The supreme court’s decision to strike down race-consciousness in college admissions will upend the academic landscape for millions of people. But students in nine states already live in a post-affirmative action world.
In 1996, Californians voted to ban race-conscious affirmative action policies in the state’s public universities. Since then, eight other states – Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington – have also barred race-based considerations, often through ballot initiatives approved by the states’ voters. Some universities in these states report that the bans have made it significantly harder to achieve racial diversity on their campuses.
