U.S. Supreme Court rules against affirmitave action for university admissions

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that policies that consider race in admissions criteria to universities violated the constitution, thus barring the practice moving forward.

The court’s conservative majority struck down admissions plans at both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina which both used race as part of its affirmative action policies to increase the number of minority groups at their institutions.

President Joe Biden has slammed the decision, calling on institutions to ensure that the ruling was not the last word.

The Supreme Court ruled along its ideological make up with the six conservative justices rejecting the race-based criteria, ruling in favour of a group called Students for Fair Admissions founded by an anti-affirmative action activist, Edward Blum.

The high court overruled lower court decisions upholding programmes used at the two institutions that have, along with others, used affirmative action as a means to remedy racial inequity and exclusion on campuses but also to increase diversity and in so doing, broaden their talent pools.

President Biden said he strongly disagreed with the court’s decision.

“While the court can render a decision, it cannot change what America stands for. America is an idea, an idea unique in the world, an idea of hope and opportunity, a possibilities of giving everyone a fair shot, of leaving no one behind. We’ve never fully lived up to it, but we’ve never walked away from it either. We will not walk away from it now. We should never allow the country to walk away from the dream upon which it was founded. That opportunity is for everyone, not just a few. We need a new path forward, a path consistent with the law that protects diversity and expands opportunity.”

Biden urged Universities not to abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies of diverse backgrounds and experience that reflect all of America.

“Discrimination still exists in America. Today’s decision does not change that. It’s a simple fact. If a student has had to overcome adversity on their path to education, college should recognise and value that. Our nation’s colleges and universities should be engines of expanding opportunity through upward mobility. But today, too often that’s not the case. One statistic – students from the top 1% of family incomes in America are 77 times more likely to get into elite college than one from the bottom 20% of family incomes, 77% greater opportunity. Today, for too many schools, the only people who benefit from the system are the wealthy and the well-connected. The odds are stacked against working people for much too long. We need a higher education system that works for everyone.”

Equal Protection Clause

The court overruled previous precedent determining that race could be considered as a factor in the admissions processes and found that both programmes violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, as Blum elaborates.

“The text of the Civil Rights Act, Title VI, specifically says that race and ethnicity must not be a factor in educational endeavours. It’s quite simple and the court has recognised that it is quite simple. There cannot be a carve-out for what is now called, basically, skin colour diversity. When we talk about diversity, we’re not talking about individualised characteristics of individual students. We’re talking about how they look, and what the diversity movement really fails to understand is that how a student looks doesn’t tell us anything about who that student is, what’s important to that student, the various qualifications and interests, likes and dislikes.”

The court’s majority found that the manner in which the two Universities admitted new students “lacked sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race” and found that they discriminated against White and Asian American applicants.

The three liberal justices dissented.