In cases against Harvard and UNC, Supreme Court Justices ruled the use of race in college admissions ... [+]
After decades of legal opposition, affirmative action in college admissions is dead. The U.S. Supreme Court Justices ruled race-conscious admissions unconstitutional on Thursday in the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. While this policy change will affect every college and university in the country, it will be most devastating to our nation’s highly-selective public and private higher education institutions.
In the Grutter v. Bollinger case involving law school admissions at the University of Michigan, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” That case was decided in June 2003. The current Court actualized O’Connor’s prediction five years early. Whether now or in 2028, the discontinuation of race-consciousness in college and graduate school admissions has long felt inevitable.
It’s been 45 years since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Supreme Court case upheld the consideration of race as a factor in the applicant evaluation process. In 1996, California voters struck down race-conscious admissions via Proposition 209. Since that time, Affirmative Action bans have been enacted in nine other states: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.
Twenty-four years after a predecessor banned Affirmative Action in his state, Governor Jay Inslee (D-WA) rescinded Directive 98-01, which prevented government agencies and public institutions from considering race or sex when making hiring decisions. The Texas ban was also overturned.
Justice O’Connor’s prediction has become national law. Based on trends and outcomes across the 10 states that previously passed Affirmative Action bans, here are some predictions of what will occur in response to today’s Supreme Court ruling:
Black Student Enrollments Will Decline At Many Predominantly White Institutions
While the discontinuation of race-conscious admissions policies and practices will negatively affect students of color across a range of racial and ethnic groups at predominantly white institutions (PWIs), Black applicants will be most devastated. This has long been the consequence of Prop 209 on the University of California, the state’s most highly-selective public higher education system. Exactly one decade after California voters struck down Affirmative Action, UCLA had only 96 Black students in its incoming class of 4,852 freshmen, the Los Angeles Times reported. A large share of them were athletes.
Enrollments Will Increase At Historically Black Colleges And Universities
Since the mid-1800s, HBCUs have continuously and reliably provided college access to incredibly bright Black Americans whom PWIs systematically deny. Washington Post analyses show that applications to and enrollments at HBCUs increased after the 2020 summer of racial reckoning, the protest movement in response to the murder of George Floyd.
Much of this was attributed to HBCUs offering Black students psychologically safer, culturally affirming educational alternatives to PWIs. As has always been the case, HBCUs will continue to recruit and admit talented Black students without discriminating against applicants from other racial groups.
Schools With Big-Time Sports Programs Will Miraculously Find Admissible Black Athletes
In a 2018 research report, I noted that Black men were 2.4% of undergraduates enrolled at universities across the five most profitable sports conferences, but comprised 55% of football teams and 56% of men’s basketball teams (the two sports that generate the most revenue.)
In our nation’s post-Affirmative Action era, Black student representation at most PWIs will decline everywhere except in revenue-generating sports. Coaches will continue traveling far and wide to find extraordinarily gifted Black student-athletes, including Black women who comprise significant shares of basketball and track teams.
Interpretive Overreach Will Lead To Decreases In Race-Focused Campus Initiatives
Even though the Supreme Court ruling makes unlawful the use of race as a factor in admissions, many employees at higher education institutions will convince themselves that it extends to just about everything else pertaining to race.
They will argue that establishing college readiness programs in Latino communities, or that funding predominantly Black student organizations, or that creating African American Studies Departments, or that constructing new culture centers for Indigenous or Asian American students all are constitutional violations. None of those activities are suddenly unlawful. The SCOTUS ruling will be misused as an excuse to abandon race-conscious activities that resisters never actually wanted.
Numbers Of Faculty And Administrators Of Color Will Decline
Inevitably, affirmative action in admissions will extend to affirmative action in employment practices at higher education institutions. Race won’t be considered as a factor when hiring a faculty member, even in academic departments that have no or too few professors of color. Cluster hires and other faculty diversification strategies will be outlawed.
Despite being underrepresented amongst full-time faculty and in leadership roles, I noted in my 2020 testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives (which was subsequently adapted for publication in this peer-reviewed academic journal) that employees of color comprise 46% of professionals in low-level service roles (e.g., groundskeepers, maintenance workers, food service staff, and custodians) on campuses. Their representation in the workforce at most PWIs won’t decline much, if at all.
People Of Color Will Be Further Marginalized At PWIs
It remains the case in 2023 that a student could be the only Black woman in an academic major (and therefore in every class she takes), or that a professional could be the only Latino person in the campus unit where she works. Underrepresentation results in marginalization for many students and employees of color at PWIs.
Decreases in the numbers of Asian American, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, multiracial and Pacific Islander persons on campuses will exacerbate feelings of isolation, erasure and unimportance. Encounters with microaggressions and overt demonstrations of racism will worsen these feelings. Consequently, more students of color will drop out of PWIs and turnover rates among employees of color will increase.
White Students Will Learn Too Little And Enter Professions Even Less Prepared
Meaningful engagement with persons from a diversity of racial groups typically leads to stereotype reduction and opportunities for the cultivation of healthy interracial relationships. A decline in the number of people of color on campuses will deny white students powerful opportunities to unlearn prejudices, biases and racist perspectives. They will carry this inexperience with them into workplaces after college. They won’t know how to lead racially and ethnically diverse teams. Many will unintentionally say and do racist things to co-workers of color because they interacted with so few people like them in prior residential and educational contexts.
Justice O’Connor’s predicted timing was off, but what she imagined would happen to race-conscious admissions in this decade was right. I actually want to be wrong about my predictions (well, except for #2, given that I’m an HBCU alumnus). Based on what we’ve seen in California and the nine other states that banned Affirmative Action in previous years, I’m sadly confident in each of my projections. My seven-point forecast doesn’t fully capture all the ways that today’s SCOTUS ruling will negatively impact our democracy, people of color, white Americans, higher education institutions, and workplaces. But it does offer a horrifying glimpse of what’s ahead.
