Although the Supremes have yet to hand down rulings in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases, it’s assumed that the Court will limit, if not eliminate, the use of race in college admissions. Whether it was called holistic or a collateral consideration only for the educational purpose of creating diverse classrooms on campus, it turned out that it served to produce racial quotas despite all the pretty bows tied around the admission decision. Acceptance for some. Denial for others. Race being the distinction between the two.
In anticipation, colleges are preparing to deal with the aftermath, eliminating standardized testing requirements which, they contend, favor wealthier white students who can afford test prep courses, as well as legacy admissions, sports recruitment, scholarships based on race, early admission, all of which for one reason or another are argued to favor white students over “Black and Latinx” (as if Asians didn’t exist). But I digress.
Still, college admissions counselors believe they will lose a generation.
If the court rules as expected, the class admitted for the fall of 2024 will look quite different, education officials said.
“We will see a decline in students of color attending college before we see an increase again,” said Angel B. Pérez, the chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “We will be missing an entire generation.”
Why would that be? Are black and Hispanic students unaware that college exists? Didn’t their teachers and guidance counselors tell them to apply to college? Don’t their parents want them to go to college? Why would they suddenly stop attending college?
Mr. Granger, who also serves as president of the association for college admission counseling, expects changes even at the community college level. Citing drops in applications following statewide bans on affirmative action in Michigan and California, he said that some students from underrepresented groups may simply not apply.
But if black students know about college and “simply” choose not to apply, why would that be a problem? Are they not entitled to make their own decision whether to apply or not? Many would argue that the decision not to apply may well be the smarter choice, given the cost of college, the burden of student debt (terms and conditions apply), the opportunity costs lost and the availability of many occupations that pay well, are satisfying and require no degree.
This was argued by the universities before the Supreme Court as well.
“The probability of Black applicants receiving offers of admission would drop to half that of white students, and the percentage of Black students matriculating would drop from roughly 7.1 percent of the student body to 2.1 percent,” the brief said, predicting a return to “1960s levels.”
What would cause such a precipitous drop in offers of admission? Certainly the decision to “simply not apply” would reduce the universe of applicants, but surely there would still be enough applicants to Harvard and UNC to fill up a classroom. Why would their admits drop so greatly just because admissions decisions were not based on racial quotas?
The court could prevent colleges from purchasing lists of potential applicants that focus on race and ethnicity, a common practice used in recruitment, Dr. Pérez said.
“Fly-ins,” in which certain students are provided expense-paid visits to campuses, could also be on the chopping block. So could scholarship programs designated for students of color, which many rely on to afford tuition.
“Fly-in programs, scholarship programs, partnerships with churches and community-based organizations, where does it end?” Dr. Pérez asked.
Where does it end, indeed? Affirmative action has been the rule for almost 60 years now, and yet here we are, colleges complaining that without it, too few black students will apply and too few will be admitted. And even fewer will graduate, but that’s another problem. Why, after almost three generations, do black students still need to have their hands held, be led by the nose to drink at the gilded educational trough of Harvard?
Colleges are planning behind the scenes for the court ruling, though they are reluctant to release plans, worried about potentially opening themselves up to legal action.
“We don’t want to get ahead of the court, and we don’t want to give the court any ideas,” Dr. Pérez said.
Do college admissions counselors refuse to accept the premise that black students just aren’t that into them?
“It tells me something that half of Black and Latinx students are saying, ‘I don’t want to submit my test scores,’” Dr. Park said, adding that research shows that test-optional policies have a small but positive impact on enrollment of underserved minority students.
What does it tell her? What it does not tell her, apparently, is that you can eliminate all determinants of intelligence and competence, pretend that black and Hispanic students are somehow too clueless or sheltered to know that there’s a university on the other side of those Harvard gates and still they choose not to apply, not to attend.
Colleges are looking at the percentages of people by race in the population and trying to replicate those numbers on their campus, all the while denying they’re doing so because it would be unlawful discrimination. They’ve been playing this game for almost three generations now, and still aren’t close to achieving the numbers they believe in their most empathetic hearts they should if they weren’t racist. And they’ve turned racist in the process of doing so, even though they refuse to believe it and have redefined the word so as to create plausible deniability.
As someone who has long believed that racial diversity on campus serves an educational benefit, provided everybody is allowed to be themselves and talk openly and honestly about their experiences even if they fail to comport with the latest version of woke propriety, I think it’s a terrible shame that the racial makeup of highly selective and lowly selective colleges have a dearth of black and Hispanic students.
But you can’t make anyone apply to college, attend college, work hard in college, learn in college and graduate from college who doesn’t want to. Granted, there was a time when many black students and their parents, teachers and guidance counselors, rightly believed that racist admissions precluded their being admitted. But things have changed, and colleges have made it overwhelmingly clear that they desperately seek diversity. If black students, under these circumstances, choose not to apply anyway, at some point you have to respect their decision and focus instead on educating the students whose butts are in the seats.
