Affirmative Action
It’s application season! See how this recent Supreme Court case affects your application!
Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina are two significant SCOTUS cases that came to a close this past summer on June 29, 2023. In the two cases, the Supreme Court ruled to ban the use of affirmative action in private organizations.
What is affirmative action?
Affirmative action is a program with benevolent intentions in which private organizations/programs, like colleges/universities, give special consideration to applicants of historically oppressed identities, for example, women and people of color.
What happened?
Edward Blum and his organization, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), took both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina to court, challenging their use of affirmative action in their decision process. SFFA argued that affirmative action was not real diversity, but instead forced physical differences of students on campus. On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of SFFA, banning the use of affirmative action, claiming that the practice violated the Equal Protection Clause. Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court, stating that the use of affirmative action relied on “employ[ing] race in a negative manner, [and] involve[d] racial stereotyping.”
How does this affect future college admissions?
For years, certain states and certain schools had already banned the use of affirmative action in their application process, California, Washington, Florida, and Michigan, being just a few. By looking at how the end of affirmative action affected the schools in these states, we can have a good idea about how it will affect the rest of the country. There will be a substantial drop in students of color being enrolled in schools nationwide, as seen in California’s almost 40% drop in representation when the state ended its use of race-based applications. However, just as the UC system has employed various different ways to expand its application pool to reach a greater variety of students, the same can be expected in numerous other institutions. For example, schools could be expected to place a higher emphasis on recruitment from local high schools, community colleges, student-athletes, and those with military backgrounds. Race-based financial aid could potentially see an increase as a way to continue to ensure campus diversity.
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