The Ups and Downs of Admissibility: How Black Students Should (Not) Be Introduced to Black Studies at a Public University
Let me be clear that I am not an opponent of affirmative action. I think that if affirmative action wasn’t in play, I wouldn’t have gotten into Haverford College as an undergrad, and I think that the doctorate program I am holding at New York University would also probably not have happened. Affirmative action works, that it is necessary to correct historical evils of chattel slavery, and that it is a crucial counterbalance against the system of white affirmative action that rewards many academically mediocre students for having good grades.
Some states, including California, Michigan, and Florida, have banned race-conscious admissions at public universities. The 2003 Supreme Court decision Grutter v. Bollinger said that it’s constitutional for a university to consider race, along with grades and test scores, in admissions to increase diversity on campus. The institutions at the center of the case do not comply with limits on race-based admissions, according to a 29 June decision.
The attack is confirmation that Americans aren’t willing to take into account the barbarity of our racial history. A racial backlash has hit every period of progress for Black people. Southern white people created a new and mythical history of slavery in order to respond to Reconstruction. This insistence on denying history is still going strong more than a century later. Witness the laws in a growing number of conservative states that prohibit teaching the truth about racial oppression, with dismissal and possibly even jail for teachers who dare to defy them.
Everyone who I met as a tutor was white, brown, rich or poor and believed that getting into an elite college required racial Gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school. I had to play it myself. A few years later, as a Black Ph.D. candidate in search of my first gig as a professor, I agonized over how — and whether — to talk about my race in ways that would mark me as a possible diversity hire. It felt like being dishonest to check the box.
The University of Oklahoma, if not more so, than it was when Oklahoma banned affirmative action in 2012 is one of a number of schools in Oklahoma that the attorney general of Oklahoma has filed a brief for. The university’s main campus in Norman currently has a U.S. undergraduate student population that is about 60% white and 5% Black.
Roberts said that the policies at Harvard and UNC were “However well-intentioned”, but did not use them in accordance with previous court rulings.
Roberts also wrote that schools could still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, “be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” But not, he wrote, through a specific application essay or other means.
The ability to use race-conscious admissions policies has been dramatically curtailed, according to a professor at Southern Methodist University. This is not good. But it’s important to pay attention to the details, because those details are how we think about what institutions can do right now at the moment as they’re gearing up to start working on admissions for the next year.”
There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., and only a small portion — slightly more than 200 — have highly selective admissions, where fewer than 50% of applicants get in. There are over 200 schools where the ruling on the race-conscious admissions process could make a difference.
They’re the key conduit to high levels of government and industry. As just one example, currently eight of the nine Supreme Court justices attended law school at Harvard or Yale.
On the Importance of Race and Ethnicity in Educational Admissions: The Case Against the Californian High School Infamous 96
In the simulations, using different combinations of high school grades and test scores didn’t produce more diverse classes.
“As an admissions officer, you should understand who is a qualified candidate if you know more about that person’s educational opportunities and disadvantages in life.”
The current admissions criteria reinforce gaps in educational opportunity in the K-12 system, and have been shown in research to show that students admitting with lower grades and scores are just as likely to succeed as the rest of their classmates.
This echoes previous research conducted in several states that have banned race-conscious admissions from ballot measures. Those statewide bans include Michigan since 2006, California since 1996 (and reaffirmed in 2020), and Washington since 1998 (and reaffirmed in 2019).
She wonders, for example, whether a program designed to increase the number of Black doctors — with support to complete the pre-med curriculum and get into medical school — will now be challenged.
OYan Poon, visiting education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park argues that the Harvard case should cause a halt to race or ethnicity in the educational setting.
Baker agrees: “We want to make sure that we don’t overstate what the legal contours are, because that might create a chilling effect where institutions restrict themselves further than the legal limits.” She’s especially interested in the line in Justice Roberts’ majority opinion about how schools can still consider the way race impacted an applicant’s life.
After California banned race-conscious admissions in 1996, the proportions of Black and Latino students at UCLA, one of the most highly selective schools in the state’s system, fell drastically. By 2006 there were 96 Black students in the freshman class. They became known as the “Infamous 96.”
The University of California responded to those numbers by adjusting its admissions policies to take into account other factors such as family income, high school graduation rates, and whether or not a student is the first in their family to go to college. The university has spent more than 20 years, and hundreds of millions of dollars in new programs and scholarships, in efforts to restore that level of diversity.
Other ideas for promoting campus diversity include admitting a percentage of the state’s high school students, like the University of Texas at Austin, which automatically admits Texas students in the top 6% of their high school graduating class. Students who have high qualifications would be randomly selected to be part of the lottery.
While very similar, the cases represent two very different admissions environments: UNC is a state school that highly favors in-state students (it’s only allowed to admit 18% of first-year students from out of state), while Harvard is a highly selective private school that admits fewer than 5% of all applicants (that’s just under 2,000 students this fall).
In amicus briefs filed with the Supreme Court ahead of the arguments in these two cases, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley both admitted that their efforts to meet their diversity goals, without using race, were falling short.
In the absence of affirmative action in the college admissions process, Kelly Slay expects colleges to increase targeted recruitment, expand financial aid, and go test-optional in an effort to maintain their ethnic and racial diversity.
She says they don’t have anything that works as effectively at generating racial diversity as race-conscious affirmative action. We have over 20 years of data and research on that.”
The right turn under Trump: the influence of standardized tests, legacy admissions, and standardized testing on faculty salaries and faculty make-up
The court’s rightward turn under Trump is reflected by the 6-3 ruling, split on ideological lines.
Julie Park, a researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park, says the decision will affect the makeup of student bodies, as well as the make-up of staff. “For better or for worse, these elite or name-brand institutions are a big part of the pathway into the professoriate,” Park says.
A study published last September in Nature2 found that 80% of tenure-track faculty members across the country were provided by 20% of institutions that granted PhDs in the US. These institutions include Harvard University and Stanford University in California, but the list does not have any historically Black colleges and universities or Hispanic-serving institutions.
Without race-conscious admissions, the diversity of future generations of scientists, who are trained at universities, might suffer too, Park says. 9% and 8% of the total workforce in the United States are made up of black and Hispanic workers. Black people make up about 14% of the population in the US, while Hispanic people make up nearly 19%. Park says that she is concerned, becauseSTEM hasn’t been doing so great while race-conscious admission policies are in place.
Other steps that elite colleges could take, specialists say, are to end legacy admissions, which give students a leg up if they have alumni family members, and to no longer require standardized testing, which some students prepare for by attending costly classes. Both practices have been shown3 to favour white, wealthy applicants.