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US supreme court rules against affirmative action in Harvard and UNC cases (kbin.social)

submitted 2 years ago by Madison_rogue@kbin.social to c/politics@kbin.social

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From The Guardian

So Affirmative Action is basically dead for college admissions, further dismantling Civil Rights era legislation.

Way to go, SCOTUS. /s

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[–] garrettw87@kbin.social 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (11 children)

Probably going to get downvoted for this, but I tend to agree that AA, as it stood, had run its course. Getting rid of it now clears the way for new and better solutions.

When I read these excerpts from this article https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-action/ - I get a strong sense that AA really just allowed schools to be lazy.

“Universities all across the country will begin to experiment with a whole variety of admissions techniques that are race-neutral in the sense that race is not an explicit factor, but not race-neutral in the sense that they’re intended to produce diversity,” says Jeremy R. Paul, a professor of law and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law.

Paul says many universities are going to have to up their recruitment efforts, increase partnerships with community colleges and high-poverty high schools, and invest more in scholarships and financial aid.

“These are things that universities will want to do anyway, because they’re good things to do,” Paul says.

Dan Urman, director of the law and public policy minor at Northeastern, who teaches courses on the Supreme Court, says the ruling means that universities will have to redouble their efforts to maintain diverse student bodies. Urman says there are examples of states opting out of affirmative action policies to mixed results.

“My home state of California abolished affirmative action in 1996 in a vote called Proposition 209, and California universities spent a lot of time and resources recruiting, establishing programs,” he says. “They were able to get diversity, not back to where it was before … but let’s say they were able to avoid some of the worst predictions of what would happen to diversity.”

One potential solution to maintain diversity are so-called percentage plans, where students who graduate at the top of their classes at each respective high school are guaranteed spots in universities. The first percentage plan was signed into law in 1997 in Texas by then-Gov. George W. Bush. It permits any student from “a Texas public high school in the top 10% of his or her class to get into any Texas public college, without any SAT or ACT score.”

[–] HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

I don't come to the same conclusion that AA had allowed institutions of higher education to be lazy in their admissions process.

I read this excerpt to mean that now these institutions that used to have race-conscious admissions will have to go the extra mile to communicate to prospective students of color that the institution is amenable to that student's application and is interested in recruiting them despite rulings like today's from SCOTUS.

The institutions impacted by this decision are self-motivated to increase diversity because those are values established and held by those institutions. So this excerpt saying they'll have to double recruitment efforts just means that they will have to demonstrate their doors are still open to students of color despite SCOTUS barring this particular avenue in.

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