leg up to applicants from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and those who were the first in their family to go to college. It also bolstered recruiting and outreach by, among other things, hosting workshops for high-school counselors, maintaining a recruiting office in Detroit and coordinating campus visits.

Before the ban took effect, underrepresented minorities were about 13% of Michigan undergraduates. That percentage declined to less than 11% in 2014. The current share is about 13.5%, slightly above the pre-ban percentage. However, it is a different story for specific groups, including African Americans.

Black enrollment has declined from 7% in 2006 to roughly 4% in 2021, a reduction of 44%. During the same period, the total percentage of college-aged Black people in Michigan increased from 16% to 19%. And Native American enrollment is down by 90%, according to the university.

“The University’s persistent efforts have not been sufficient to create the racial diversity necessary to provide significant opportunities for personal interaction to dispel stereotypes and to ensure that minority students do not feel isolated or that they must act as spokespersons for their race,” the brief stated.

While affirmative action opponents are cheering last week’s ruling, advocates are now focused on how to boost minority enrollment without it.

Jessie Ryan, executive vice president at the Campaign for College Opportunity, an advocacy group that aims to give all Californians the opportunity to go to college, said the focus must now be on high school preparation for higher learning.

“We will continue to advocate for scaling high-impact practices that result in greater racial equity,” she said in an email, including access to college preparation curriculum, universal completion of financial aid forms, and test-optional admissions policies.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the list of states that have implemented automatic admission programs for top-performing high school students. 

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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that two prominent universities’ consideration of race in acceptances violated the U.S. Constitution, effectively reshaping the role of affirmative action in the college admissions process throughout higher education.

, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote that the admissions processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

“Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” Roberts wrote.

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“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” Roberts continued.

Because Harvard is a private institution and UNC is a public institution, this decision affects higher education across the board.

The three liberal Justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

Jackson recused herself from the Harvard portion of the decision.

Jackson participated in the debate of the UNC case but not the Harvard case because she is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and recently sat on the Harvard Board of Overseers, which is one of the two governing boards for Harvard University.

The decision stems from a 2014 lawsuit against Harvard College and a separate lawsuit against the University of North Carolina. The two suits sought to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, which is currently how universities use race-conscious admissions.

Harvard and UNC have argued that race is one of the many factors that the universities consider in admissions, along with socioeconomic status and extracurricular activities, and they make admission decisions within the guidelines set by Grutter.

Both suits were filed by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which is funded by Edward Blum, a conservative legal activist who has launched multiple lawsuits over what he sees as racial preferences in school admissions.

For the Harvard case, the group alleges that Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted compared to similarly qualified Black, Latino or Indigenous applicants. Title VI bars institutions that receive federal funding from discrimination on the basis of race.

The UNC case argues that because the university takes into consideration race in its admissions process, it violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Federal courts rejected Students for Fair Admissions’ arguments and sided with the universities.

Affirmative action  from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order barring discrimination in the workplace based on race, religion — and later gender — by those entities that received federal contracts and subcontracts.

There are nine states that have banned race-based affirmative action from being implemented in public institutions: Florida, California, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Idaho. Washington state rescinded its ban on affirmative action in 2022.

Oral arguments

, members of the court’s conservative wing, who now make up a 6-3 majority, questioned if it is legal for universities to consider race and for how long such policies should endure, pointing to a 2003 case that predicted that affirmative action would no longer be needed in 25 years.

The case, Grutter vs. Bollinger, allowed the limited use of race to be considered in college admissions, and held that race was merely one of many considerations given in an applicant. The case allowed the University of Michigan Law School to consider race in its admissions process in order to help create a diverse student body.

Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative and the only Black man on the Supreme Court, pressed lawyers defending the schools’ policies on how diversity benefited education.

“I didn’t go to racially diverse schools but there were educational benefits. And I’d like you to tell me expressly when a parent sends a kid to college that they don’t necessarily send them there to have fun or feel good or anything like that. They send them there to learn physics or chemistry or whatever they’re studying,” Thomas said to Ryan Park, the attorney representing UNC. “So tell me what the educational benefits are to that?”

During oral arguments in October of last year, 

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One likely effect is obvious. “There is going to be some closing of doors,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “It’s going to be a landscape in which it’s harder to secure access in most competitive schools.” 

But further down the line, a ruling against schools that factor race in admissions could affect a host of other academic mainstays, from scholarships to the centrality of tests like the SAT and ACT.

The ruling might not end diversity efforts outright. Granting preferential admission to low-income students, children of single parents or those from communities where students often don’t go to college could achieve similar results, experts say, without courting legal trouble. 

“ don’t want race used in admissions, but Americans do want selective institutions to be racially diverse,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and an expert on integration. He thinks the court’s decision could reflect that paradox. “They don’t want to be seen as simply dismissive of the aspiration of racial diversity.”

The court is expected to issue decisions in two lawsuits — brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — later this month. The plaintiff in both cases argues that the weight universities place on race in admissions violates anti-discrimination laws and puts Asian American students at a disadvantage. 

‘Next generation’

While the cases don’t deal directly with K-12 schools, the high court’s decision could elevate the importance of a recent lower court ruling rejecting a legal challenge to diversity efforts at an elite Virginia high school. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., removed a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats at the school for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case, called the revised admissions criteria discriminatory against Asian American students. 

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that view. “The policy challenged here is not just race-neutral: It is race blind,” Fourth Circuit of Appeals Judge Toby Heytens wrote in the

The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said board members’ desire to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students at the school motivated the new policy. They plan to ask the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit. 

Kahlenberg, who testified on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions about race-neutral alternatives, called the TJ case a “next generation issue.”

If the Supreme Court rules that universities can no longer ask applicants to identify their race, they might see the Fairfax case as a chance to “spell out in further detail the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable,” he said. “I think the answer will be that the TJ program is perfectly fine.” 

