The supreme court’s decision to strike down race-consciousness in college admissions will upend the academic landscape for millions of people. But students in nine states already live in a post-affirmative action world.
In 1996, Californians voted to ban race-conscious affirmative action policies in the state’s public universities. Since then, eight other states – Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington – have also barred race-based considerations, often through ballot initiatives approved by the states’ voters. Some universities in these states report that the bans have made it significantly harder to achieve racial diversity on their campuses.
The University of California and the University of Michigan, whose representatives submitted arguments to the supreme court in support of race-conscious admissions, are two such schools. In the years since Michigan voters ended affirmative action in 2006, for instance, the number of Black and Indigenous American students at the University of Michigan has plummeted. The same happened at UC Berkeley and UCLA after voters approved a ban in 1996. And despite developing numerous strategies to supplement the lack of affirmative action policies with other outreach tactics, the representatives wrote, their efforts have failed.
The California data shows that freshmen attending its nine public UC schools do not accurately reflect the state’s high school graduate population. In 2019, just a quarter of freshmen who attended UC schools identified as Latinx. By contrast, Latinx students accounted for more than half of high school graduates in California that year. During that same period, Black students accounted for just 4% of UC freshmen, even though they made up nearly 6% of high school graduates. The numbers were worse at the system’s more selective institutions: at UC Berkeley, for example, Latinx students accounted for just 15% of freshmen, and Black students accounted for only 3%.
Since affirmative action was banned in the state, the UC system has spent more than $500m on outreach efforts to students from low-income backgrounds, students whose families had marginal, if any, college experience, and students who “attend an educationally disadvantaged school”. It has also adopted a “holistic” review process, which takes into account 13 factors beyond grades and test scores to determine admission. But the amicus brief notes: “Although these programs have increased geographic diversity, they have not substantially increased the racial diversity of students admitted to UC. They have had little impact at the most selective campuses.”
At the University of Michigan, similar attempts at a solution have had little effect. Representatives from that school wrote: “The University’s 15-year-long experiment in race neutral admissions thus is a cautionary tale that underscores the compelling need for selective universities to be able to consider race as one of many background factors about applicants.” The statewide affirmative action ban caused a “marked and sustained drop especially among the most underrepresented groups, Black and Indigenous American students”.
Despite the creation of a Center for Educational Outreach, specialized recruitment programs and efforts to consider applicants’ financial backgrounds, the university found that the “admission and enrollment of underrepresented minority students have fallen precipitously in many of U-M’s schools and colleges since Proposal 2 was adopted”. Further, Black student enrollment has fallen 44% and a quarter of students from underrepresented backgrounds at the University of Michigan reported that they didn’t “belong”. The university noted that that was a 66% increase from the last decade.
Not all statewide programs that have barred affirmative action agree with Michigan’s and California’s findings, however. An amicus brief by the state of Oklahoma (which barred affirmative action in 2012) and 18 other states in favor of race-conscious policy bans noted that the University of Oklahoma had “no long-term severe decline in minority admissions”. It said that the states that had barred race consideration in admissions were “no less diverse” than states that “permit such discrimination”.
The brief compares 2019 data on the Black and Latino freshmen at University of Oklahoma with other states that have comparable Black and Latino populations, such as Massachusetts, Minnesota and Wisconsin. It argues that those states’ flagship universities admit similar numbers of Latino students and “do not admit substantially more African American students’’ than Oklahoma.
Still, the authors of the University of California amicus brief challenged that argument, noting that, upon closer inspection, enrollment of Black and Indigenous American students significantly fell at the University of Oklahoma’s flagship campus in Norman. In the years since Oklahoma barred affirmative action, Black students at the university’s main campus fell from 5% of the 2019 freshman class to roughly 4%. Even if that decline isn’t considered significant by the University of Oklahoma’s standards, a single point drop on an already low number could have material effects on students from underrepresented backgrounds as they become less and less visible on campus.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the college admissions process was “zero-sum”. But Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, who studied the impact of California’s affirmative action ban on the state’s public university system, challenged that notion. He told me that the bans’ long-term effects on students of different backgrounds were fundamentally uneven. “The gains for white and Asian students were measurably very small, compared to the losses for Black and Hispanic students,” Bleemer said.
Thursday’s decision means that the current reality for several universities around the country will now be extended nationwide: When schools are barred from factoring race into the admissions process, they lack meaningful tools that would help facilitate a more racially diverse student population.