The Supreme Court Biffs It: Affirmative Action in Higher Education
But how much really changes now?
Note: this post was originally written in June 2023 on Open Water
Okay, so I do want to talk about today’s deeply flawed Supreme Court decision about affirmative action admissions policies and what this does and don’t mean for most students, but I must first make my usual disclaimer about my work here very front and center.
This piece represents my opinions and insights after 20+ years working in higher education, including in admissions, senior enrollment management positions, and doing state level policy work. That said, this DOES NOT represent the opinions/views/or policy directions for any past, current, or future employers.
When I woke up this morning, my Twitter feed was ablaze with reactions and commentary about the Supreme Court decision that ruled that current race based affirmative action admissions structures at the University of North Carolina and Harvard1 were unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Right Act. The reaction on Twitter had all the usual nuance of Twitter reactions: lots of people fired up about it (both in favor and in disappointment) and A LOT of missing nuance about how this will (or, spoiler alert, won’t) impact college admissions for both white students and students from historically excluded populations.
I thought it might be helpful to break down this decision in the larger context of how college admissions really works and what context seems to be largely mission from the discussion today.
The truth about college admissions2
One of the most important things to keep in mind when reading or discussing the affirmative action decision today is that the vast majority of colleges and universities don’t practice any kind of formal (or informal) affirmative action practices in admissions reviews. This is both because these practices have been banned in several states for years (including states like California which have some of the most selective public universities) and because, as we’ve talked about before, the vast majority of schools admit the vast majority of their applicants. Quite simply, when schools say “yes” more than they say no, they don’t generally have an affirmative action weighting system in their applicant review process. If they do have a policy on paper, it may not meaningfully change any admissions outcomes for students from historically advantaged populations (e.g. it may used to say “yes” to more students, but that doesn’t necessarily increase the number of students who get told “no”).
One quick soapbox moment: There are REALLY, REALLY good schools that say “yes” to more students than they say “no” to. Selectivity shouldn’t be the benchmark for deciding which schools are “good” and we should stop talking about the admissions process at the most selective schools (about 100-250 in the country) as the norm. These schools are the outliers but our cultural emphasis on them and their practices just makes everyone more anxious than they need to be about the college application and selection process.
What do they mean when they talk about “affirmative action”?
The kinds of policies up for discussion in this decision were essentially holistic review admissions policies that used self-identified race/ethnicity as a considered factor in considering the strength of an applicant. What this means is that in addition to grades, strength of coursework, quality of essay, letters of recommendation, test scores, and other criteria, some institutions might give a student’s application a little bit of additional weight if they came from a historically excluded population.
For the sake of this essay, let’s imagine four students: “Wendy” (white), “Hildie” (Hispanic), “Brian”(Black), and “Jared Kushner3 , um, Tushner” (we’ll get to him in a minute).
Hildie has a 4.0 GPA, eight AP classes, a 35 ACT score, and is an accomplished volleyball player.
Wendy has a 4.0 GPA, five AP classes, and a 31 ACT score.
Brian has a 3.9 GPA, four AP classes, and a 29 ACT score.
Jared has a 3.1 GPA, three AP classes, and a 24 ACT score. He is a legacy applicant.
In this scenario, Hildie, Wendy, and Brian are all highly qualified applicants who have statistically the exact same likelihood of succeeding at the college where they have applied. Hildie gets admitted via early decision. Jared gets admitted early decision. Wendy and Brian are deferred to the general applicant pool. An admissions committee might say, if there was one hypothetical space left, “which student will bring something different to our campus? Do we already have a lot of students who look like Wendy on paper? Do we have many that look like Brian?”
The premise for these discussions is the idea that there is a value for ALL students at a higher education institution when there is a diverse student body. Students learn inside and outside the classroom and having the chance to learn from and alongside people who had different life experiences than they did. This was the basis of the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in the Grutter v. Bollinger case, where the Court affirmed that, yes, there is an inherent value in having a diverse campus.
Now, what’s important to note in the overly simplified example of Wendy vs. Brian is a few things:
Brian was already a well-qualified applicant. There is this myth that affirmative action policies would be how “C” students got into the Ivies. This has never been the case because the highly selective institutions had a vested interest in admitting students with the highest GPAs and test scores possible as it helps their rankings.
Wendy didn’t actually “lose” her spot to Brian. She was simply one of the many, many well qualified applicants that didn’t get in that year. She actually “lost” her spot to the other “Wendys” in the pool who were as or slightly more competitive than her.