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I don’t like how this totally ignores the issues of lack of funding for disadvantaged populations that has been structured to deny them generational wealth. Also, lower quality learning opportunities persist in many locations that may cripple these populations, in both ability and desire.
Using quotas in college admissions to fix those problems is like editing your blood pressure readings to fix hypertension. You will not only fail to fix it, you will probably die much sooner. “I can’t climb the stairs anymore, but check out my numbers!”
Turns out that this idea to further racialize an already racially stratified society (or any society) might not be the winning strategy to repair disparities that the neo-racialists pretend it is. But it’s good for demagoguery and votes and who doesn’t care more about that.
I won’t type this in all caps but I really want to – why don’t we work on encouraging better behavior in the black community (dads sticking around, encouraging education among the kids and so on) and improve the schools that serve minority communities instead of forcing these poor folks into situations that we and they combined to not prepare them for? If improving the schools means kicking out distracting students who don’t want to be there anyway then do it.
Is that just too bleeping hard for our education experts to do? Is suggesting to a culture that there are things they could improve on racist? Until their childhoods are better served by parents and schools the situation is never going to be different. And I’m not saying blacks are inferior. I’m saying that that young blacks are poorly served, a decent amount of which is done in their own community.
Lots of people are poorly served. So what else is new? A disproportionate number of minority dads are imprisoned because of institutional racism embedded in the judiciary nationwide. In the South, it was/is overt. In the North, covert. Wink, wink, if you catch my drift?
Adding insult to injury, we have had decades of so-called red-lining of neighborhoods, extensive damage of which is just now being studied and revealed. This practice was government encouraged and enabled for decades.
Whatever the Supreme Court hands down will make the nightly news and be dissected, inspected and analyzed by scores of talking heads and op-ed experts, but will not change one iota of a scintilla on the ground or in academia. The Supreme Court is supremely irrelevant to the vast majority of us in the hinterlands and rolling hills of our daily lives. We pay them no nevermind.
Your arguments are weak and easily refutable. The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race! Justice John Roberts, I believe.
I, for one, prefer crazy incoherent Bill over stupid incoherent Bill, but I prefer silent Bill most of all.
Hey, give me credit for not going first today. Wintry mix of precip today. We’re going nowhere fast. Not much to do, and all day to do it.
Notice we opened the door for Paleo to return to the table. No, he’s not crazy. We just have different points of view, simpley!
A lot of black fathers are imprisoned because blacks disproportionately commit crimes. Yes, they are frequently treated differently than whites by the system, but statistically they do commit more crimes. The neighborhoods that you want to avoid at night are generally not white, middle/upper class. Whatever the cause, it’s a fact.
As to stopping discrimination on the basis of race, I’m arguing for that as well. But my wish is to improve the situation for those communities. Some of which needs to come from within. Their family structures suck, their primary education sucks. They’re so far behind in the beginning that it’s very difficult to catch up.
The “diversity” argument in the Bakke decision rests on the idea that contact between students of different races on campus can lead to a more enriching educational experience for all students, broaden their understanding of the world, and promote cross-cultural understanding and communication. This fundamentally requires students to “talk openly and honestly about their experiences” with each other. Yet if black students at a college tend to self-segregate by living in University-sponsored, black-only residential halls (such as the Ujamaa Residential College at Cornell to name one), the benefits of diversity are forfeited. Note that the benefits are not merely “lost” or “foregone”, but deliberately tossed away, ex cathedra, by the administrators promoting** places like Ujamaa. The only thing left standing is what David Lat called “visual diversity”– and come June, maybe even that will be standing less tall.
(**We toured Cornell with 3 three of our kids when they were in high school, and not once did the backward-walking, water-bottle-toting, university-paid tour guide take us to Ujamaa, though we saw other special recruiting tours visit there.)
I was on the 5th floor of Mary Donlon Hall, across from Ujamaa, my freshman year. I never saw the inside of Ujamaa. It wasn’t allowed unless you were invited, and I was never invited.
A Freudian might argue that if only those Ujamaans had invited you in, maybe the arc of Simple Justice would have bent to different morals. Then again, you got to see the Dead at Barton Hall, and for that alone you can never say Mother Cornell left you deprived…
I loved Cornell. Maybe too much. But I never gave Ujamaa a second thought at the time, and there were many black students who chose not to live there, just as there were many white students who chose not to live in crunchy Risley. To each his own.
Will the ruling even allow segregated residence halls to continue?
https://youtu.be/VWsR2qdS4Rs
It’s unlikely the ruling will have anything to do with them, although there is a strong case to be made that they violate Title VI even if no one wants to challenge them.
The irony, of course, is that it undermines the premises of Brown and Bakke in the service of providing a “safe space.”
Both in the area of university admissions and government contracting, the Court has been making its anti-quota pronouncements for years, but the racial politics never go away. If the Court says flatly that race can’t be used as a factor, some other factor will be substituted with a design of achieving the same end, and everybody will know what it’s for. The nature of racial politics requires that the race-based discrimination be sufficiently obvious for its proponents to receive due credit.
