US university admissions ruling triggers a rethink

Few would disagree that diversity is a desirable feature in classrooms and workplaces. But the United States Supreme Court ruled in late June on what universities are and aren't allowed to do to achieve that outcome, ultimately deciding that race-based selection does not pass legal muster. 

For proponents of affirmative action, it represented a clear setback in the fight to level the academic and professional playing field for historically wronged Black and Hispanic students.  

Rotimi Kukoyi is an incoming sophomore at University of North Carolina which, along with Harvard University, was named in the Supreme Court case that resulted in the ban on affirmative action in higher education admissions.

"Affirmative action meant that I've got into spaces with other people that look like me, and so to me, that's meant that the university has explicitly said: 'We want to welcome students like you, we understand that we have histories that have been discriminatory towards people from your background and other backgrounds and we're taking steps to address that,'" Kukoyi told DW. 

But for others, it represents a correction of a policy that led to more racial skewing, not less.

"If it would not be lawful for Harvard to favor white and Asian applicants over Black and Hispanic applicants, then the reverse must be true as well," said John Raj Puri, an incoming sophomore at Stanford University. 

Within this spectrum of for and against are several arguments that complicate the picture — mostly acknowledged by either side. 

"You did see that admissions officers often had bias against Asian-American students. They were reported to have lower personality scores on average, and so it's not like these are imagined," said Kukoyi. 

"But that's an individual officer problem, whereas affirmative action is seeking to address systemic racism and oppression."

Puri, for his part, argues diversity across more metrics across the board would be better for universities, even as he acknowledges that racial diversity will take a hit as result of the ruling. 

"You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't remove affirmative action and expect the exact same results, expect the exact same racial diversity," said Puri.

"When you're trying to achieve a diverse student body, you want to achieve a diverse kind of set of individual backgrounds, not just statistics on a page and not just meeting a certain percentage of different races in your student body."

'Whiter than white'

Broadly speaking, where one stands on the debate depends very much on whether that person believes that colleges have a moral imperative to selectively favor Black and Hispanic students because of America's history of racial injustice — and consciously put other groups at a disadvantage. 

But there is a general consensus that banning affirmative action in the college admissions process will inevitably result in fewer Black and Hispanic students in selective colleges, with consequences for diversity in the highest tiers of American industry and government.

"What's going to happen is that the elite institutions are going to be whiter and whiter," said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

"They produce the doctors, the lawyers, the politicians, the industry CEOs. We basically recruit the leadership of the American nation from those colleges."

Citing a study conducted by his institute, Carnevale said the more initially obvious ways to counter an impending decline of Black and Hispanic students might not work.

How will college admissions change?

If university admissions offices were to respond to the ruling by substituting racial metrics with socioeconomic indicators in their admissions processes — with the understanding that minority students experience higher poverty rates than their white counterparts — it still would not be enough to maintain the kind of diversity that reflects wider American society. 

"What we found out in our research was that, in the end, if you do not use race in admissions, you don't get race in admissions," said Carnevale.

"We ran just about every model possible. We found that you can claw back some of the racial diversity that you used to have but not much."

Now that the Supreme Court has said they are no longer expressly allowed to do so, it is clear that higher learning institutions are going to have to find other ways to ensure diversity in their student populations if it is a priority to them, regardless of whether a greater emphasis on socioeconomic factors works or not. And the pressure to do away with legacy admissions — a kind of affirmative action for the often already wealthy children of alumni — is increasing at the same time. 

"It's important to recognize that legacies perpetuate discrimination once again because in the United States segregation was not overturned in schools until the '50s," said Kukoyi.

"Most Black people my age, their grandparents didn't go to college because they weren't able to, and so when you have a system that benefits people who are descended from parents, grandparents that went to these elite universities, but those same elite universities excluded students from marginalized backgrounds, you're essentially discriminating against students from those backgrounds.” 

Building a better system

Puri, himself a legacy beneficiary at Stanford — both his parents attended the university — said he also sees a case for universities to stop legacy admissions. 

"There's a very good chance that without that accident of birth, which is no more meaningful a characteristic of my character or my work ethic or my intelligence than my race, I was benefited," said Puri. "If racial preferences are kind of unjust, then I would say the legacy preferences that I benefit from have to be unjust as well."

But more than compelling universities to change their admissions processes, the Supreme Court ruling is also going to trigger a much more difficult reckoning with what is arguably the root cause —  why so many struggle to access high quality education in the first place. 

"We're back to basics now. We're going to have to build an education system that actually produces large numbers of minority students, most of whom begin by being economically disadvantaged," said Carnevale.

"We're going to have to build a system that produces real talent in those demographics in the United States. So it's neither a good thing or a bad thing in the end. It simply is disruptive. That is, it's going to force us to face more substantial solutions going forward."

In that respect, the end of affirmative action will have to mark the start of something else for those shaping education in America and the futures of American students. Whatever that may end up being will have to start much earlier in the educational lives of students and be all the more challenging. 

Edited by: Keith Walker

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