Wendy didn’t “lose” her spot to Hildie and has no way of knowing if Hildie was admitted because of affirmative action or not (and in this scenario, she wouldn’t have been).
It’s also important to note that, in my opinion, no actual harm was done to Wendy. She’s still has PLENTY of access to higher education and in no way has she been blocked from pursing a degree, even if one (or multiple) school says “no”.
Fun fact: selective college admissions has never been “fair”
Proponents of ending affirmative action policies have loudly (and wrongly) banged on the fairness drum. Affirmative action isn’t faiirrrrr, they whined. It’s reverse racism. It’s hurting poor little whiny babies like Wendy who “deserve” a spot that they “earned”.
With all due respect: this is bullshit.
Selective college admissions has ALWAYS been unfair. Sometimes this was in actual policy, like when Ivy League institutions didn’t admit women4, or didn’t admit Black students, or had quotas in place to limit the percentage of Jewish students enrolled. Sometimes this was through the very, very common practice of giving preference to some kinds of students (largely white students) with significant social and economic privilege: the children of alumni or employees, the children of large donors, applicants with significant athletic or performing arts talents, etc.
When it comes to getting admitted a “Jared Tushner” type with a some B and C grades and a rich daddy has ALWAYS had better odds for getting admitted than “Brian” does.
The social and economic advantages also show up in the measures of what makes someone a competitive applicant. Simply put: kids who go to better funded schools with more robust college prep curriculum fare better in the selective college admissions process. Kids who come from the wealthiest zip codes have, on average, the best test scores. Kids who go to elite (and expensive) private high schools in the northeast go to the Ivies in high percentages than kids who go to public schools in the midwest. When over 90% of applicants get told “no”, there will ALWAYS be “deserving” students who get left out.
The Supreme Court decision does not a single damn thing to reduce the “unfairness” of all of those factors.
What does this decision mean for most students?
For the vast, vast majority of prospective college students, today’s Supreme Court decision won’t have an impact on how they experience college admissions, simply because most students don’t go to highly selective institutions. By most estimates, less than 15% of public universities had affirmative action policies and many of those were still admitting the majority of their applicants anyways. The majority of private institutions are also not that selective, although it is less clear how many had affirmative action policies in place that meaningfully changed the outcome of their admissions process.
While some schools that practiced affirmative action did see their campus diversity numbers improve, the actual number of students who, in a given year, actually “got in” as a result of affirmative action policies is difficult to measure but is almost certainly vanishingly small — like single digits percentage wise of all the students enrolled in a higher ed in a given year.
That being said, the decision still matters. Colleges and universities have a lot of work to do to make up for literal centuries of excluding some populations of students and affirmative action was one of the most public facing ways that recognized that, yes, diversity is good and necessary. Even if most students from historically excluded populations didn’t directly benefit from these policies, I think you can make an argument that knowing, on some level, that they existed was a way to signal that colleges want a diverse student body. The existence of affirmative action policies in general and the public awareness that they existed may have been a signal to some students that college was for them and was a possibility.
It’s also a bad decision because, as I pointed out above, it doesn’t do anything to make access to the most selective institutions more fair for non-wealthy students5. It doesn’t actually address that family income is still one of the best predictors we have for where a student will enroll in college. It refutes the idea that diversity (in all its forms) is actually an educational good, which is simply incorrect (and there is tons of research to prove it).
One final note
As flawed as I think the Supreme Court decision is, we should also take a moment to recognize that highly selective colleges and universities also bear responsibility for creating systems where affirmative action policies were needed in the first place. If they really value fairness and diversity, they still have options to change their own current admissions practices to control for the economic and social advantages wealthy students have. Higher education, as a whole, still needs to better recruit, enroll, and serve students from historically excluded populations, even if affirmative action is off the table. It’s the right and the smart thing to do for ALL students.
Please feel free to share this post if you found it helpful or hit me up in the comments with questions if you have them!
Because of the two schools covered, this means the decision will be applied to both public and private colleges and universities. It does not, however, apply to military academies and you should definitely take a minute to think about why that might be the case.
Remember: The majority of the almost 20 million students who attend colleges or universities in the United States are attending schools that admit 75% or more of their applicants. There are at least 1,500 high quality, accredited institutions that admit 99% or more of their applicants.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-kushners-curious-acceptance-into-harvard
Women didn’t start making up a meaningful percentage of Ivy League students until the 1970s.
And, of course, there is a whole correlation of wealth and race at play here too. Most wealthy students are white.