‘Formative experiences’

The college admissions industry, meanwhile, has been preparing for the end of affirmative action for months. Beginning in August, for example, colleges can hide a student’s race if it’s included in the , a uniform application for undergraduate admissions accepted at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide.  

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Counselors earlier this year to review all of their policies and practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to examine any area, such as mission statements and recruitment efforts, where race is a factor — “no matter how minor” — to determine if changes are needed.

Organizations that focus on high school graduation and college enrollment say they plan to continue to identify students who would be the first in their families to attend college, regardless of race. 

“In some ways for us, it will be business as usual — to serve underserved students. That’s been really the heart of our work long before this became a hot-button issue,” said Pam Johnson Davis, director of fellow support for OneGoal, a nonprofit that works in eight states to increase graduation and college enrollment rates. Eighty-six percent of the students served by the organization are Black or Hispanic. She supports 400 “fellows” in the Chicago area who are already in college or another postsecondary program.

If students are barred from bringing up their race even in their admissions essays — a hypothetical scenario that came up during Supreme Court — teachers at OneGoal schools would still encourage students to write about barriers they overcame to pursue education, Davis said.

Facing discrimination, raising younger siblings, translating for parents who don’t speak English — “these are really formative experiences in students’ lives,” she said. “Their stories will be shaped by their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Stephen Barker, a spokesman for the organization, added that opportunities for Black and Hispanic high school students to earn college credit could become more important for colleges and universities if the court strikes down affirmative action in admissions. 

“Institutions need to double down on those partnerships [with districts] if they want to keep that diversity going in a race-neutral way,” he said.

But he said it’s hard to predict what importance universities might place on other aspects of a student’s application, including GPAs, honors classes, and SAT and Advanced Placement exam scores if race no longer factors into the equation.

The potential end of affirmative action in admissions a growing movement away from requiring the SAT or ACT for admission, with some researchers and advocates for educational equity arguing the tests are biased against Black and Hispanic students and . According to FairTest, an advocacy group, are now test-optional or don’t even accept the exams.

But others say that criticism of the tests is misguided and that they still serve as a good predictor of how well students will perform in college. Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, said are “deeply vetted” to remove content that might disadvantage minority students. GPAs, he added, are less controversial, but large remain.

He doesn’t think the test-optional trend is only about removing barriers for Black and Hispanic applicants. Admissions officers may have other motivations, he said.

“Either [universities]think that the exams aren’t so important or … they, for financial reasons, desire an excuse for admitting more affluent students with less academic preparation,” he said.

With or without admissions exams, the end of race-conscious admissions would put more pressure on K-12 counselors serving Black and Hispanic students, Kahlenberg said.

“For years, the [private] prep school kids have had the upper hand. There are fewer students per counselor and they can put time into writing impressive letters [of recommendation],” he said. “Here’s an opportunity for public school counselors to paint a picture of students who have done remarkably well despite the barriers.”

In a post-affirmative action America, students who are already hesitant to pursue a degree from elite institutions will be even more reluctant to apply. Already, a National Bureau of Economic Research found that high-achieving, low-income students routinely look to less-selective schools than they qualify for, even when these institutions provide less financial aid and have lower graduation rates. 

I was almost one of those students. I grew up in a working-class, middle- to low-income community with immigrant parents from El Salvador. I was a top student in my high school, active in sports and in my community. But when I told a coach of my intention to apply to an elite college, the response I got was less than enthusiastic. 

The message was clear: Students like me don’t get into elite schools. 

I had one of the highest averages in my class yet wasn’t seen as Ivy League material. Millions of talented students of color receive these implicit and explicit messages every day. Those messages will only be amplified if the highest court in the country decides against affirmative action. 

Despite these messages, I persisted and enrolled at Cornell University. There, I participated in a summer bridge program designed to help first-generation, low-income, primarily students of color transition to student life at the elite institution. Cornell understood that merely opening the door to more diverse students was not enough, because despite our achievements, the high schools we graduated from left us woefully underprepared for college. Though exceptional, many of us still struggled.

But 25 years later, as I scroll through my LinkedIn connections, I see the high levels of professional achievement my peers have attained: corporate counsel for a tech giant, vice presidents, executive directors of nonprofits, professors and so on. Our excellence as students carried us into adulthood, demonstrating that affirmative action was never a handout. We were always meant to succeed and thrive, if given a chance. The generations of young students of color following in our footsteps may not have those opportunities if race is no longer a factor in college admissions.

I wish the country no longer needed affirmative action or support programs like the one I participated in at Cornell. I wish all students had access to high schools with the necessary resources, where they are affirmed and encouraged to pursue their greatest postsecondary ambitions. I wish the postsecondary attainment gap had been closed long ago, with full economic parity across populations. But this is not reality — and the pandemic exacerbated these long-standing inequities. for Black and Latino students at colleges and universities has fallen almost 20% since 2020.

A decision striking down affirmative action would mean colleges and universities would have to find new, creative ways to ensure students of color have a fair shot at securing a seat and thriving. Establishing admissions pipelines through formal agreements with high schools in counties where underrepresented minority students reside is one solution. Colleges could also ask applicants outright: Do you work part time in high school? Do you care for a younger sibling or family member during the summers? Were you raised as part of a single-parent household? Are you the first in your family to attend college? These questions are race-neutral but reflect the reality of many students of color and could inform selection alongside academic profiles and other traditional criteria. Such a multipronged approach will be essential for achieving diversity on college campuses In the event of a negative Supreme Court ruling.

At , an organization whose mission is to close the postsecondary degree divide — — we work with students to create “” lists of institutions of higher learning. The formula includes personal and financial compatibility, academic match and graduation rates for underrepresented minority students at colleges and universities around the country. We often have to ask or go digging for this data, because these numbers are not often published. If institutions prioritized transparency about completion rates for their Black and brown students, it would attract applicants interested in enrolling where the rates are highest.

