Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action

[Parasaurolophus]

Legacy admissions may be next:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/03/harvard-university-legacy-admissions-civil-rights-complaint/

Non-paywalled version: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4079319-harvard-faces-civil-rights-complaint-over-its-legacy-admissions/

Well, that's nice, at least. I didn't expect that challenge to come so quickly!

I dunno that racial discrimination is a framework that the courts are likely to accept, however, since in legacy admissions it's indirect despite the strong correlation.

[Langue_doc]

NYT article https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/us/harvard-alumni-children-affirmative-action.html

Harvard's Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni
After the Supreme Court banned race-conscious affirmative action, activists filed a complaint, saying legacy admissions helped students who are overwhelmingly rich and white.

It's been called affirmative action for the rich: Harvard's special admissions treatment for students whose parents are alumni, or whose relatives donated money. And in a complaint filed on Monday, a legal activist group demanded that the federal government put an end to it, arguing that fairness was even more imperative after the Supreme Court last week severely limited race-conscious admissions.

Three Boston-area groups requested that the Education Department review the practice, saying the college's admissions policies discriminated against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants, in favor of less qualified white candidates with alumni and donor connections.

"Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?" asked Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is handling the case. "Your family's last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process."

The complaint from liberal groups comes days after a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, won its Supreme Court case. And it adds to accelerating pressure on Harvard and other selective colleges to eliminate special preferences for the children of alumni and donors.

The Office for Civil Rights of the Education Department, which would review the complaint, may already be gearing up to investigate. In a statement after the Supreme Court decision, President Biden said he would ask the department to examine "practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity."

A spokeswoman for Harvard, Nicole Rura, said the school would have no comment on the complaint, but reiterated a statement from last week: "As we said, in the weeks and months ahead, the university will determine how to preserve our essential values, consistent with the court's new precedent."

Colleges argue that the practice helps build community and encourages donations, which can be used for financial aid.

A poll released last year by the Pew Research Center found that an increasing share of the public — 75 percent — believed that legacy preferences should not be a factor in who was admitted to college.

And the call for eliminating legacy and donor preferences has grown recently across the political spectrum.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, tweeted that if the Supreme Court "was serious about their ludicrous 'colorblindness' claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged."

On "The Faulkner Focus," a Fox News program, Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina and a presidential candidate, said, "One of the things that Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs where they have preferential treatment for legacy kids."

Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke University economist who has analyzed Harvard data, found that a typical white legacy applicant's chances of being admitted increase fivefold over a typical, white non-legacy applicant.

Even so, eliminating legacy preferences at Harvard, the study said, would not offset the loss in diversity if race-conscious admissions were also eliminated.

In its decision on race-conscious admissions, some Supreme Court justices criticized legacy admissions. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in an opinion concurring with the court's majority, took aim at preferences for the children of donors and alumni, saying: "They are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents' good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives. While race-neutral on their face, too, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most."

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor referred to legacy admissions, arguing that continuing race-based preferences was only fair in light of the fact that most of the pieces in the admissions puzzle "disfavor underrepresented racial minorities."

While Colorado adopted a law in 2021 banning legacy admissions in public universities, legislation in Congress and several other states has gained little traction.

A New York bill filed last year was opposed by the state's private school association, the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, which includes highly selective colleges such as Columbia, Cornell and Colgate.

In Connecticut, where lawmakers held a hearing on the issue last year, Yale was among the private schools that came out in opposition. In written testimony, Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions, called the proposed ban a government intrusion into university affairs.

Selective private universities, in particular, have been slow to eliminate legacies, with M.I.T., Johns Hopkins University and Amherst College among a few elite schools that do not use them.

In a news release last month describing its fall class, the first since the college eliminated legacy preferences, Amherst announced that the number of first-generation students in the school's fall class would be higher than ever — 19 percent — while the number of students who were legacies had declined to 6 percent. Previously, legacies had made up 11 percent of the class.

The complaint to the Education Department was filed by three groups — Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England and Greater Boston Latino Network.

Stephanie Saul is a national education reporter based in New York.

[Wahoo Redux]

NYT: On Race and Academia

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I'd like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I've never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I've seen to the Supreme Court's decision move me to venture it.

[kaysixteen]

Methinks McWhorter is far from alone amongst highly successful Black professionals who both 1) recognize that they did get unfair legs-up via AA, and 2) do not like this.

[Langue_doc]

NYT: On Race and Academia

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I'd like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I've never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I've seen to the Supreme Court's decision move me to venture it.

