The Supreme Court has agreed to hear another case on affirmative action in higher education, and it’s sparked a discussion of the effects of the policy in schools.
Fisher v. University of Texas has already faced the Supreme Court, but the case was returned to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The core issue remains whether the University of Texas used race in an unconstitutional way, according to SCOTUSblog.
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“The reality is that the majority of the current Justices seems to hold a deep-seated skepticism about race as an influence — benign or not — on public policy making, so any time the Court takes up a question related to ‘affirmative action,’ the outcome has the potential to become consequential,” Lyle Denniston wrote.
Whether a far-reaching decision on affirmative action will come from the Court’s decision is unclear. A middle ground that preserves affirmative action as a legitimate policy for public universities, but doesn’t encourage it, might emerge. Justice Elena Kagan is recused due to her involvement as the U.S. Solicitor General when the case was in the lower courts, so avoiding a 4-4 split decision might be easier than finding a majority either way.
Eight states ban affirmative action policies from being used in college admissions, and comparing them with states that use affirmative action shows its effects. Affirmative action was meant as a temporary policy to further racial diversity on campus, FiveThirtyEight noted.
Relative to states that have banned affirmative action, colleges with affirmative action have succeeded in improving racial diversity.
“The most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau shows that white students are slightly underrepresented at a majority of public research universities, typically the campuses where affirmative action is under fire, and Asian students are overrepresented at a majority of these campuses. Black and Hispanic students are still vastly underrepresented at these colleges overall, and they fare even worse in states with bans on affirmative action,” Hayley Munguia wrote.
The policy hasn’t been ineffective, and racial diversity has improved in admissions. A potential defeat to affirmative action could erase some of the progress in terms of racial diversity on campus.
However, that racial diversity declines between admission and graduation. While university snapshots of diversity improve with affirmative action, minority students don’t always reap the end result of a degree.
“A survey of selective colleges by UCLA professor Richard Sander documented that students who get in based on race tend to earn lower grades and are less likely to graduate. At less demanding colleges, they’d have a better chance to succeed. They’re in over their heads. But not in California, which outlawed racial preferences in 1996. Minority students now are more apt to attend lower ranked public colleges but twice as likely to graduate,” the New York Post noted.
A tradeoff has emerged between racial diversity and minority achievement.
A similar argument was made by Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in an amicus brief filed in support of Fisher for the current case.
In the brief, Heriot argued that affirmative action policies encourage educational mismatching where students who receive preferential treatment are less likely to succeed as a result, and the policies have the effect of doing more harm than good for those they are meant to help.
Accepting students to a more challenging university they are unprepared for pushes them lower in class ranking, discourages them, makes them less likely to “follow through with an ambition,” and are less likely to graduate compared to similar students at less-challenging universities.
“Minority students are not public utilities. If they are worse off on account of race-preferential admissions, then race-preferential admissions are not narrowly tailored to achieve the goal of a better education for all through diversity,” Heriot wrote.
Fisher v. University of Texas isn’t likely to be the death knell of affirmative action policies. Affirmative action, however, presents an uncomfortable tradeoff in effect. Colleges seem to have greater diversity, but at the cost of non-Asian minority success. Instead of using admission rates as a proxy, graduation rate and post-graduate success could reveal more about the value and wisdom of race-based preferential treatment.
