Let’s be clear about something right off the bat: College admissions is not, and has never been, a meritocracy. There has never been a time in America where academia has been so pure as to accept only the most talented souls into the ivory tower. The Supreme Court’s decision this week to strike down affirmative action as we have known it for 50 years does not change this fact.
The injustices of the past will continue to compound under this new paradigm.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ ruling is the higher education version of his opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, in which the court invalidated the major enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County decision presumed that American society had advanced to the point that racial injustices were more or less self-correcting. Roberts repeats this assumption in Thursday’s opinion, deciding that the use of race in admissions at private and public universities “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.”
The idea that allowing colleges and universities to include race as a factor in their admissions fosters inequality is a perverse misunderstanding of the purpose of the 14th Amendment. It assumes that we have transcended fully beyond a world in which certain races have been systematically held back and that there is no more need for positive adjustments to correct that imbalance. But if anything, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has now ensured that it will be even harder for talented minds from underrepresented communities to gain a foothold in the real world, as opposed to the utopian vision that Roberts has crafted. While schools are already exploring new ways to evaluate students for admission, the injustices of the past will continue to compound under this new paradigm.
It is worth noting that the complaints in this case — as with the cases aimed at undoing affirmative action in the past — are targeted only at the most elite schools. Many of these colleges and universities will continue to use factors other than race to carve out slots for admitting students whose transcripts might not otherwise guarantee them a position. A 2019 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “43% of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard,” NBC News reported at the time.
“That number drops dramatically for Black, Latino and Asian American students, according to the study, with less than 16% each coming from those categories,” the NBC report continued. “The study also found that roughly 75% of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled ALDCs in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs.”
Legacy admissions will continue at many of these schools, despite growing external pressure to drop them. Even Justice Clarence Thomas has called them out as being a hindrance to merit-based college admissions. Granted, he used legacy admissions as a reason to denounce the idea that it’s necessary to correct for racial discrimination, but he gets half-credit for at least acknowledging that “the entire process is poisoned by numerous exceptions to ‘merit.’”
It doesn’t hurt that legacies also tend to be from more well-off families. Even for those applicants whose families didn’t attend the school in question, money and a prestigious name can go a long way. My colleague Jarvis DeBerry pointed me to a Wall Street Journal story from 2003 in which a student who attended a prestigious boarding school pleaded in her application essay to Brown University “to be judged on her own merits and not considered as the daughter of David Halberstam, best-selling writer of ‘The Best and the Brightest’ and the baseball book, ‘Summer of ‘49.’” She was admitted after the admissions dean spent most of her visit talking baseball with her father — and with the help of a letter from a former university president, an old family friend.
Those connections to the so-called upper crust are hard for many Black and brown students to compete with, no matter how high their grades or test scores. For those that do make the cut, the overall cost of their education can be an important factor in choosing which school to attend. And it’s worth noting that this court also decided this week that the Biden administration had overstepped in its efforts to provide relief to those whose student loans have become burdensome, even if they were unable to complete their degrees.
In the same term, this court has seen fit to decide that it is proper for one branch of the government to cut off a crucial avenue for minorities to ascend the social ladder, while even narrowly framed student loan relief, which would substantially aid many of those same minorities, is outside the scope of another branch. There is no merit to be found in either decision, no guarantee that these rulings will serve to better society. Instead, the main lasting impact is to further cement generational wealth as the only real way to get ahead in America — one only has to buy their way into the right university.
