Supreme Court could eliminate affirmative action in university admissions as it considers high-profile challenges against Harvard and University of North Carolina
- Students for Fair Admissions wants the Supreme Court to eliminate race as a factor in university admissions.
- Affirmative-action supporters say such a move would decrease racial diversity on college campuses.
For more than four decades, American colleges and universities have sought to make their campuses more diverse by considering race in their admissions processes.
But the Supreme Court may soon deem those policies unconstitutional – a decision that affirmative-action supporters fear, and opponents have long hoped for.
"I represent so many communities in which affirmative action benefits us all the time," Agustín León-Sáenz, a first-generation immigrant from Ecuador and a sophomore at Harvard, told Insider. "Seeing the possibility of having it taken away would be so absolutely devastating."
León-Sáenz, along with dozens of affirmative-action proponents, plan to rally outside of the Supreme Court on Monday as the justices hear two high-profile challenges that call for eliminating the consideration of race in university admissions. They and other advocates of the policy argue that affirmative action is about leveling the playing field, granting historically underrepresented groups the opportunity to access a higher education.
"It was never about removing access or prioritizing one certain population group or one student group over any other in admissions," said León-Sáenz, who serves as a board member of Harvard Fuerza Latina, a cultural affinity organization on campus.
Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit led by conservative activist Edward Blum and the plaintiff in both cases, alleges the opposite: universities are unlawfully giving "racial preferences" to underrepresented minorities, including Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants, at the expense of other groups. Specifically, the organization claims that Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants by using race in its admissions, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discriminated against white and Asian applicants.
After both of the universities denied those claims and lower courts sided with them, SFFA turned to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to abolish race as a factor in admissions and to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, a nearly 20-year-old landmark decision that upheld affirmative action.
"We think that people should be treated as individuals – not on the basis of their membership in a racial group," Wen Fa, a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation who filed a legal brief supporting SFFA, told Insider, calling affirmative action efforts "wrong and pernicious."
The Supreme Court has over the years confronted the role of race in university admissions and repeatedly maintained the constitutionality of affirmative action. But the current 6-3 conservative majority could overturn that precedent.
SFFA claims that universities like Harvard and UNC have over-emphasized race in their admissions policies, violating Title VI the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits private institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, and the Constitution's equal protection clause.
Regardless of their race, students should be allowed to "work towards your dreams and not have the university admissions policy stand in your way just in an effort to achieve a racially balanced class," Fa said.
Racial diversity in colleges and universities could plummet
Experts warn that ending race-conscious admissions policies could have ripple effects for minority students across higher education and beyond, making them less likely to be enrolled in college and eventually enter the workforce. Studies have shown that without affirmative action programs in universities, racial diversity decreases as enrollment rates among students of color decline.
"Even though race does not play a significant factor" in admissions, David Hinojosa, an attorney at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told Insider, "The consequences of it are much more severe because it sends a signal to students of color, despite their high qualifications, that universities don't want them to apply."
Professors say that classroom discussions are more fruitful with a diverse student body, and that problems confronting "21st century America require diverse perspectives," Hinojosa, who will argue the case in favor of UNC's admissions policies on Monday, added.
Some experts say that while admissions processes might dramatically change if the court rules that race-conscious practices are illegal, they don't predict a doomsday scenario.
Colleges will just become more "deceitful and they'll just consider race in other ways without saying so explicitly," Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, told Insider.
But in practice, ending affirmative action policies at major universities has meant dramatic drops in the number of students of color accepted to those schools. Both the University of Michigan and the University of California, in legal briefs filed to the Supreme Court, say their push to create diverse classes without affirmative action policies – which were banned in both states more than 15 years ago – have largely failed. Just under 4% of the 2021 incoming class of first-year students at the University of Michigan were Black students, the school wrote in its brief. Similarly, about 3.7% of incoming students last year at UC Berkeley were Black.
For León-Sáenz, tossing out race-conscious admissions will make it harder for schools to achieve diversity. Though Harvard strives toward that goal, Hispanic students account for around 12% of the latest class admitted, though they make up roughly 19% of the national population.
"There is still a long way to go when it comes to equitable admissions," León-Sáenz said, "We're gonna continue fighting because it affects every member of our community."
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decisions in the pair of cases by June.