Those working in high schools must also do better by their students. They must affirm students’ postsecondary ambitions and help them explore their options to decide which schools are the best fit. Most importantly, students must be encouraged to see how their racial identities have positively shaped them. These identities are very often the source of their superpowers, and a big part of why they deserve a seat at the table.

Some young people might interpret a negative decision by the court to mean that race, ethnicity, background and culture no longer matter. District leaders, guidance counselors and teachers need to send a counter-message to ensure that students lead with their identities in every part of a postsecondary application process, centering the beauty and rich histories of their communities.

Advancing equity in society still falls on those of us in communities that are already marginalized, a burden that we, as people of color, are all too familiar with carrying. But we are resilient. We figure out ways to circumvent inequitable systems. It is part of our legacies as Black, Indigenous and people of color to fight our way into positions of influence and economic security. We will continue to do this for as long as we must.

If the tenor of the sometimes pointed exchanges are any indication, the outcome may hinge on how long universities expect to employ race-conscious admissions before such practices are no longer needed.

In arguments that lasted close to five hours, the court heard a pair of high-profile cases brought by a pro-Asian organization against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

During the UNC case, which was heard first, attorneys representing the university argued that students are not admitted based on checking a racial box; rather, they look “holistically” at multiple factors, said Ryan Park, solicitor general of North Carolina, who insisted that race plays a “minimal” role in UNC’s decisions. 

“If it’s irrelevant, then you shouldn’t care whether it’s ruled out,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was only on the bench for the UNC arguments, repeatedly homed in on the notion that the universities only employed race as one criteria among many. 

“The university is not requiring anybody to give their race. When you give your race, you’re not getting any special points. It’s being treated just on par with other factors in the system,” Jackson said. “No one’s automatically getting in.”

At a time when racial issues are at the forefront of educational debates and school politics, the historic cases reflect how polarizing attempts to address past discrimination have become. The court’s lengthy gauntlet Monday is also an indication of the far-reaching implications of its decisions in the two cases, which are expected in June.

Advocates for affirmative action argue it’s important for colleges and universities to consider race as one factor in their efforts to create a diverse student body, especially since K-12 schools for Black and Hispanic students. But the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions — with strong backing from Republicans and conservative organizations — say such policies are a form of illegal racial discrimination that put Asian students at a disadvantage. 

The student group wants the court to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 ruling that upheld race-based admissions at the University of Michigan Law School. They argue that allowing such policies to continue violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to any institution receiving federal funds, and the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which applies to UNC as a public university. 

“Grutter assumed that race would only be a plus. But race is a minus for Asians, a group that continues to face immense racial discrimination in this country,” said Cam Norris, representing the group in its lawsuit against Harvard. Asian students, he said, “should be getting into Harvard more than whites, but they don’t because Harvard gives them significantly lower personal ratings.”

He said that Harvard is not socioeconomically diverse and that removing race-conscious admissions would actually increase opportunities for Black students. But Seth Waxman, representing Harvard, disagreed with Norris’s statement that 80% of students at the university come from wealthier families. The university, he said, has increased financial aid as a way to reduce its reliance on racial preferences. 

In the Harvard arguments, the conservative justices focused on a preliminary “personal rating” the university’s 40 admissions counselors apply to applicants as a form of “triage” to help sift through over 60,000 applications for just 1,600 spots at the elite university. Waxman showed the justices a chart that he said proves the role of race was so small, it was almost zero.

“So there is only a little racial discrimination,” Chief Justice John Roberts quipped.

In the Grutter decision, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested that 25 years in the future — 2028 — the use of racial preferences would no longer be necessary. The conservative justices repeatedly pressed the Harvard and UNC attorneys to give an “endpoint.” 

Representing the Biden administration, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the “arc of progress” has been slower than O’Connor envisioned and that universities should be diligent in using alternatives to race in their admission decisions.

Reacting to Monday’s arguments, Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, called the responses to the justices’ questions on this issue disappointing.

The lack of an endpoint “will allow the conservatives to say that schools have no intention of ever ending it, in violation of Grutter,” he said.

Both Waxman for Harvard and Park for UNC said that race-neutral alternatives have been insufficient in creating a diverse student body. Removing the option to consider race would reduce the percentage of Black students admitted to Harvard from 14% to 10%, Waxman said.

The justices — even conservatives Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett — raised the possibility of using race only in the context of a student’s life experiences.

“What if an applicant wrote an essay about how integral their racial identity was to them as a source of pride and the cultural attributes of their racial heritage were very important?” Barrett asked. “Would that be OK?”

But Thomas expressed some skepticism that diversity offered a value in and of itself. “I’ve heard the word diversity quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means,” he said.

‘The bigger question’

This line of questioning suggests the court might not be as quick to end all racial preferences in admissions as many assumed, said Art Coleman, managing partner of EducationCounsel, a consulting firm.

“There is a majority of the court that is uncomfortable at some level with the notion of the consideration of race in admissions,” he said. “But I think the bigger question is what they do about that.”

While some observers have questioned whether the court would ultimately end even race-neutral, voluntary integration programs in K-12, Coleman said he doesn’t see the justices leaning that way. Instead, the legal question for the court is whether a student gets some “material benefit,” like admission or a scholarship, because of their race. That, he said, could have implications for “college counselors who are guiding students to and through the admissions process.” 

The liberal justices pushed attorneys for the plaintiffs to explain whether eliminating racial preferences in college admissions would result in a lack of racial diversity across society as a whole. Prelogar, representing the U.S. government, said during the UNC hearing that it is “critically important” to have diversity in the military, and then added during the Harvard arguments that removing race-conscious measures would have “destabilizing ramifications in just about every important industry in America.”