So they are going to threaten to eliminate the free campus visits, free plane tickets, scholarship programs, partnerships with churches and community-based organizations to stick it to the U.S. Supreme Court? As Professor Reynolds once noted, when local politicians want to raise taxes, they threaten to fire and suspend the cops and firefighters, but no one ever talks about the do-nothings at City Hall with their feet up on desks.
Couldn’t most of these elite universities afford to expand the fly-ins and scholarships as well as go out to other disadvantaged places to meet with community-based organizations without focusing on race? I just checked, and Cornell University, so often mentioned in this blog, is sitting on almost ten billion dollars. It could easily fund scholarships for every middle-class, much less disadvantaged, student and fly every one of them for an all-expenses paid weekend in Ithaca, for what that would be worth, prior to admission.
I think Perez’s argument was that these things would be on the chopping block *because* they are very disproportionately used to recruit black and Hispanic students to their campus. Cornell doesn’t care to fly a poor Chinese kid from Queens with outstanding test scores who is the child of noting-but-the-clothes-on-their-back immigrants, or the white kid from a small former coal town in Kentucky who got a near perfect SAT and is the child of a single mother. It’s not that the colleges want to stick it to the Court, it’s that these are integral parts of the affirmative action machinery that elite colleges use to get black and Hispanic students, so Perez believes it will be illegal to have fly-ins, “purchasing lists… focused on race and ethnicity” (how was this legal?!), and partnerships with churches and community organizations, which, again, surely weren’t for Asian community orgs or Christian churches in mostly white small towns.
Just so. But nothing in the anticipated Supreme Court opinion would prevent selective universities from conducting outreach and bringing high school seniors to campus for a visit. However, they would be violating the law by solely continuing to limit the program to students on whose behalf they wish to discriminate.
The whole article gives off a vibe that if they cannot officially discriminate in favor of certain racial groups, then the universities will take their ball and go home. To put it another way, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill minority outreach.”
As for purchasing lists of favored groups to contact, mere rules and technicalities have never stopped the Ivy League. As I recall, the entire Ivy League was under a consent decreed from 1991-2001 for fixing financial aid awards. A new case against them, and some other elite universities, for the same thing started up last year.
As others have mentioned in the comments, I don’t expect selective universities to change anything unless they are under consent decrees. Unfortunately for Harvard, they are already subject to a pending lawsuit, so they may fall under a consent decree first. Could you please shed a tear for Harvard, Mr. Greenfield?
An uneducated cynic might surmise that this is all about terror over a possible kink in the not-really-up-to-being-a-student loan cash firehose dressed up in a legal argument.
No matter what the Supreme Court says the universities will continue to give preferences to black applicants and the percentages in the student body will remain roughly the same (although it might take a year or two for them to get it “right”). The problem for universities is not that black (or brown) students don’t apply, it’s that the ones who do apply — the ones with doctors or lawyers or such for parents, who live in good suburbs or go to private schools — still have sub-par SAT/ACT scores and HS grades. The only way to get the percentages right is to admit blacks with lower numbers (i.e. scores and grades) than many whites and Asians who are rejected. So all the universities have to do is make the tests optional (as so many already have), choose some portion of the students the old-fashioned way on test scores and grades, and then choose the rest of the students — the ones without test scores — on some vague, impossible to quanitfy set of attributes like “drive to succeed” or “ambition” or “overcoming obstacles.” If those attributes happen to end up with the admission of a great number of blacks, well, nobody will ever be able to prove that race played any role in the admissions process.
On your last point, if the no-test option is being used to the overwhelming benefit of black and Hispanic students, how would that avoid the problem of the “personality score” that is at issue in the Harvard/SFFA case, where Asian applicants are rated the worst and black applicants are awarded the best? And reserving the no-test option as a criterion to be used by the admissions committee for black and Hispanic applicants doesn’t seem that far removed from the reserved seats at UC Berkeley that were at issue in the Bakke case. As it is, the really fudgy criteria like personality, alumni interviews, etc, already seem to be the back door for bumping up the number of non-white/Asian students.
It’s true that the federal courts, in the wake of whatever SCOTUS decides in the Harvard/UNC cases, can’t order colleges that they only consider the SAT and GPA, but presumably the Court is going to fashion a rule that tells the lowers courts to conduct a higher level of scrutiny toward non-objective admissions criteria that seems to overwhelmingly benefit applicants of particular races. If what happened in California and Michigan after affirmative action bans passed is any indication, then there’s going to be a lot less wiggle room for colleges to try to bump up black and Hispanic enrollment without falling afoul of laws or constitutions.
“…overcoming obstacles ” sounds like the real winner for a key phrase. Lots of emotion, guilt, and suffering in only two words, and the obstacles will never go away. They have roots that disappear into the bowels of the earth.
Everyone just loves special trearment when it benefits them and theirs.