Affirmative action—the bogeyman of racial politics—has been outlawed by the Supreme Court on the basis that it “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause” in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. But equal protection assumes equal footing, equal status and equal opportunity. To paraphrase Justice Sotomayor, this decision requires the prerequisite of colorblindness in a society that is anything but.
We already know what the results of this decision will be—a significant decline in college enrollment of Black and Hispanic students.
In 1996, California voters approved a ban on affirmative action at public universities. Prior to the ban, UC Berkeley and UCLA, the two most competitive schools in the UC system, “were roughly representative of the California high school population eligible for enrollment at universities” according to Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton. As reported by NPR, Bleemer continued to follow enrollments over time and measured long-term impacts.
The year following the ban, enrollment among Black and Latino students fell by 40 percent.
Twenty-five years later, school officials still haven’t been able to meet their diversity and equity goals, despite having spent a half billion dollars on outreach and alternative admission standards. In fact, a study by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, found “that nothing substitutes for explicitly considering race or ethnicity in admissions…there was not a single case where alternatives to race-conscience admissions succeeded in preventing enrollment declines among those students.”
The action of the Supreme Court will have long term consequences—not just for Black and Hispanic students—but for society as a whole. Medical and law schools, and graduate schools in all disciplines, will have fewer diverse students to choose from; this will lead to severe shortages in areas already experiencing declines, such as STEM professions.
Instead of providing a level playing field, the Court’s decision changes the game completely. Fewer minorities in professional occupations provide fewer models for younger generations, and will have the unintended (or perhaps intended) consequence of “keeping them in their place.”
And it’s not like Black students are overrepresented; in fact, even with affirmative action, Black undergraduate enrollments at prestigious schools like Harvard are just 8 percent of overall enrollment, according to The National Center for Educational Statistics. None of the other “elite” schools in the study exceeded this amount, and at Brown, Columbia, and Cornell the percentage was even less.
This decision entrenches discrimination further by not addressing another practice that is inherently discriminatory—that of legacy and other admissions not based on academic merit.
Here are the results of a the most recently available study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2019: 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, and applicants whose parents or relatives had donated to Harvard. Compare that percentage to the 8 percent of Black undergraduate students at the same school. And here’s the kicker: the study also found that the majority of these white students would have been rejected had it not been for those special qualifiers. In fact, according to The Guardian, many U.S. colleges admit legacy or students with a family connection at “dramatically higher rates than other applicants,” with legacy and donor applicants six to seven times more likely to gain admission than other applicants.
Any guess as to the percentage of white legacy applicants? Records revealed, in a complaint submitted to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the wake of the SCOTUS ruling, that 70 percent of Harvard’s donor and legacy applicants are white. This admittance procedure is racially discriminatory in its results and clearly unfair by any standard.
For many Americans, affirmative action opened the door. Those who chose to walk through, gained advancement and benefits. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1983, he told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an agency he would later chair, “God only knows where I would be today if not for the legal principles of equal employment opportunity measures such as affirmation action …” and “these laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years.” As noted by the Yale School of Law, and reported by Newsweek, this university from which Thomas received his degree, had embarked on an aggressive affirmative action campaign at the time when Thomas applied.
Lucky him. Timing really is everything.
Marsha Shearer is a resident of The Villages and the author of “America in Crisis: Essays on the Failed Presidency of Donald J. Trump.”