U.S. Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action nationwide in lawsuit involving UNC-Chapel Hill
Affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The decision came in a pair of lawsuits, challenging admissions practices at UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard University. Both made similar arguments, against admissions for public and private universities. The UNC case argued that North Carolina’s flagship public university puts too much emphasis on race when deciding which new students to accept,
About 8% of UNC-Chapel Hill’s student body is Black. In the past that’s led to concerns that the school isn’t representative of a state where a quarter of the population identifies as Black or multiracial.
The new ruling goes in the opposite direction. It could pave the way for more white and Asian students to be accepted.
The rulings apply nationwide, and they came down along partisan lines at the Supreme Court. All the conservative justices voted to strike down affirmative action, with the liberal justices dissenting.
"The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court's majority, referencing a part of the constitution that bans racial discrimination. "Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points."
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the only Black woman to ever serve on the nation's highest court, wrote a strongly worded dissent accusing the majority of being intentionally ignorant of America's long history of racism — something affirmative action was intended to help counteract, when it was created in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
"We should be celebrating the fact that UNC, once a stronghold of Jim Crow, has now come to understand this," she wrote. "The flagship educational institution of a former Confederate State has embraced its constitutional obligation to afford genuine equal protection to applicants, and, by extension, to the broader polity that its students will serve after graduation. Surely that is progress for a university that once engaged in the kind of patently offensive race-dominated admissions process that the majority decries."
But the court's other Black justice, Clarence Thomas, voted with the majority to strike down affirmative action. The U.S. has absolutely discriminated against Black people in the past, he wrote, but that doesn't make it OK to engage in a different sort of racial discrimination, to help Black people.
"Two discriminatory wrongs cannot make a right," Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion.
State Democratic leaders decried the ruling.
“Once again, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has overturned decades of legal precedent and undercut the important progress we’ve made towards racial equity," U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, D-Wake, said. "Students of color often face unique barriers to accessing institutions of higher education, and affirmative action has played a critical role in remedying lingering injustices."
Gov. Roy Cooper called on university leaders to work even harder in the coming years to promote diversity on campus, saying the court's decision "undermines decades of progress made across the country to reduce systemic discrimination and promote diversity on campuses."
What is affirmative action?
Universities couldn't use race alone as the only reason to accept or deny a student. That’s illegal. But under the rules the Supreme Court shot down Thursday, race had been allowed to be one of several factors considered in addition to academics.
Other factors — which the Supreme Court didn't address Thursday — can include a prospective student’s legacy status (whether their parents went to the school), extracurricular activities, leadership roles, musical talents, athletic abilities and more.
For instance, if two students have similar extracurricular activities and grades, a university might use one of those factors to admit one but not the other, if the students are otherwise borderline cases for admission.
Asian students discriminated against?
Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative group that filed the lawsuits, argued that the schools were improperly passing over some white and Asian students in favor of Black and Hispanic students who scored lower on tests like the SAT.
UNC Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz wrote in a statement Thursday that the university disagrees with the decision but will follow its new rules in the future.
“Carolina remains firmly committed to bringing together talented students with different perspectives and life experiences and continues to make an affordable, high-quality education accessible to the people of North Carolina and beyond," he wrote.
Asian students are over-represented at UNC, making up about 3% of the state population but 22% of the student body. But the fact that some highly qualified Asian students are not accepted, the lawsuit says, constitutes discrimination.
“Asians have faced enormous racial discrimination in this country, from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the internment of Japanese Americans, to modern scapegoating over COVID-19,” the lawsuit argued, claiming that “an entire industry exists to help them appear ‘less Asian’ on their college applications; and the unlevel playing field contributes to their unusually high levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide.”
Kenny Xu, a Morrisville resident who's also Students for Fair Admissions board member, celebrated the ruling Thursday.
“Top schools have been rigging the game in the name of diversity for too long," he wrote in a statement. "The landmark decisions confirm that using racial preferences to choose applicants is not only unfair, but unconstitutional. We need to keep holding schools accountable to help ensure that all of the best and brightest students get the fair shot they deserve, regardless of race.”
Xu told WRAL News earlier this month that he agrees the education system needs to be helping minority students. It's just that it should be happening far earlier than college, he said.
The ruling makes clear that while colleges are now banned from considering race in general during the admissions process, students shouldn't be penalized for talking about it in their admissions essays as, for instance, an example of overcoming adversity.
"Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise," Roberts wrote.
It's unclear if the ruling will affect many college applicants. Most colleges in the country accept a large majority of those who apply; the average acceptance rate nationwide was 70% for the 2021-22 school year, according to U.S. News & World Report.
But it will certainly affect highly selective schools, like UNC.
This year’s freshman class at UNC is 65% white, 22% Asian, 10% Black, 10% Hispanic and 1% Native American. That adds up to over 100% because some students identify as multiple races or ethnicities. Slightly less than one in every five of them are from families with no prior college graduates, a statistic that can sometimes mirror the socioeconomic status of the students’ families.
Recent polls show the general public tends to believe that's a more fair for colleges to weight applicants; a Pew
UNC and many other colleges consider prospective students’ race and socioeconomic status — along with factors such as athletic or musical talent, leadership roles and extracurricular activities — in addition to their academic records. Doing so creates a campus environment that’s diverse in many different ways, proponents say.
That’s how the system has worked for years, and the Supreme Court upheld that system as recently as 2016 in a different lawsuit brought by this same group.
But the court has shifted significantly to the right in the past six years, opening the door for the past precedent to be undone in this new ruling.
Background of the case
Many universities banned Black students from attending at all until the 1950s or later. UNC didn’t admit any Black undergrads until 1955, after the Supreme Court forced public schools to desegregate in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education.
Affirmative action followed integration and has been controversial ever since. Supporters see it as a way to help minority students overcome generations of systemic racism; many opponents see it as giving non-white students an unfair advantage.
Universities since the 1970s have been banned from having racial quotas in admission. Until now they have been allowed to consider race as one of many factors that weighs into whether to admit a student or not. In addition to its anti-racist motivations, supporters also see it as providing a general benefit to society because it introduces students to people from all walks of life and with all sorts of views and interests.
"Do not miss the point that ensuring a diverse student body in higher education helps everyone, not just those who, due to their race, have directly inherited distinct disadvantages with respect to their health, wealth, and wellbeing," Jackson wrote in Thursday's dissent.
According to a university webpage detailing UNC’s incoming class, 95% of the current freshmen — of whom 87% are either white or Asian — said in a survey that they basically agree with that sentiment and “want to get better at leading, serving, and working with people from different backgrounds.”
But for those who wanted to be part of that class and didn’t get in, the feelings can be different. Sometimes they lead to lawsuits like the one before the high court, as well as similar cases in 2013 and 2016 that dealt with the University of Texas.
UNC, which is often ranked as one of the nation’s top public universities, is highly competitive. It rejects 75% of applicants.
According to UNC, the middle 50% of incoming students scored between 1340 and 1500 on the SAT, out of 1600 possible points. Of those whose high schools reported class ranks, most new students had a top-10 grade point average in their high school graduating class, and nearly all were in the top 20% academically.
The Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit, however, claimed the university put too much emphasis on race, at the expense of academics.
The lawsuit was led by Edward Blum, a conservative activist involved in previous legal battles against affirmative action, as well as other policies intended to address racial inequality. Most notably, he was involved in Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 case in which conservative justices on the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
