Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action

[Wahoo Redux]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/live-blog/supreme-court-decisions-live-updates-rcna91671

[Langue_doc]

NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/29/us/affirmative-action-supreme-court

Affirmative Action's Legacy
How Admissions Could Change
Other Key Rulings

June 29, 2023, 11:43 a.m.

Affirmative Action
Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.
In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.


June 29, 2023, 11:37 a.m.
Adam Liptak

The decision is likely to reshape college admissions at elite schools. Here's what to know.
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs "unavoidably employ race in a negative manner" and "involve racial stereotyping," in a manner that violates the Constitution.

Universities can consider how race has affected an applicant's life, but he emphasized that students "must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was "further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society."

"The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated," she said in her scorching dissent.

The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.

Here's what to know:

The opinions in the case — including concurring opinions from Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh and another dissenting opinion from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — total 237 pages. (Justice Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case because she had been on the university's board of overseers.) Read the opinions here.

President Biden will deliver remarks on the Supreme Court's decision at 12:30 p.m., just before traveling to New York City for an interview with MSNBC and two campaign fund-raisers. The Times plans to carry live video of his statement.

The two cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal activist who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court. The decision, he said, is "an outcome that the vast majority of all races and ethnicities will celebrate."

In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs said that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The case against Harvard has an additional element, accusing the university of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness, and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions. The universities both won in federal trial courts, and the decision in Harvard's favor was affirmed by a federal appeals court.

Nine states already ban the use of race-conscious college admissions at their public universities, and their experience could provide a sign of the ruling's consequences.

In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld an admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin, holding that officials there could continue to consider race as a factor in ensuring a diverse student body. Read about that case here.

[marshwiggle]

NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/29/us/affirmative-action-supreme-court

The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.

One effect it should have is to make the quality of students or graduates of institutions be uncorrelated with their ethnicity. If uniform standards are applied to everyone, then there shouldn't be clustering of groups in grade distributions. That will make it easier for employers to hire graduates, since they also won't have to use different standards for different groups.

[Parasaurolophus]

NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/29/us/affirmative-action-supreme-court

The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.

One effect it should have is to make the quality of students or graduates of institutions be uncorrelated with their ethnicity. If uniform standards are applied to everyone, then there shouldn't be clustering of groups in grade distributions. That will make it easier for employers to hire graduates, since they also won't have to use different standards for different groups.

Are your grade distributions not normal or approaching normal?

[Anselm]

Does this affect the previous ruling in Fisher vs. University of Texas.  That ruling said that race can be considered to enhance and preserve diversity which to me seems a different motive than affirmative action.  Originally AA was targeted at businesses which were showing blatant discrimination in hiring.  Then they had to take "affirmative action" and hire minorities to fix that problem.  AA has since evolved into something more comprehensive.

[marshwiggle]

NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/29/us/affirmative-action-supreme-court

The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.

One effect it should have is to make the quality of students or graduates of institutions be uncorrelated with their ethnicity. If uniform standards are applied to everyone, then there shouldn't be clustering of groups in grade distributions. That will make it easier for employers to hire graduates, since they also won't have to use different standards for different groups.

Are your grade distributions not normal or approaching normal?

The overall grade distribution doesn't necessarily show whether some factor is correlated with grades. For instance, if 10% of the class had red hair, but all of them would up in the bottom 20% of the class, the distribution could be normal. However, whether it was normal or not, the bigger the class the more unlikely that result is to be strictly coincidence. (In a class of 10, it would be no surprise. In a class of 1000, it would be downright glaring.)

[dismalist]

Does this affect the previous ruling in Fisher vs. University of Texas.  That ruling said that race can be considered to enhance and preserve diversity which to me seems a different motive than affirmative action.  Originally AA was targeted at businesses which were showing blatant discrimination in hiring.  Then they had to take "affirmative action" and hire minorities to fix that problem.  AA has since evolved into something more comprehensive.

The thread title and many newspaper headlines are incorrect. It's not about affirmative action but about the diversity justification, any justification really, for considering race  in higher education admissions. That has been held unconstitutional. That means Fisher is no longer valid.

Individuals may still write something about their coping with racial discrimination in their application essays, and admissions decisions based on these personal circumstances may be made. This does not justify using such to get around the decision, it is stated, however. The dissent apparently believes the opposite.

In my opinion, the beat goes on.

[Puget]

Useful analysis by an admissions officer who is also a lawyer, suggesting that the ruling is actually much narrower than it could have been, because it allows for considering how race impacts the individual applicant, which will reduce its impact (though it will increase the burden on URM students to articulate those impacts, so still not great!).