The two hearings offered a history lesson on the nation’s unfinished work to redress its racist past. Speaking on behalf of UNC, David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said Black students can be discouraged from applying to the university when they see Confederate statues on campus or witness demonstrations by white supremacy groups. 

The plaintiffs argued that the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ending desegregation in K-12, should have applied to race-conscious admissions in college. That prompted a strong response from Prelogar.

“There is a world of difference between the situation this court confronted in Brown, the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that was designed to exclude African Americans based on notions of racial inferiority,” she said. The court recognized, she said, that such discrimination affected children’s “hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

While it is focused on higher education, the court’s ruling in those cases is bound to filter down to K-12 schools.

“Despite the best efforts of school districts … to create more diverse schools, racial segregation has increased over the last two decades. As a result, educational inequities persist,” according to filed by the Council of the Great City Schools in defense of admissions policies at Harvard University and the University North Carolina.

At least 18 million students attend K-12 schools where more than three-quarters of the enrollment is of a single race, a recent report showed, and 14% of students attend schools where at least 9 out 10 of students are of the same race.

Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs in the case, are challenging admissions criteria at those universities they claim discriminate against Asian students. Admissions, they say, should be based on merit.

They want the court to overturn a in Grutter v. Bollinger that upheld race-based admissions at the University of MIchigan Law School. In that ruling, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor foresaw a nation in which “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The Biden administration, , and advocates for Black and Hispanic students argue that affirmative action is even more essential today because schools are still segregated and the promise of integration under Brown v. Board of Education “remains unfulfilled.”

Supporters of affirmative action expect the court’s six conservative justices to side with the plaintiffs. While this will be the first time Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hears an education case, she’s one of just three liberal justices. And she’ll only sit on the bench for the UNC arguments, having recused herself from the Harvard case because she served on the school’s Board of Overseers until this past June. 

“I think it is highly likely that the court takes a position that disallows the use of race whatsoever in higher education admissions,” said Stefan Lallinger, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Such a ruling, he said, could put “a final nail in the coffin of efforts by colleges and universities around the country to directly ensure that all of their students benefit from a racially diverse student body.”

Most experts see two routes for the court to take in this case. First, it could follow the precedent set for K-12 schools in a 2007 case against Seattle Public Schools and the Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky. 

In , the court ruled that school districts couldn’t explicitly use race in their efforts to create more diverse schools. But separately, former Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that districts still had a “compelling interest” to pursue racial integration. Since then, districts have moved toward based on family income. 

Noting the court’s recent decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, many predict that the six conservative justices won’t be bound by precedent. 

“It should be noted that the only reason the court salvaged any use of race in the [Parents Involved] case was the moderation of Justice Anthony Kennedy,” Lallinger said. 

That’s why he thinks it’s possible the court could take a second approach and rule as unconstitutional all race-conscious efforts to achieve diversity.

“The current court does not have an Anthony Kennedy,” Lallinger said. 

‘Pressure to discriminate’

In the wake of the Parents United opinion, many conservatives continue to hold that some of the admissions policies K-12 schools use for competitive schools are discriminatory.

In the Fairfax County, Virginia, schools, for example, the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation is representing plaintiffs who sued the district over changes to acceptance criteria at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The district dropped a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Board members expressed hope that the changes would increase representation of Black and Hispanic students at the school, which the plaintiffs argued was illegal “racial balancing.”

“We’re all entitled to each be judged on our own individual characteristics, not on the basis of our membership in a group,” said Wen Fa, a senior attorney at the law firm, which is also challenging similar admission policies in New York City, Boston and Montgomery County, Maryland.

In supporting Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit Parents Defending Education wrote that the 2003 decision in Grutter v Bollinger has “spawned increasing racial discrimination” that has spread to the K-12 system.

“As long as Grutter remains the law, K-12 schools will face an inexorable pressure to discriminate based on skin color,” the brief said.

But even those challenging the university policies point to integration efforts based on family income as the direction for higher education, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher who wrote on the issue. He served as an for the plaintiffs when the case was in a lower court, and he doesn’t think the justices have hinted that they would rule out all efforts to achieve diversity.

“Not a single Supreme Court justice has indicated that they entertain that extreme position,” he said. 

He pointed to Clarence Thomas’s in 1991, in which the justice defended programs that give preference to students who overcome obstacles. 

“The kids could come from any background of disadvantage,” Thomas said. “The kid could be a white kid from Appalachia, could be a Cajun from Louisiana, or could be a Black kid or Hispanic kid from the inner cities or from the barrios, but I defended that sort of a program then and I would defend it today.”

But the court has grown far more conservative since Thomas joined. Most experts don’t expect different outcomes from the two cases, but note that Jackson is likely to raise questions in the UNC case that might not surface in the Harvard hearing.

There’s one clear difference between the two. Harvard is a private university and therefore subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to any institution receiving federal funds. But UNC is a public university and is guided by the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

Kahlenberg said that by taking both cases, the court can issue rulings based on both laws. 

Impact on recruiting

Education advocates in North Carolina are already assessing the possible impact if the court ends affirmative action. Black and Hispanic students in the state may have fewer opportunities to attend the flagship university, according to researchers at the Hunt Institute, an education think tank.   

Just look at California, where voters banned affirmative action in 1996, wrote Madeline Smith and Erica Vevurka, directors of higher education and K-12, respectively, at the institute.

“The ban [on] affirmative action made it more difficult for the state’s public institutions of higher education to explicitly recruit students of color,” they wrote. “It also restricted the access that students of color had to information around financial aid options.”

After 1996, the enrollment of freshman from underrepresented minority groups dropped by at least 50%, according to that the University of California submitted to the Supreme Court in support of Harvard and UNC. 

