As a high schooler applying to college, I watched in horror as Operation Varsity Blues, the biggest admissions scheme ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, brought the downfall of Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. The investigation shed light on wealth and other factors that students themselves have no control over, but a much more devastating system pervades college admissions: affirmative action.
The basis of affirmative action, seeking to give historically discriminated-against students an equal opportunity in college admissions, had noble intentions. A movement born from the civil rights era and the time of Martin Luther King Jr., affirmative action was critical in allowing minorities to attend exceptional universities.
The legal foundation of affirmative action, however, has been questioned. Currently, the legality of affirmative action is based in the Supreme Court’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision of 1978. The ruling recognizes race as a factor in college admissions but, according to Margaret Kramer of the New York Times, establishes “a standard of judicial review known as strict scrutiny” in which “race could be a narrowly tailored factor in admissions policies.”
However, the Bakke ruling maintaining that race could be a non-deciding factor in admissions is over 40 years old. Today’s top-tier universities are far from compliant with this legal standard.
Using the excuse that admissions are becoming increasingly competitive, colleges use race in a critical stage of the admissions process called shaping. Shaping, according to Jeffrey Selingo’s “The Secrets of Elite College Admissions” in the Wall Street Journal, is “the last sorting of applicants before final decisions are sent out.” It is “where selective admissions is the most unfair — the point at which a decision based on traditional criteria such as grades and test scores gives way” to factors such as money and race.
The inequalities perpetuated by the admissions committees of top universities are not limited to money. While Operation Varsity Blues revealed the financial component of inequality, the racism of affirmative action continues to remain unaddressed. Asian Americans with higher grades, GPAs, and test scores, objectively more qualified to attend America’s elite universities, are denied admission in the name of diversity. Affirmative action advocates fail to realize that true diversity and racial equality are inherently impossible with the systemic discrimination inherent in such policies.
This discriminatory shaping process at America’s top universities is blatantly illegal and flies in the face of the decades of progress the nation has made regarding civil rights. These universities ought to be criminally liable for, as Charles Krauthammer so shrewdly put it, “parsing exactly how many spoonfuls of racial discrimination are permitted in exactly which circumstance.”
Proponents of affirmative action will cite the problem of a wholly merit-based approach to admissions: the lack of an even playing field and the absence of equal opportunity centered on income inequality. After all, richer Americans can pay for extracurricular activities and test prep services that put them at an inherent advantage in a meritocracy.
I agree that this is a major problem, which is why I support need-based aid programs that account for that lack of financial opportunity. The fundamental flaw of affirmative action is that this racialization of college admissions doesn’t measure financial disparities using finances; they are measured by race. Under affirmative action, a black student from the projects gets an immeasurable advantage over an impoverished white student from West Virginia’s coal country. Both of these students deserve a quality education, but affirmative action’s advocates would disagree.
As America continues to reckon with race relations, it is critical that we purge active discrimination from our nation’s institutions. Martin Luther King Jr., after all, had a dream that people would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. So do I.
Connor Deir is a rising freshman at Wake Forest University.
