The Supreme Court Addresses Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court announced last month that they would be hearing the case challenging affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. This case has the potential to overturn precedent after years of discussion on the topic and two Supreme Court cases. A ruling either way is sure to have considerable ramifications over college admissions around the country.

So what exactly is affirmative action?

In a broader view, affirmative action refers to policies and actions within an organization that aim to include certain groups - based on their race, socioeconomic status, and other differentiating factors - in areas where they are historically underrepresented, commonly in education and employment. But most people are familiar with affirmative action in regards to college decisions and how they are impacted by race.

Most people have probably heard about affirmative action being used by elite schools in an effort to create diversity and provide opportunities to populations who may not otherwise have them. Over time, there have been multiple different methods of affirmative action being used by institutions. Some of these include a quota system - where a certain amount of spots are set aside for minorities or people of a certain race - or a point system where applicants are allotted points based on different factors of their application, race being one of those factors.

The first affirmative action case that made its way to the Supreme Court was the 1978 case of UC Regents v Bakke. The plaintiff, Alan Bakke, sued UC Regents for denying him admission on the basis that they had to fill the spots allotted for minority applicants. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that using a quota system is unconstitutional but that schools could use affirmative action to accept more minority applicants in some circumstances. More recently, in 2003, the case of Gratz v. Bollinger involved the University of Michigan’s undergraduate school, who was sued by a white student who was rejected from the school. The Supreme Court upheld the Bakke precedent by ruling in favor of the plaintiff, deciding that race could be a factor in admissions, but not the deciding factor in admitting a student.

These decisions are quite vague and have left a lot of room for interpretation by individual schools. In the current case being heard by SCOTUS, an organization led by Edward Blum called the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) sued Harvard on the grounds that the university discriminates against Asian-Americans. SFFA cited that Harvard has controversially utilized a subjective “personal” score, measuring qualities such as “likability, courage, kindness and being ‘widely respected.’” According to Harvard, Asian Americans systematically score worse by these measures than any other racial group, weighing down their admittance rate despite having higher academic scores.

SFFA hopes to eventually achieve a race-blind admissions system in schools which could have varied impacts. Since affirmative action is an effort to provide opportunities to those who cannot access them solely by their own merit - as they have been historically discriminated against - decisions about it are likely to have an impact on many people and communities.

Advocates for affirmative action would argue that if admissions become entirely race-blind, this would lead to very low levels of diversity on campuses all around the country, as well as continue to repress those who don’t have access to higher education because of their racial background, ensuring they are never able to break the pattern. Opponents of race-based affirmative action argue that race blind admissions would lead to more objective and impartial application evaluations, admitting the students who deserve to attend that university because of their merit, not an uncontrollable factor such as race. While we wait for the Supreme Court to hear the Harvard case and release its decision, it is important to think about how this affects all young people, especially those applying to universities.