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1674437450851049472?s=20

[Sun_Worshiper]

Useful analysis by an admissions officer who is also a lawyer, suggesting that the ruling is actually much narrower than it could have been, because it allows for considering how race impacts the individual applicant, which will reduce its impact (though it will increase the burden on URM students to articulate those impacts, so still not great!).

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1674437450851049472?s=20

I heard on the radio that it also allows military academies to continue using affirmative action.

[Hibush]

The president of my institution sent a note around saying that serving a diverse student body, drawn from throughout society, has been a fundamental purpouse of the instution since its founding and that has not changed. I like that take.

[waterboy]

Here's a naive question...having never worked the admissions side of things, how is/was affirmative action actually operationalized?

[Puget]

Here's a naive question...having never worked the admissions side of things, how is/was affirmative action actually operationalized?

That varies widely between institutions, but under the old SC ruling (from 2004?) race/ethnicity could only be considered as one factor among many when using wholistic evaluation to build a diverse class. Claims that universities have quotas are false, and back in the day when they *did* have quotas it was to *favor* white Christinas by limiting the number of racial and religious minorities they admitted to a token amount.

[sinenomine]

The president of my institution sent a note around saying that serving a diverse student body, drawn from throughout society, has been a fundamental purpouse of the instution since its founding and that has not changed. I like that take.

My institution's president did the same.

[onthefringe]

Claims that universities have quotas are false, and back in the day when they *did* have quotas it was to *favor* white Christinas by limiting the number of racial and religious minorities they admitted to a token amount.

I know it's a typo, but that would be a delightfully specific affirmative action quota!

Here's a naive question...having never worked the admissions side of things, how is/was affirmative action actually operationalized?

Where I am (semi-selective state flagship with a 55ish% acceptance rate) it's done in the context of a holistic review:

People are viewed based on a GPA/rigor of schedule/test score scale that takes into account the record of their high school as a whole
Offers are made to some subgroups using models that reflect the yield rate for students in that subgroup and our targets (ie, out of state students yield at a lower rate, so if we want a certain % of the final class to be out of state students, we make offers that the model says will yield our desired result — and I think some of the models take race into account)
For edge cases, when we have a giant sea of "acceptable" students and we can only accept a fraction of them, race and  ethnicity is one of the things that can tip the balance (along with things like being from a county in the state that is underrepresented or a state in the country that is underrepresented, since we would like to have students from every county in the state and every state in the US if we could)

[Langue_doc]

The very liberal Daily News: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-edit-racial-preferences-college-supreme-court-20230629-knpmxmhikrbh7mxabrrkim46ny-story.html

An affirmative reaction: After Supreme Court ban on racial admission preferences, colleges should focus on family income levels and end the legacy boost for connected kids
By Daily News Editorial Board

New York Daily News
•
Jun 29, 2023 at 12:00 pm

The Supreme Court has spoken, invalidating racial preferences in college admissions as was widely anticipated. The six-justice conservative majority deemed the boost that universities give some applicants purely on the basis of their ethnicity or skin color incompatible with the U.S. Constitution's promise of equal protection under the laws.

There is plenty we disagree with in the reasoning as articulated by Chief Justice John Roberts. He — and a concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, tapped for the court by George H.W. Bush in part, let's be honest, because he is Black — gives too-short shrift to the educational benefits of diversity. Colleges seeking to give their students a well-rounded education and mint future leaders have very good reason to go out of their way to admit all types of people from different walks of life and backgrounds, including different racial backgrounds.

We cannot, however, dispute that racial preferences that disadvantage Asian-Americans are in tension with, if not at odds with, the same principles that seek to guarantee equal opportunity for all, including Black and Latino Americans. They could never last forever, so the imperative is for colleges to find a better way to uphold high academic standards and comprise diverse academic classes.

The first thing to do: give applicants a boost based on their income-level or whether they'd be the first in their family to attend college. As liberal Richard Kahlenberg has written in these pages, class-based preferences can just as successfully produce varied student bodies that honor the American promise. Colleges public and private should follow that advice.

Simultaneously, the schools should do away with the widespread practice that is the single worst offense against the American promise of fairness: legacy admissions, whereby the sons and daughters of alumni get easier entry based solely on the fact that their parents happened to attend. That practice privileges the privileged, and it should end.

Progressives furious at the court should redirect their energy to sculpting productive class-based admissions programs — and helping extinguish legacy admissions once and for all.