Even though the state has implemented diversity efforts targeting low-income families and first-generation college students, the university system “struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity,” the brief says. 

Beyond college admissions, some experts say the case has implications for efforts to create a more diverse teacher workforce, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

A ruling for the plaintiffs could “derail the progress” made in grow-your-own programs and teacher residencies that target Black and Hispanic college students, said Jerell Hill, dean of the School of Human Development and Education at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. 

The college participates in an that targets universities serving large numbers of minority students. “It is difficult to measure a court decision that could delay social, economic and educational opportunities for decades,” he said.

Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West said if the court rules for the plaintiffs, there are still strategies to increase diversity in teaching. They include building strong teacher education programs at historically Black colleges and universities and expanding affordable housing for teachers.

“To have diverse professions like teaching, you’ve got to have a pipeline of folks who are coming out of undergrad who are also diverse,” he said. “We know diverse teachers are good for all students.”

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott of Virginia has filed a  along with 64 other House Democrats urging the Supreme Court to uphold  at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

“Narrowly tailored admissions policies that recognize race as one criterion — out of many criteria for evaluating prospective students — are a key tool to realize diverse learning environments and address continued educational inequity,” Scott said in a statement issued Tuesday.

The Supreme Court originally combined the two cases that challenged affirmative action but then separated them — likely because the newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, said she would recuse herself from the Harvard case because she previously held a six-year term on Harvard’s board of overseers. Legal experts have said the court’s decision could reshape the use of affirmative action in higher education.

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The cases are  and 

Both ask the court to overturn a 2003 decision in  that upheld the University of Michigan’s practice of considering race in its undergraduate admissions process to achieve a diverse student body.

The Harvard case also questions whether the university is violating the Civil Rights Act by placing a cap on its admittance of Asian American students, which the plaintiff argue discriminates against those students.

“These admissions policies are critical for achieving the promise of equal educational opportunity that remains unfulfilled more than 65 years after the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” Scott said.

House Democrats in their brief argue that race-conscious admissions policies are still needed “given the continued underrepresentation of African Americans, Latinos/Hispanics, and many Asian Americans in colleges and universities across the country.”

“Even with the use of a race-conscious admissions program, the University of North Carolina (UNC) ‘continues to face challenges admitting and enrolling underrepresented minorities, particularly African American males, Hispanics, and Native Americans,’” they wrote.

Virginia Rep. Donald McEachin also signed onto the brief. The Supreme Court will hear the cases in the fall.

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, part of a series of studies conducted in the wake of high-profile litigation against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, shows that Hispanic and African American applicants to both colleges enjoy substantial advantages relative to whites and Asian Americans. Their chances of acceptance are drastically higher than they would be in the absence of affirmative action, but with a somewhat counterintuitive addendum: preferential treatment is relatively weaker for minority applicants from poor and working-class backgrounds than it is for their peers from more affluent families.

Those findings, and those of the preceding papers, are built on data that was made publicly available during the discovery phase of two lawsuits — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — that were before the court. Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and the studies’ lead author, has provided expert testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim that the storied institutions have systematically discriminated against Asian applicants. In an interview with ����Ӱ��, he said he hoped his work would help clarify the public debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

“So much of the debate about affirmative action is happening in this binary where you’re either for it or against it,” Arcidiacono observed. “But there’s a large range of possibilities, from just [using] race as a tiebreaker to fully equal outcomes. So in order to get a sense for whether affirmative action has gone too far or has not gone far enough, you have to understand the role that race plays currently, and you can’t do that without the data.”

Those questions are becoming more concrete by the month. in the case, which will be heard in the 2022-23 term. With plaintiffs asking the nation’s highest court to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in the college application process, and Republicans in Congress that would force colleges to publicize their use of non-academic characteristics in admissions, the stage is being set for a major rollback of affirmative action as it has been practiced for half a century. According to Arcidiacono’s latest study, a significant reversal could shrink the percentage of African American students admitted to Harvard by more than two-thirds.

Georgetown economist Harry Holzer finds those projections plausible. A proponent of race-based affirmative action, he signed (alongside multiple Nobel laureates) defending Harvard’s policies that was filed in a lower-court iteration of the suit. Arcidiacono’s line of research “makes reasonable points,” Holzer said, while arguing that it does not invalidate the use of racial considerations by admissions officers. 

“It doesn’t change my support for affirmative action to see his numbers, though I certainly don’t disagree with the research findings. It shows that when very elite schools practice affirmative action in admissions, which they do, it does effectively raise the admission rate for people of color — especially African Americans — by a lot.” 

Race & class

Arcidiacono and his coauthors dug into admissions records for over 300,000 domestic applicants to the admissions classes of 2014–2019, of which roughly 142,000 applied to Harvard, 57,000 applied to UNC as in-state candidates, and 105,000 applied to the same college from out of state. Applicant-level information included demographic attributes such as race and socioeconomic status, as well as richly detailed academic records covering high school grades, standardized test scores, and individual ratings from admissions officers across a range of academic and non-academic indicators. 

Combining high school GPA, SAT scores, and scores on SAT II subject tests, the research team created academic ratings for each applicant and ranked them by decile (a statistical measurement dividing data into 10 equal parts). The lowest-performing students were grouped into the bottom 10 percent and the strongest performers grouped into the top 10 percent. Most African Americans fell into the bottom 20 percent of all applicants to both Harvard and UNC, but they were admitted at the highest rate for almost every performance decile, followed by Hispanic, white, and Asian applicants.

The acceptance gaps between categories are largest around the middle of the spectrum for academic qualifications, with African Americans applying to Harvard being accepted at a rate double that of Hispanics — and 12 times greater than Asian Americans — at the fifth decile (i.e., between the 41st and 50th percentile of qualifications). For out-of-state applicants to UNC, African Americans at the fifth decile were almost 33 times more likely to be accepted than Asian Americans and 14 times more likely than whites. 

