The U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned affirmative action, prohibiting public education institutions from considering race as a factor in their admission processes. This decision will have broad implications for the future of public education in the United States. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted, it “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
The goal of affirmative action, when it was originally passed, was to increase the proportion of racialized students, who have historically been excluded from higher education in America. Over the past few decades, affirmative action has been used as an important element of holistic admission policies that consider the applicant as a whole human being, rather than relying solely on their academic testing scores.
