On Oct. 31, the Supreme Court began hearing two cases concerning affirmative action in the college admissions process, raising several questions about how race can and should be used in the college admissions process.
Encyclopaedia Britannica defines affirmative action as “an active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for members of minority groups and for women.” Ever since the court’s hearing of the Regents of University of California v. Bakke case in 1978, the precedent has been that it is illegal for universities to have racial quotas for admissions but that the use of affirmative action policies to admit more diverse students is acceptable.
Since this landmark decision, the Supreme Court has ruled on affirmative action cases many times; however, what makes the current cases so pivotal is that the Supreme Court is more conservative than it has been in the past, and as a result, there’s a high likelihood that the ruling from the Bakke case will be overturned.
But what would this overturning look like for universities? Institutions such as Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, the two schools involved in each of the respective cases, are both extremely selective schools that receive massive pools of qualified applicants every year. In order to make decisions between these equally qualified applicants, the schools can factor race into the decision, often opting to admit the student who will add diversity to their student body and bring with them unique perspectives that other students can learn from. The striking down of the Bakke ruling would ban affirmative action policies like these and make it unconstitutional for universities to consider a student’s race when following a holistic review process.
So how would universities be able to diversify their incoming student bodies? Various practices that don’t explicitly consider race already exist, such as considering whether or not a student is the first in their family to go to college, a student’s family income, and where they attended high school. George W. Bush also implemented a law known as the “Top 10% Rule” when he was governor of Texas. The law states that all Texas students who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class will automatically be admitted to all state-funded universities.

In theory, these measures should all help to increase diversity; however, what’s been shown is that without affirmative action, the number of students of color accepted into selective schools like Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill drops dramatically. For example, the University of California (UC) system noted in a recent amicus curiae that “the proportion of students from underrepresented minority groups fell dramatically throughout the UC system” following the 1996 state-wide ban on affirmative action. Although efforts have since been made to increase diversity throughout the UC system, reports show that on the system’s more selective campuses, the proportion of racially diverse students hasn’t recovered, and “feelings of racial isolation persist.” The University of Michigan reported similar findings in its own amicus curiae, stating that “Despite persistent, vigorous and varied efforts to increase student body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means, the admission and enrollment of underrepresented minority students have fallen precipitously in many of U-M’s schools and colleges”.
The statements from both school systems show that affirmative action is not just wanted but needed when it comes to enrolling racially diverse incoming classes. While their statements may add to the argument in favor of affirmative action, what remains to be seen is whether or not the Supreme Court will listen to this argument and decide that affirmative action is here to stay.

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