Overall, Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood that an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. For out-of-state applicants to UNC, the force of racial preferences multiplied African Americans from 1.5 percent of admitted students to 15.6 percent, a tenfold increase. Black applicants applying in-state to Chapel Hill gained a smaller advantage from affirmative action, becoming 70 percent likelier to win admission.

Beyond these general calculations, the authors noticed a peculiar interaction between race and class. While white applicants from lower-income families appear to receive an advantage in admissions relative to wealthier whites with similar academic profiles, disadvantaged African Americans and Hispanics do not. Affluent applicants of color therefore receive a comparatively larger boost over affluent white applicants than poor and working-class students of color enjoy over poor and working-class whites. 

Holzer said the substantive arguments in favor of affirmative action — particularly the educational value of maintaining a racially diverse campus — “don’t require that the specific recipient face bias or barriers in the past.” Still, he asserted that low-income students of color deserve “extra credit” not only for their race but also their class background.

“If the bump for just being African American is really large, you could imagine that maybe [admissions officers] think, ‘We’re already taking care of that problem,’” Holzer said. “But for someone like me, who thinks that class really matters a lot, you want to make sure that lower-income students of color get consideration.”

Arcidiacono argued that the large edge claimed by some wealthy students, even if they come from historically excluded groups, risks eroding public faith in the fairness of admissions altogether. Disillusionment already exists not only due to long-running patterns of underrepresentation, he added, but also newer blots such as the Varsity Blues scandal, which saw moneyed parents conniving with college employees and private admissions counselors to game the system.

“This is in the context of a system that completely favors people who come from richer backgrounds,” Arcidiacono said, listing the factors already favoring upper-class applicants: ready access to college counselors, special weight placed on extracurricular activities, and recruitment for sports like sailing and golf.

“To me, one of the arguments for affirmative action would be that you’re trying to build trust in the system for a group that has been traditionally disenfranchised. But the way you do that matters, and it’s not really hitting the poorer African Americans — they’re not the ones benefiting the most.” 

The ‘narrowly tailored’ standard

The Supreme Court will consider Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard this fall, eight years after it was first filed in federal district court. When a decision is finally reached, the case could fundamentally alter the practice of affirmative action in college admissions and, with it, the racial composition of some of the country’s most prestigious schools.

Existing Court precedent was set in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case, in which a plaintiff alleged that preference systems at public graduate schools — in that instance, the University of Michigan Law School — illegally disadvantaged white students on racial grounds. A majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor found instead that “the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions” was constitutionally permissible, while adding that the issue would be ripe for reexamination within 25 years. That deadline has nearly elapsed, and the Harvard litigants seek to reopen the question of whether affirmative action has been “narrowly tailored” to begin with.

The case, along with the corresponding UNC suit, centers on the accusation by a group of Asian American students that Harvard’s policies unfairly disfavored them relative to applicants from every other racial group. Although the admissions candidates with the highest GPAs and test scores are disproportionately Asian American — showed that about one-quarter of Asian high school graduates scored above a 1400 on the SAT, compared with 8 percent of whites, 2 percent of Hispanics, and 1 percent of African Americans — they were consistently graded lower according to Harvard’s personality scores. A released by Arcidiacono and his colleagues suggested that, absent the subjective penalty that Asian applicants face, they would be admitted at a rate 19 percent higher than currently prevails.

The findings instantiated a theory that first gained widespread attention a decade ago, when one right-wing commentator that Asian Americans were tacitly being held back by admissions quotas lest they grow to dominate Ivy League campuses. Although Asian high schoolers were routinely among the top-performing students in the United States, their numeric presence on elite campuses peaked around 1990 and remained roughly the same over the next 20 years.

Trends in Asian American college enrollment were the focus of by the Manhattan Institute. Author Robert VerBruggen, a journalist and fellow at the conservative think tank, noted that the unmistakable stagnation in representation — which occurred even as Asians were continually growing as a percentage of all college aspirants — began to lift about about a decade ago. Whether that was connected to the growing focus on apparent discrimination is unclear.

“It’s an interesting question why that’s happened, but it’s certainly consistent with the narrative that everybody started making a stink about it, lawsuits were filed, and schools got a lot more careful about what they were doing,” Verbruggen said.

The release of the schools’ data allowed researchers to investigate trends in admissions beyond purported anti-Asian bias. In a widely covered , Arcidiacono and his co-authors calculated that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard between 2014 and 2019 were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of university faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (i.e., relatives of potential high-dollar donors). Another postulated that the school, which has its efforts to diversify, may African American students who stand virtually no chance of gaining admission. 

“In some sense, there’s this uneasy compromise that works to the detriment of Asian Americans and poor whites,” Arcidiacono said. “You’ve got the racial preferences helping underrepresented minorities get into certain colleges, and you’ve got the legacy and athlete preferences helping rich, disproportionately white kids get into college.”

A Supreme Court ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could leave that system profoundly changed, upsetting the demographic mix that elite schools have worked hard to cultivate. By Arcidiacono’s accounting, the proportion of African Americans admitted to Harvard over the period he studied would have been less than 1 percent if acceptance was offered on the basis of academic qualifications alone; those admitted to UNC in-state or out-of-state would sink to 4.3 percent and less than 2 percent, respectively. At the same time, the percentage of Asian Americans would have risen substantially — to over 50 percent of all admitted students, in Harvard’s case.

While oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t come for months, the recently announced recusal of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a promising sign for the plaintiffs. With the departure of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has lost two members who had previously ruled in favor of race-based affirmative action in postsecondary education.

Whatever the legal outcome, VerBruggen said that Arcidiacono’s work offered considerable value simply by shining a light on the internal admissions processes in two highly competitive universities.

