US Supreme Court Rules Against Affirmative Action. What That Means For California's Future College Students

Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina's admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

"Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," the justices wrote in the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The court ruled 6-3, combining the cases against each school. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, although Jackson recused herself from consideration of the Harvard case. (Jackson recently served on Harvard's Board of Overseers.)

The decision is a milestone in a decades-long national conflict over race-based admission preferences in higher education.

What did the court rule?

In the majority opinion, justices agreed that the admissions offices' consideration of race did not survive a test of strict scrutiny.

The court left open the possibility that universities can consider "an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university."

Writing in the dissent, Justice Sotomayor said the majority's holding "cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter."

What is Students for Fair Admissions?

In 2014, a nonprofit group called Students for Fair Admissions filed two cases. The group challenged admissions policies at private Harvard University and the public University of North Carolina. Both universities used race and ethnicity as one of a list of factors to make admissions decisions.

Students for Fair Admissions alleged these policies discriminated against some applicants who were denied admission.

According to the lawsuit the group filed against Harvard:

That lawsuit as well as the suit against UNC allege that the policies violated white and Asian applicants’ equal protection guarantees granted in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

The universities have argued that affirmative action policies help increase student body diversity.

Students for Fair Admissions seeks to eliminate race and ethnicity from college admissions. The group is supported by right-leaning groups and says it represents tens of thousands of students harmed by admissions policies that take race and ethnicity into account.

Group founder Edward Blum is a conservative activist who has challenged public policies that seek to help Latino and Black citizens.

“Most Americans believe that a person’s skin color doesn’t tell them anything of real importance about who that person is as an individual,” Blum told Time Magazine in 2022.

Recent polling suggests a vast majority of adults in the U.S. support affirmative action policies for college admission.

In a statement following Thursday's ruling, Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a Los Angeles-based non-profit that advocates for college access, blasted the court's decision.

“The Supreme Court ruling to prohibit the use of race-conscious admissions in higher education is a threat to our democracy and an assault on the progress that universities have made to promote racial integration on college campuses,” she said.

The effect on college admissions

California has had a ban of affirmative action in higher education since 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209. Private universities were not included in this ban.

Proposition 16, a California ballot measure that would have overturned Prop. 209, failed at the ballot box in 2020.

Some Asian American groups in California came out early to oppose Prop. 16, which prompted other Asian Americans to come out in support of Prop. 16. This recent New York Times op-ed by an Asian American high school student captures the unease that affirmative action stirs among some Asian Americans: that including an admissions preference that benefits Black, Latino, and Native Americans is unfair to those who don’t benefit from it.

In the years after the California ban, the University of California and California State University systems, which together enroll nearly 750,000 students, have come up with so-called holistic admissions policies that include socioeconomic factors such as family income along with high school grades, classes, and other academic factors.

The University of California continues to promote racial, ethnic, and other forms of diversity in its incoming classes.

But Maricela Martinez, vice president for enrollment at Occidental College, expressed concern for how the court's decision will affect high school students weighing their futures.

"My concern is that students' behavior will change, that underrepresented students will be discouraged from applying to highly selective institutions,” she said, alluding to a phenomenon called undermatching, where students — often at the advice of a guidance counselor — apply to less-selective institutions than they may actually be able to gain access to.

Court workarounds

Students for Fair Admissions accuses universities who use socioeconomic factors of engaging in race-based admissions.

The striking down of affirmative action is set to compel all colleges and universities in the nation to eliminate race and ethnicity as a factor in admissions.

“My view is that affirmative action is a significant tool in addressing group inequalities,” said Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Chicago.

It’s the ethical obligation of public institutions, he said, to rectify inequalities that have come as the result of the gross mistreatment of groups of people in the past and current discrimination.

“What we've learned in that process is that there's nothing that you can do that is as effective as directly considering race in admissions,” said Julie Posselt, professor of higher education at USC.

They and others say that many colleges and universities across the country have been preparing for the striking down of affirmative action by bolstering socioeconomic factors into their admissions process.

“I speak [about this] with a lot of the representatives from a lot of little small liberal arts colleges around the country,” said Sharmon Goodman, director of a college scholars program at One Voice, which helps underrepresented students apply for college.

They’ve been preparing for the Supreme Court decision.

“They’ll figure another way around it,” she said.

The method most talk about, she said, is taking into account family income to help underrepresented students in admissions.

Impact on students

UC researchers found that in the aftermath of Prop. 209 admission of white students increased while admission of Latino, Black, American Indian students dropped at every UC campus.

There’s a fear among people who help those types of students apply for and stay in college that a similar drop is coming.

“There already is a kind of a decline of interest from first-gen, low-income students to going to college,” said Petrona Garcia, high school program coordinator at the L.A. based Kid City Hope Place.

The pandemic’s economic and emotional impacts, she said, are behind this declining interest in college-going.

“All students of color are going to be affected by this but I think specifically young men of color will be most affected by this,” she said, because the pressures of earning money for their families is pushing many of these young men to choose finding a job after high school instead of applying for college.

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