SCOTUS Ruling on Affirmative Action & Admissions: Read It For Yourself

The US Supreme Court has ruled that admissions programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University that relied on racial criteria violates equal protection in a 6-3 ruling that could have wide-ranging consequences to university and college selection processes.

Read the Supreme Courts 6-3 decision on race-based admissions and affirmative action here:
affirmative action

Washington Post:

The votes split along ideological grounds, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the conservative members in the majority, and the liberals dissenting.

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Roberts said the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

But he added that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

While the ruling involved race-conscious programs at Harvard and UNC, the decision will affect virtually every college and university in the United States. In anticipation of the ruling, leaders of elite private and public institutions have said they fear a dramatic drop in Black and Hispanic students if they are forced to rely only on grades and test scores in making admissions decisions.

It was the second time in as many terms that the court’s dominant conservative majority has undermined decades-old, landmark rulings. Last year, the justices ended the guarantee of abortion rights that court found nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade. It was 45 years ago that the court first approved the limited use of affirmative action in college admissions decisions, citing the importance of filling U.S. campuses with students from varied backgrounds.

In dissent on Thursday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that it is is “a disturbing feature of today’s decision that the Court does not even attempt to make the extraordinary showing required” to reverse precedent.

Sotomayor has said her own life is an example of how affirmative action programs can work. In her 69-page dissent, she wrote: “Equal educational opportunity is a prerequisite to achieving racial equality in our Nation.”

“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits,” Sotomayor said. “In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

Sotomayor, the court’s lone Latina justice, spoke at length from the bench, a tactic justices use to mark their profound disagreement with a decision. She was joined in her dissent by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, although Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case because she served on a board at the university.

Roberts’s majority opinion did not specifically say the court was overturning its precedent in Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 opinion that said universities could consider race as a factor in admission decisions to build a diverse student body.