“Schools are so tight-lipped about their affirmative action policies that we don’t have a lot of data on them,” he remarked. “If you want to know what’s going on in a school, you basically have to sue them.”

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. With a vote of 53 to 47, Jackson picked up support from three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah.

According to the White House, Jackson, who will be the first Black woman on the court, watched the vote with President Joe Biden. 

Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, said Wednesday that if confirmed, she would recuse herself from an upcoming case focusing on race-conscious college admissions involving Harvard University. 

Jackson is currently on the Harvard Board of Overseers. Her term runs through June.

“Your and my alma mater, Harvard, is currently being sued for its explicitly and, in my view, egregious policy of discriminating against Asian Americans,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said during Jackson’s second full day of hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If you’re confirmed, do you intend to recuse from this lawsuit?”  

Jackson responded, “That is my plan, senator.”

The , which combines challenges to race-based admissions decisions at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is considered the most significant case involving both race and education in several years. The plaintiffs argue that the admission policies discriminate against Asian applicants. The debate is taking place in K-12 as well with a recent federal judge’s against the Fairfax County Public Schools regarding its so-called “racial balancing” practice at a selective science and technology school. Observers speculate that the court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, would of the plaintiffs. But if Jackson is confirmed, which appears likely, her recusal would create the potential for a 4-4 tie. 

If that’s the case, the “lower court decision would remain intact,” explained Cedric Powell, law professor at the University of Louisville. That means both Harvard and the University of North Carolina could keep in place their current practices of considering underrepresented groups when making admissions decisions. 

Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in both cases, said in response to Jackson’s statement that, “as a litigant, it would be improper for us to comment.”

The case, which is scheduled to be heard in the court’s next term, starting in October, would typically be scheduled for one hour of oral argument. the court could allot one hour for each petition, in which case Jackson could participate in the case against the University of North Carolina. 

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. With a vote of 53 to 47, Jackson picked up support from three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah.

According to the White House, Jackson, who will be the first Black woman on the court, watched the vote with President Joe Biden. 

President Joe Biden made history Friday when he nominated federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, however, she’ll likely face pressure to sit out one of the most important cases involving race and education in recent years. 

In 2016, she recused herself from a against the U.S. Department of Education because she has served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, where she previously graduated magna cum laude and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. Prior to her confirmation hearings for a federal judgeship, she explained in a that she “was serving on the board of a university that was evaluating its own potential response” to sexual assault guidelines.

That rationale is likely to be revisited if she sits on the court next term when it hears an upcoming case in which the university is a defendant, one of two challenging race-based admissions policies. Plaintiffs argue that affirmative action policies at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminate against Asian Americans by giving preference to Black and Hispanic students. 

Charles Geyh, an expert in judicial conduct at Indiana University, said Jackson’s first responsibility would be to ask herself whether she can be impartial. But the degree of the board’s involvement in creating and implementing the policy also factors into the decision.

“The more involved she was, the more a reasonable person would look at this and say, ‘I don’t know if she can weigh this thing in an even-handed way,’” he said. “It wouldn’t shock me to find that some senators will try to leverage that.”

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is one of several high-profile education cases the court will hear in coming years. Other potential issues expected to work their way up from the lower federal courts involve religious school choice, the rights of transgender students and the public status of charter schools.

Jackson, who attended a Miami-Dade high school, is the daughter of public school educators, whom she thanked Friday during remarks at the White House. 

“My father made the fateful decision to transition from his job as a public high school history teacher and go to law school,” she said. “Some of my earliest memories are of him sitting at the kitchen table reading his law books. I watched him study. He became my first professional role model.” Her father served as a school board attorney for the Miami-Dade County Public Schools and her mother was a principal at one of the district’s magnet schools for 14 years.

Despite her strong public school connections, Jackson has served on boards of private schools in the D.C. area — Georgetown Day School and a Christian school in Maryland that has since closed.

The Montrose Christian School opposed abortion, another issue Jackson could face on the court. The school’s mission statement also said marriage should be limited to those between a man and a woman. Questioned by Sen. Josh Hawley, a conservative Republican from Missouri during hearings last year on her nomination to the appellate court, she responded that she did not “necessarily agree with all of the statements … that those boards might have in their materials.” 

None of those potential conflicts came up Friday, however, when Biden formally announced her nomination.

“Her opinions are always carefully reasoned, tethered to precedent and demonstrate respect for how law impacts everyday people,” he said. “It doesn’t mean she puts her thumb on the scale of justice one way or the other, but she understands the broader impact of the decisions.” 

If confirmed, Jackson won’t change the ideological make-up of the court, where conservatives have enjoyed a supermajority since 2020. That means on a major educational issue like school choice — where liberals typically oppose public funds for religious schools — the addition of Jackson would be unlikely to affect the outcome.

But as the first Black woman on the court, Jackson would likely be more attuned to issues of race and gender as reflected in school dress codes or , and she might see “discrimination that maybe another justice might not,” said Preston Green, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. 

Jackson would join the court at a time when conservative justices have signaled they’re open to rolling back abortion rights and have already moved in the direction of more religious freedom. 

“This court is really undoing a lot of decisions that people have thought were off the table,” Green said.

‘So long overdue’

Prior to her service on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Jackson served as a trial judge on the Federal Court in Washington for 8 years. Biden called Jackson’s experience as a trial judge a “critical qualification,” and civil rights organizations celebrated the nomination.

In 2020, she blocked the from allowing child welfare agencies receiving federal grants to turn away LGBTQ youth and families. And in 2018, Jackson ruled that the Trump administration failed to follow proper procedure when it sought to end funding for teen pregnancy prevention.

“I’m elated. It’s groundbreaking, and so long overdue to have a Black woman on the Supreme court,” said Sasha Buchert, senior attorney at Lambda Legal, which focuses on the rights of LGBTQ students and adults. “She has a stellar civil rights record.”

