Report Suggests Reforms if Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action

In as little as two days, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to deliver a devastating verdict to advocates of affirmative action. Although the exact scope of the decision can’t be known, it seems clear that the court’s conservative majority will strike down the consideration of race in admissions. Now, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce has released a report on the potential impacts of the decision and how higher ed and governments can react.

Although race-conscious admissions policies have been under assault in recent years, the report traces their decline back to a 1978 Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Although the court’s ruling upheld affirmative action, it changed its permissible motivation: no longer could schools consider race to achieve social justice purposes. Race-conscious admissions were now only allowed for the achievement of the educational benefits of diversity.

Dr. Anthony Carnevale, director of the CEW“We decided to disconnect affirmative action from America’s vulgar and violent racial history,” said Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the CEW. “It became that we wanted to make sure that the white kids at Harvard knew some Blacks and Latinos.”

This rationale, argues Carnevale in the report, is less politically appealing and morally compelling.

The report also makes clear that banning race-conscious admissions will make it nearly impossible for colleges to match their current levels of diversity, let alone the diversity of graduating high school classes. It recaps previous CEW research involving simulated admissions that showed that the proportions of all under-represented groups only increased in the highly unrealistic scenario of colleges directly admitting students from the entire high school graduating class, rather than only from those who applied to them. Models that incorporated students’ socioeconomic status were shown to potentially help claw back some level of diversity but were limited.

“We tried to make class do the job; it just doesn’t,” said Carnevale. “It’s simply not powerful enough.”

In order to compensate for an adverse ruling, colleges will need to make drastic reforms of admissions policies, the report notes. This includes de-emphasizing application factors that favor the wealthier, such as standardized tests, AP and IB classes, extra-curricular activities, and counselors’ recommendations.