The SCOTUS affirmative action ban, 1.5 years out

Hey, y’all,

The first wave of this year’s college applicants clicked “send” on their top choices this week. It’s an exciting and celebratory moment for any student — but I’m worried for them. 

It all comes down to the playing field. Who gets to go to college has never been a fair shake, and what the Supreme Court did (and didn’t do) last summer made it worse (again). Now, we’re starting to see the impact, and with the election looming, students’ futures hang in the balance.

In June 2023, the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was in front of the high court. In the end, conservative justices decided with a 6-3 majority vote that taking race into account during college admissions — AKA affirmative action — was unconstitutional.   

Black Voice News covered the issue at the time, writing how dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision cemented “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society.” 

The decision is already reshaping the college admissions landscape, but to what degree is only now coming into view.  As AsAmNews reports, data from last year’s admissions cycle — the first since the ruling — is starting to roll out. While experts say it can’t be directly linked to the court ruling, it is an initial look at the case’s potential impact. 

Here’s what the data show: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology saw a 15% drop in Black and Hispanic first year students compared to the previous admissions cycle; Amherst College fell 4% in Hispanic enrollment and 8% in Black enrollment; Yale saw a 6% drop in Asian American enrollment; Harvard’s Black first year students declined 4%; and BIPOC enrollment at UNC — the other school included in the Supreme Court case — fell by 5%. 

As noted in this episode of URL Media’s Meet the BIPOC Press, what any discussion around affirmative action means to people is multifaceted and often oversimplified in the press.

Many can’t help but see the ruling as a massive step backward in the progress made toward more racially-representative higher education classrooms. Some say it won’t have any impact, and those who attacked the policy for years (looking at you, Edward Blum) are thrilled that admissions are now supposedly based purely on merit. 

Except, the thing is, they aren’t. 

Schools are still allowed to build their classes with reserved spots tied to family legacy and wealth — and many public and private institutions do exactly that. An applicant can gain a leg up over everyone else if their parents attended the school, gave it a lot of money, or are on the faculty. To Fabiola Cineas at Vox Media, this is all basically just affirmative action for white people. 

Granted, it wasn’t a perfect system before the Supreme Court ruling — and in an ideal world, a pure assessment of merits would be possible without any checks and balances needed on the Common Application. 

As far as I can tell, though, we do not yet live in that world — and the reality that the Supreme Court has plunged us into is overtly hypocritical. 

How can schools be banned from being conscious of the systemic history that has kept Black and Brown students out of higher education, while family ties and generational wealth can still set the agenda? 

Legacy- and donor-based admittees are overwhelmingly white, so the spots that minority or first-generation students had an equitable shot at landing before may now be eaten up by these other string-pulling allowances. This playing field isn’t just uneven — it’s seismically shifted. 

During the court case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson raised the issue of legacy in her arguments. 

“A university can take into account and value all of the other background and personal characteristics of other applicants, but they can’t value race,” she said, per Inside Higher Ed. “That seems to me to have the potential of causing more of an equal protection problem than it’s actually solving.”

In the days following the affirmative action decision, another lawsuit was filed against Harvard for legacy admissions, and a growing chorus of voices around the country called for finally getting rid of the practice nationwide. 

Tackling the issue at the state level may be the best strategy, as schools are unlikely to rid themselves of donor-friendly practices anytime soon. Five legacy admissions bans have already been passed, most recently in California, Politico reports. 

The debate could also someday land before the Supreme Court, just like affirmative action did. If it does, who is sitting on the bench will make all the difference. 

Former President Donald Trump’s additions to the Supreme Court helped sound the death gong for affirmative action. If he secures another four years this election, odds are he’ll continue to load up the Supreme Court when he can, as well as lower federal courts. 

However, in a matter of days, Vice President Kamala Harris could win the presidency and start to chip away at rebalancing the courts. Plus, there is a good chance she would continue the student debt relief work of the Biden administration, which tried to cancel or reduce $430 billion in student debt before the Supreme Court struck down that plan last summer. 

With the costs of college at all-time highs, debt relief and fair admissions are really two sides of the same coin. Bringing justice to who gets into college is all for naught if those same applicants are drowning in debt afterward anyway.

As CNBC reports, President Joe Biden’s administration has a new plan in the works to grant the Secretary of Education the power to waive student debt for borrowers facing hardship. A Trump victory would likely mean such powers would be stripped, along with other Department of Education funding that helps student borrowers. 
What do you think? Without affirmative action, should legacy and donor picks also have to go? Can the student debt crisis be solved? Let us know at editor@url-media.com.