- The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that affirmative action in college admissions was unconstitutional.
- The practice allows universities to consider race among other factors in the admissions process.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the practice of considering race in the college admissions process was unconstitutional, effectively ending the practice of affirmative action.
Thursday's decision is over two cases brought by the group Students for Fair Admissions, a group overseen by the right-wing legal strategist Robert Blum, who has for decades brought lawsuits seeking to end affirmative action.
Earlier Supreme Court cases have upheld affirmative action — the practice of giving additional weight to applicants who belong to groups that have historically been the subject of discrimination — for four decades. Some decisions have refined the practice, such as forbidding the use of racial quotas in admissions.
Ever since former President Donald Trump cemented a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, legal experts have expected the Supreme Court to do away with affirmative action altogether.
Students for Fair Admissions brought two lawsuits that ended up before the Supreme Court last fall, against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, alleging they discriminated against white and Asian-American students. Lower courts rejected the challenges.
The Supreme Court's six conservative justices agreed on the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. He said that for too long universities have "concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice."
According to Roberts, the methodologies employed by the schools to achieve racial diversity among the student body amounted to racial stereotyping, were too vague, and were ultimately simply unworkable.
"Some of them are plainly overbroad: by grouping together all Asian students, for instance, respondents are apparently uninterested in whether South Asian or East Asian students are adequately represented, so long as there is enough of one to compensate for a lack of the other," Roberts wrote. "Meanwhile other racial categories, such as 'Hispanic,' are arbitrary or undefined."
The court's three liberal justices opposed the decision, with the exception of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who recused herself from the Harvard University case because she served on one of the school's boards.
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayer accused the majority of ignoring the reality that race does matter in society, and schools ought to take account of that.
"Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits," she wrote. "In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter."
A group of Harvard University administrators said in a statement that the school would "continue to be a vibrant community whose members come from all walks of life, all over the world." Kevin M. Guskiewicz, the chancellor of the University of North Carolina, said the state's schools would continue to prioritize diversity while complying with the Supreme Court decision.
"Carolina remains firmly committed to bringing together talented students with different perspectives and life experiences and continues to make an affordable, high-quality education accessible to the people of North Carolina and beyond," he said in a statement. "While not the outcome we hoped for, we will carefully review the Supreme Court's decision and take any steps necessary to comply with the law."
States that ended affirmative action saw drops in minority enrollment
Blum's group, Students for Fair Admission, contends that colleges and universities can use other, race-neutral ways to assemble a diverse student body, including by focusing on socioeconomic status and eliminating the preference for children of alumni and major donors.
The schools said that they use race in a limited way, but that eliminating it as a factor altogether would make it much harder to achieve a student body that looks like America.
At the eight Ivy League universities, the number of nonwhite students increased by 55% from 2010 to 2021, according to federal data. That group, which includes, Native American, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and biracial students, accounted for 35% of students on those campuses in 2021, up from 27% in 2010.
The end of affirmative action in higher education in California, Michigan, Washington state and elsewhere led to a steep drop in minority enrollment in the states' leading public universities.
They are among nine states that already prohibit any consideration of race in admissions to their public colleges and universities. The others are: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.
In 2020, California voters easily rejected a ballot measure to bring back affirmative action.
A poll last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed 63% of U.S. adults say the court should allow colleges to consider race as part of the admissions process, yet few believe students' race should ultimately play a major role in decisions. A Pew Research Center survey released last week found that half of Americans disapprove of considerations of applicants' race, while a third approve.
The chief justice and Jackson received their undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. Two other justices, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, went to law school there, and Kagan was the first woman to serve as the law school's dean.
Every US college and university the justices attended, save one, urged the court to preserve race-conscious admissions.
Those schools — Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame, and Holy Cross — joined briefs in defense of Harvard's and UNC's admissions plans.
Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett's undergraduate alma mater, Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee, was not involved in the cases.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.