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SCOTUS AA rulings stink, but more modest effect on college admissions: context from institutions. [1]

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Date: 2023-06-29  

A couple of us serve on university admissions committees and let’s be clear, we’re not happy about the Supreme Court’s rulings in the affirmative action cases issued today, it’s yet another reason why SCOTUS reform and expanding the Court have to be top priorities for Democrats. However, there’s once again way too much doom and gloom and defeatism from progressives here, in this case about SCOTUS opinions that will have a far more modest and even negligible effect on the actual policies of college admissions going forwards, as we’ve all agreed upon in our discussions of the decisions. SCOTUS has struck down affirmative action in many previous rulings going back to Bakke, but this ruling in fact fits in the same pattern as before—barring race (and sex) as an explicit form of admissions criteria while opening up options to use it in practice, in more holistic ways. This becomes clear when the text of the Court’s majority opinion is fully read, but even more when the broader context of previous decisions and the actual practice of university admissions are taken into account. Here is the tldr: In almost every US university, the Court’s decisions today really won’t be changing anything in practice, because modern American universities use holistic admissions more aggressively and fundamentally than ever before, especially after the COVID19 pandemic and test optional and test blind admissions (and downgrading GPA with grading inflation) as the norm in nearly every US college and university. And in fact—maybe the most important part of the SCOTUS ruling, that got far less attention—holistic procedures and review are now the universally accepted norm, the Court indicating that refinements here are the way forwards and with Roberts himself affirming this. And yes, holistic admissions do include considerations of diversity (vague enough to provide a lot of wiggle room) and overcoming racial, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation, religion and other forms of discrimination.

Part of the reason for the reaction here we suspect, is that as usual, the New York Times and other newspapers and media are fanning flames with their latest bit of yellow journalism and trying to claim dramatic effects from the SCOTUS ruling to sell more newspapers and clicks, way beyond what they actually do. But the scaremongering from NYT and other media is partially also based on misinformation and an antiquated misunderstanding of how US college admissions actually work in 2023, which is a far cry from a decade ago, let alone 2 to 3 decades ago (where the NYT’s presumptions are clearly being made). First, remember that the Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action many times before, even as far back as the Bakke decision which contrary to the way it’s sometimes taught in schools, resoundingly ended affirmative action as it was used then. Although it’s sometimes presented as allowing race to be used as a plus factor in medical school and college admissions, as a practical matter Bakke disallowed race to be used in any kind of concrete form for such decisions, and in practice opened the door towards the gradual shift towards a more holistic form of admissions that would take decades to develop. The twin cases of Grutter and Gratz v. Bollinger, again while sometimes presented as allowing affirmative action, in practice placed such tight constraints as to make actual consideration of race (in explicit form) impractical—again nudging admissions in a more holistic direction. The most restrictive SCOTUS affirmative action ruling (much more than today) was for Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena in 1994, which imposed such a narrow straitjacket on affirmative action programs as then used as to de facto outlaw the standard programs applying it.

So why are we even talking about the legality of affirmative action now, if it had already been struck down before? Because simply, the previous SCOTUS and federal court decisions against affirmative action were in the same frame and pattern as the current one, in fact, is also adhering to, in spite of the current SCOTUS recklessness and incompetence with precedent generally: curbing the explicit use of race (and gender) in admissions and contract decisions, while also opening up options for institutions to more subtly recruit and attract PoC through what might be called softer, more holistic means. Which have in their turn, become the norm for university admissions and recruiting especially over the past decade. In fact, had the SFFA ruling been handed down in for ex. 2005 it may well have had a more dramatic effect, but that’s strongly blunted in 2023 by the spread and sophistication of holistic admissions policies in general. On this in fact, the SCOTUS opinions confirmed the holistic principle and freedom for institutions to basically structure and prioritize their admissions criteria as they like, just so long as they don’t explicitly cite an applicant’s race as a decisive factor.

This in point of practice, means that US colleges and universities are going to be able to continue to promote diverse entering classes, to provide scholarships for needy PoC students and generally help provide a lift for BIPoC communities, even if not quite with the sort of explicit policies sometimes previously used (though not as widespread as so often presumed). And this in fact has been confirmed in the follow-up statements by American institutions across the country, from Sarah Lawrence College to UMass Amherst to Bryn Mawr to almost every other (including our own), that they will continue to recruit solid and diverse classes going forwards. No doubt the fast shift to test optional admissions—ironically heavily spurred by the pandemic demands--has also helped in this and GPA is also being looked at more skeptically due to rampant grading inflation, but bottom-line here is that as admissions move in an even more holistic direction, this cuts the rug out from standing for suits partially because there’s no uniform yardstick for deciding admissions, and each institution will make its own choices to suit its own needs. (Not to mention that companies—in a long overdue move—are no longer requiring college degrees even for advanced positions, and scholarships for PoC, most of them private, are very much still active, which is maybe even more important given that PoC who do get into college are being disproportionally hit by student loans).

Now let’s be clear, we’re not happy about this ruling and the official statements by our own universities also expressed condemnation and a determination to help overturn it. (Going much closer than we expected, for universities that by their nature shy away from any statement that sounds political, to state that Republicans and their Court appointees are a disaster for the United States) And there are some ways that it probably will cause some serious damage to the US even in the very short term. Partially because so many American institutions will have to dance around the obvious—the clear need to consider the significance of race and ethnicity in American communities to ensure the United States maintains the tenuous unity we barely still have (especially with white Americans already a fast shrinking minority among American children)—there may be a lot of work-arounds which will have various kinds of collateral damage to the admissions and educational process. When California outlawed affirmative action in admissions in 1996, there was an initial sharp drop-off in PoC enrollment, but in the intervening years, it’s gone back up again, especially for Latinos, African-Americans and native Americans. Similar for Texas, which now has a Latino plurality and a significant PoC majority (with whites in Texas less than 40 percent of the Texas population) and restored high representation for PoC, and in many other states and institutions.

However, this has sometimes occurred with methods that in many ways are less inclusive of different groups as Americans, placing them in set off categories that allow them to be recruited more indirectly. And, many have argued (this has been a debate in our own admissions offices) that this may further undermine steps that are more meritocratic. Standardized tests, class rank, GPA and other measures for their flaws, can still provide useful information and encourage preparation to increase academic performance, for all communities making applications. Such metrics have already been falling into more disuse and disfavor, even more since the pandemic, and that process is likely to greatly accelerate now in the holistic admissions process, for better or worse. The University of California and Cal State systems are now fully test blind for example, and the huge majority of US schools—already test optional—are actively making steps to de-emphasize standardized testing and other such metrics further. This is something we obviously have mixed feelings about, and it’ll certainly be making our jobs more complicated. But again, the bottom-line is that the SFFA rulings aren’t going to have that much of an effect on admissions and class recruiting in actual practice when it comes to maintaining diverse classes. Some in our forum groups have even used words like “nothingburger” or “negligible” to describe it, and whether such terms are suitable or not, it’s clear that diverse recruiting remains a top priority of college admissions committees now (even more so, if anything) and that the holistic admissions process, as it’s recently evolved, provides the tools to achieve this.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/29/2178438/-SCOTUS-AA-rulings-stink-but-more-modest-effect-on-college-admissions-context-from-institutions

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