McWhorter's concluding paragraphs:

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia's racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court's ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of "Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever" and, most recently, "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America."

[Stockmann]

Of course legacy admissions are an obvious target - is there any other democracy on the planet that allows that for HE institutions that receive even indirect (federal student loans) public subsidies? To me it seems a blatantly aristocratic practice, the sort of thing that is such a crass hereditary privilege that it could only fly in a republic.

I find McWhorter's point about the foreign student not adding much to diversity bizarre - it seems to me blindingly obvious that an average American WASP and an average African American  are more culturally alike than either is like, say, a black Senegalese or, for that matter, a white Estonian. Diversity, cultural at least, would be more favored by admitting the Senegalese or, for that matter, the Estonian over basically anyone raised in the US and whose family has been American for generations.

[jimbogumbo]

Tom the Dancing Bug has a take: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/tom-the-dancing-bug/

[Wahoo Redux]

Tom the Dancing Bug has a take: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/tom-the-dancing-bug/

Damn.  That's pretty good...

[fizzycist]

I'm puzzled by the Court's willingness to mettle with university decisions and unclear on where the line should be drawn.

It seems widely accepted that universities can discriminate based on nationality and state residence.

And clearly they are allowed to discriminate based on perceived ability in a number of areas including not-obviously-academic ones like sports.

And they de facto can discriminate based on class/wealth by charging high tuition, room/board schemes, etc.

Also de facto discriminate against nutjobs by requiring vaccines. (Among a million other things like this).

So when does SCOTUS decide to jump in and when not? Seems like Affirmative Action was a dumb place to put their foot down (unlikely to move the needle much on admissions culture). Now they will have to consider all sorts of other areas where US majority would prefer if private actors were just left alone.

Finally. the oft-repeated notion that universities are special because students get federal loans is spectacularly dumb to me. Is every small business who got a COVID freebie also now subject to special regulation status by SCOTUS? What about every non-profit and religious org with tax breaks? I am not opposed to SCOTUS regulating discrimination with private actors, just find it annoying that ppl think universities should be held to a higher standard than everyone else.

[waterboy]

While talking with a relative the other day, it was explained to me that the federal government must have a certain percentage of federal contracts given to minority owned businesses. Perhaps someone can explain to me how that can survive given the recent Supremes ruling on affirmative action? I don't object to the policy, but I now don't see how it passes the smell test.

[downer]

The short answer is that the SCOTUS decisions are about higher ed and so don't apply to fed contracts.

How can states and federal government have quotas on contractiving for diversity when it is diversity quotas are now unconstitutional for higher ed? That is a good question. I suspect the answer is quite technical.

[waterboy]

I'll bet the lawsuits will be coming soon.

[spork]

While talking with a relative the other day, it was explained to me that the federal government must have a certain percentage of federal contracts given to minority owned businesses. Perhaps someone can explain to me how that can survive given the recent Supremes ruling on affirmative action? I don't object to the policy, but I now don't see how it passes the smell test.

Because affirmative action is and always has been a regulatory policy applicable to federal employment and federal contracting. It does not apply to private sector processes like university admissions.  Describing Harvard's admission scheme as an example of affirmative action is incorrect.

Note that affirmative action guidelines explicitly prohibit quotas:

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs.

[lightning]

Legacy admissions may be next:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/03/harvard-university-legacy-admissions-civil-rights-complaint/

Non-paywalled version: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4079319-harvard-faces-civil-rights-complaint-over-its-legacy-admissions/

Well, that's nice, at least. I didn't expect that challenge to come so quickly!

I dunno that racial discrimination is a framework that the courts are likely to accept, however, since in legacy admissions it's indirect despite the strong correlation.

And, now there are opinion pieces about eliminating the de facto admission quotas for the mostly white athletes who will play college squash, ski, lacrosse, field Hockey, etc.

great idea

[ciao_yall]

Legacy admissions may be next:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/03/harvard-university-legacy-admissions-civil-rights-complaint/

Non-paywalled version: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4079319-harvard-faces-civil-rights-complaint-over-its-legacy-admissions/

Well, that's nice, at least. I didn't expect that challenge to come so quickly!

I dunno that racial discrimination is a framework that the courts are likely to accept, however, since in legacy admissions it's indirect despite the strong correlation.

And, now there are opinion pieces about eliminating the de facto admission quotas for the mostly white athletes who will play college squash, ski, lacrosse, field Hockey, etc.

great idea

A few friends of mine have sent sent their kids to college on a full sailing scholarships.

Make of that what you will.