AUSTIN, Texas — A potential U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the use of race in college admissions could reverse recent strides among Texas universities in creating more diverse student bodies and could adversely affect the college experience for students of color, education policy experts said.
The court announced Monday that it had agreed to hear two cases challenging the use of race in college admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The court will consider the cases in its next term starting in October and issue a ruling in 2023.
While it’s impossible to predict the outcome of the cases, experts in affirmative action told the American-Statesman that if the court rules against the use of affirmative action, it could lead to reduced admission rates for Black and Latino students across the country and constrict the paths for students of color to enter the workforce.
“It would be devastating for institutions to have a negative ruling,” said Liliana Garces, a University of Texas associate professor of educational leadership and policy. “But I think that the facts really end up supporting the constitutionality of the policies. It would be quite a reversal to undo the precedent that has been in place that has guided these institutional policies.”
The Supreme Court previously has upheld affirmative action policies in multiple cases, including most recently in Fisher v. University of Texas in 2016. In the case, Edward Blum, founder of conservative nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions, lost his challenge to UT’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admission process.
But the group had already sued Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill over their policies. Lower court judges ruled in the universities' favor, but Blum appealed to the Supreme Court.
Mishell Kneeland, a former assistant attorney general in Texas who helped defend UT in the Fisher case, said a decision in the Supreme Court cases would have a wide impact nationwide, although it would affect UT less compared with other universities because fewer students are admitted through a holistic admissions process at UT.
“The decisions in the Harvard case and the UNC case will affect almost every private or selective university in the U.S.,” said Kneeland, a partner at Culhane Meadows law firm. “If what Harvard is doing with all of its vast resources isn't enough. I'm not sure that schools with smaller endowments and fewer resources will be able to do whatever the Supreme Court deems to be permissible.”
Under UT’s current admission policies, 75% of the freshman class is made up of Texas students who finished in the top 6% of their high school graduating class and were offered admission automatically. The rest of the student body are offered admission based on a holistic process that considers a variety of factors, including race and ethnicity.
UT reinstated affirmative action in fall 2005, citing its “responsibility to educate leadership for the future” and recruit “talented minority students,” after a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which upheld the use of affirmative action in the University of Michigan's law school admissions.
In the 15 years since then, UT has seen diversity among its student body steadily increase, with the percentage of Hispanic students growing from 14.1% to 23.4%, and the percentage of Black students rising from 3.7% to 5.2%, according to the UT statistical handbook.
Stella Flores, a UT associate professor of higher education and public policy, said affirmative action is one of the factors in education that has helped to slightly improve diversity at universities such as UT. She said removing the policy would contribute to a “web of inequality" across the nation, especially for students of color.
“Over time, we've had more students of color in colleges, but let's be real, the rate of Black students in colleges like UT hasn't risen dramatically. ... So what we're doing is barely keeping up,” Flores said. “The sad thing is we're fighting for barely keeping up. Colleges aren't doing enough to recruit, and the high schools aren’t doing enough to prepare their students.”
Since the 2016 ruling, Blum has continued to pursue challenges against affirmative action policies, and the Supreme Court has grown more conservative with three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump. Experts say they can't be sure, but they believe it’s unlikely the justices will rule in favor of Harvard and UNC.
Kneeland said the court could say that diversity in education isn't a good enough reason to consider race in the admissions process, which would “doom” almost all universities that use race, ethnicity, gender or other demographics in their admissions process.
“Almost every university that tries to ensure that it has a diverse student body, so that it can reap the benefits and education of diversity — which are pretty well proven, in my opinion — could also have to undertake even more activities to show that what they do is narrowly tailored and can survive strict scrutiny,” Kneeland said.
Without the consideration of race in college admissions, Flores said fewer Black and Latino students could get offered admission and receive college degrees from prestigious universities such as UT. The decision also could stifle pipelines to higher paying jobs and contribute to a lack of qualified workers and a decline of the Texas economy.
“UT cannot afford to go back to 1965, or even 1975,” Flores said. “The entire state economy is too reliant on the success of people of color, whether people want to admit it or not. And that means allowing our students to get the best degree, not only in the state, but also (one of the best) in the nation.”
Kneeland said that, along with a predicted decline in admission rates, students of color who are accepted into certain colleges might feel tokenized, especially if there are not a lot of other students on campus who look like them.
“A lack of affirmative action would be really detrimental to the educational experiences that students would be able to have — both for majority populations and particularly for minority groups in our society where they're already represented at such low numbers,” Garces said.
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