Buchert is among the legal experts who expect a case involving the rights of transgender students to reach the court at some point. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments in last week, could clash with the 4th Circuit,which ruled in that a transgender boy could use the bathroom that matched his gender identity. The Supreme Court turned down an appeal of that case, but conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have heard it. 

Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, said the court also could ultimately confront the issue of whether transgender girls should be able to play women’s sports.

“I don’t see any way that they can dodge that one,” Dunn said. “There will be some split circuit decisions sooner rather than later.”

— a challenge to Idaho’s ban on transgender girls in women’s sports — is currently moving through the 9th Circuit. Long considered one of the most liberal appellate courts, the circuit court recently because of appointments by former President Donald Trump. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Arizona-based law firm, is also expected to appeal challenging a Connecticut policy that allows transgender girls to play in girls high school sports.

Dunn said it’s hard to predict how justices would rule in such a case, adding that if Jackson is confirmed, all three liberal members of the court would be women. 

The conservative members, he said, could be “suspicious” of ruling that bans like Idaho’s should stand, but added he could see “some of the liberal wing of the court having concerns” about transgender girls in sports.

The fact that Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative, wrote the 2020 opinion in could be a factor in any future cases involving LGBTQ rights. In that case, the court decided that federal law prohibits employment discrimination against LGBTQ workers. But Buchert said the ruling also left open the door for restrictions outside the workplace.

A ‘minimalist course’ 

Before the end of the current term, the court will issue an opinion in , which challenges a Maine law banning some religious schools from receiving public funds for tuition assistance. How the court rules in that case could determine whether Jackson might face a similar school choice issue if she’s confirmed.

Experts expect the court to rule in favor of the plaintiffs, who say the state is discriminating against religious families. “My sense is that [Chief Justice John] Roberts’s ability to keep the conservatives on the minimalist course that he established is over,” Dunn said, but added that the court could also leave open the possibility for similar cases in the future.

A decision in a , which focuses on whether a student can sue a charter school under the federal equal protection clause, is expected this spring. 

Jackson won’t be on the court to hear a church-state separation case this term in which a football coach argues he should be allowed to pray publicly after games. But when she clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court justice she’s in line to replace, the court ruled that student-led prayer at football .

In choosing Jackson, Biden passed on California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and J. Michelle Childs, a federal district court judge in South Carolina, who not only went to public K-12 schools like Jackson, but also earned a law degree from the University of South Carolina.

The argument that admission to the nation’s most elite colleges is discriminatory against Asian Americans has been deemed inaccurate in a new study by researchers at Georgetown University’s Center of Education.

The study, “Selective Bias Asian Americans, Test Scores, and Holistic Admissions” found the current holistic admissions system, which looks at many aspects of a student’s application beyond their GPA and test scores and is used at many selective colleges, benefits Asian American applicants more than an alternative test-only system.

Critics have claimed holistic admissions and affirmative action conceals illegal practices of racial quotas and as a result, Asian American applicants are being denied to maintain a range of other ethnic groups.

But the study found that at the nation’s 91 elite colleges, Asian American enrollment has remained stable for the last 20 years.

The study also found that only a small number of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) would be admitted under a test-only system. Under the holistic admissions system, AAPI students typically gain nearly 14,500 spots in a year, while a test-only system only results in a mere 3,000 student gain.

The study explained the higher rate of Asian American students being rejected as a result of the higher proportion of Asian American applicants who apply to selective colleges regardless of their test scores.

Dr. Anthony Carnevale, the primary author in the Selective Bias Study, believes the debate over Asian Americans and affirmative action reflect a larger issue with college admissions.

“I firmly believe, as it shows in all our other work, the argument over Asian Americans, in a sense, misses the point. The real question here is what should we be using as metrics and other kinds of standards for admitting students?” said Dr. Carnevale. “This study begs the question of what should we do? What should colleges do, in terms of their admissions policies?”

Here are they key findings from the report:

1. Enrollment of Asian Americans at the Most Selective Colleges Has Remained Stable Over the Past Decade

In the past 20 years, Asian American enrollment increased to match changes in demographics of college’s incoming classes. Between 1999 and 2018, enrollment of AAPI at the most selective colleges grew by 4 percentage points; while their enrollment at other four-year schools grew by 2 percentage points.

2. Asian American Students are More Likely to Apply to Highly Selective Colleges Regardless of Test Scores than other Racial Groups

Asian Americans applicants with below average test scores are more likely than students from other ethnic groups to apply to selective colleges driving up the number of AAPI applicants, according to the study.

Of the Asian-American students who scored a 1300 and above on the SAT, 65% applied to the selective colleges in comparison to 50% of non-Asian American students. For students who scored below 1300, 12% of Asian American students applied to those schools compared to 5% of non-Asian American applicants.

3. In A Test-only Admissions System Would Produce Marginal Gains for Asian American Applicants 

Advocates have long pushed for a test-only, race-blind admissions system in their arguments against affirmative action. Advocates point to California schools, such as UC Berkeley and UCLA as examples of elite institutions with high numbers of Asian Americans students.

But in the study’s simulation of what would happen if college admissions did not use “race, legacy status, athletics, extracurricular activities, academic interest, ability to pay,” instead basing admission solely based on test scores, Asian American enrollment would only result in a mere 2% increase.

4. Many Asian American Applicants Already Benefit from Holistic Admissions

The simulation also showed that without holistic admissions, 21% of Asian American students and 39% of non-Asian American students would not have received acceptances, with their spots going to students with higher test scores.

In a solely test based approach, Asian American students who would have been denied overall do have higher test-scores, however, they are also “twice as likely as their non-Asian peers to have the lowest scores in the application pool.” This is because Asian Americans are not monolithic, as 40% of AAPI college students have test scores below than average.