Ruling in the Affirmative
by Jeffrey Selingo
The two landmark decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, which narrowly endorse the use of race as a factor in choosing applicants, are unlikely to radically change how colleges accept students.
In one case, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as an admissions factor at the University of Michigan's law school; in the second, the Court struck down Michigan's point-based system that gave an edge to underrepresented minority undergraduate applicants.
The rulings are expected to have minimal impact because only about one-third of America's colleges even consider race, according to a recent survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Most colleges essentially accept all qualified students, regardless of race. And even among the exclusive group of public and private colleges that do consider race and ethnicity, many have abandoned the formulaic point systems that give an edge to certain minority students, following a wave of lawsuits in the 1990s attacking affirmative action.
Colleges in several states, most notably Texas, welcomed the Supreme Court conclusions. Such institutions have been operating for much of the past decade under a different set of rules than schools in most other states, due to conflicting court rulings, ballot measures, and state policies that limited their use of affirmative action. College administrators in states like Texas say the high court's decisions are likely to bring back race-conscious admissions.
"We need to fairly quickly modify our admissions procedures to take race into account," Larry R. Faulkner, president of the University of Texas at Austin, said at a news conference shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its judgment. The Board of Regents of the University of Texas System, of which the Austin campus is a part, has already given the go-ahead to its campuses to consider race in admissions and financial aid "after serious and good faith consideration" show that alternatives are inadequate.
Nowhere will the lasting effects of the Supreme Court decisions be felt more than in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. A 1996 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Hopwood v. Texas, prohibited colleges in those states from using race in admissions-a decision now supplanted by the recent Supreme Court rulings. After Hopwood, colleges like the University of Texas at Austin saw their minority enrollments plummet. The number of African American students on the Austin campus, for instance, fell from 4.1 percent of the freshman class in the last year that affirmative action was used to 2.7 percent the following year.
Minority enrollment at the Austin campus began to increase after state lawmakers passed a law that automatically admitted the top 10 percent of each high school graduating class in Texas to a state university. The policy benefited the low-income neighborhoods where such high schools were located, but did not cover graduate and professional schools. Faulkner says the Supreme Court's decision could make an immediate and significant difference at the graduate school level. "There's a more pressing need to reinstitute [race-conscious] policies in those programs," he says.
Putting revised admissions policies in place that meet the high court's standards is bound to take time and more admissions officers. At the University of Michigan itself, officials say they plan to hire a new crop of counselors and trained application readers to review three essays and additional background information to select the undergraduate class of 2008. At the University of Georgia, which abandoned race-conscious admissions after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down its admissions policy in 2001, officials say they will appoint a committee with the goal of making changes for the fall of 2005. "We need to have a good bit of discussion about it if we want to use race again and about how we want to do it," says Del Dunn, vice president for instruction.
Point-based systems like Michigan's were developed in an effort to deal efficiently with the large number of applications that some colleges receive. But in his majority opinion in the undergraduate case, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that colleges could not use "administrative challenges" as an excuse for relying on formulas instead of "individualized consideration."
Pressure to adopt a more wide-ranging set of admissions criteria, which will require counselors to read every application they receive, is a "time and labor-intensive process," says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and comes at a time when the budgets of public colleges are being cut by state lawmakers. What's more, evaluating applicants individually is more subjective than relying on grades and test scores. "The public wants a system that is more transparent and fair, yet these challenges to using race are forcing us to return to a system that is less transparent," Hawkins says.
Despite the Supreme Court rulings, prohibitions on using race in admissions will stand in some states, at least for now. In California and Washington, colleges are restricted from using race by ballot initiatives approved by voters there. "The University of California will continue to comply" with the voter initiative, the university's president, Richard C. Atkinson, writes, "and we will continue to work through other legal means to achieve excellence and diversity on our campuses."
Jeffrey Selingo is a senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C.
