On Affirmative Action

A few notes on devastating Supreme Court decision.

Photo by Charles DeLoye on Unsplash

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional, capping several decades’ worth of decisions that have slowly scaled back the abilities of colleges to consider race among many other factors in college admissions processes. The decision allows colleges a tiny bit of wiggle room, insofar as they can consider student essays in which students may write about how their racial background shaped their character, or created obstacles that they were able to overcome. But the days of admissions officers being able to consider applicants’ race in the interests of a diverse student body seem to be over.

A few things to think about:

1. The questions of legacy admissions and athletic admissions were not before the Court, and the legal questions around those issues are both murkier and more complex (the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the 150 years of litigation that has followed it has essentially put race in a special category of consideration — to put it in the broadest and most over-simplified possible terms, there is a very high bar to meet for it to be permissible for an institution to adopt racial preferences of any kind). But just because legacy and athletics admissions weren’t before the Court and wouldn’t be evaluated under the same constitutional framework doesn’t mean that self-styled proponents of fairness in college admissions, as well as liberals and college administrators themselves, should continue to allow legacy admissions. Now that affirmative action is largely gone, there should be a renewed effort to pressure colleges to end legacy admission — legacy admissions were morally indefensible in the first place, but are even harder to justify now. Colleges, though, have zero internal incentive to not serve the interests some of their biggest cash cows, and so pressure has to come from the outside.