…. on the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action.
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In an email to “members of the Harvard community,” the university’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, and other senior leaders said it would comply with the ruling. Noting that Chief Justice Roberts had said that colleges could still take into account essays in which applicants discussed how race had affected their lives, they said they were writing to reaffirm the importance of diversity in “backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences.”
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[S]ome scholars say that dire predictions over sharp declines are alarmist and that schools will ultimately return to more racially diverse classes as they adjust to the new paradigm. They point to the University of California, which increased outreach in low-income communities. Over time, the number of Black and Hispanic students increased at most schools in the system.
Richard Sander, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who opposes race-based affirmative action, said that graduation rates for Black students improved after affirmative action was banned in California.
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Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on the Supreme Court’s education rulings, predicted that the affirmative action decision could cause some state universities to move to race-neutral strategies for increasing diversity, such as the “top percent” model used in Texas.
In that state, students with the highest grade point averages at each high school are guaranteed admission to a public university, including the system’s flagship, the University of Texas at Austin.
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Wuh Oh…!
College admissions experts anticipate there will be increased pressure on elite schools to end preferential treatment for children of alumni, who are more frequently white and affluent, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Next thing you know we’ll be hearing there was something wrong with admitting dummy Jared Kushner to Harvard because his father gave the school 2.5 million dollars! Where the hell is this going?
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From another source:
Democrats and blue-chip universities ought to move toward merit and income-based admissions while striving to eliminate legacy preferences.
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Back to the NYT:
In 2020, with Donald Trump on the ballot, Democratic leaders in California launched a campaign to reinstate race-conscious affirmative action in California.
The governor and U.S. Senators and state legislators and a who’s who of business, pro sport and labor elites banded together, outspent opponents 19 to 1 and declared that restoring affirmative action in college admissions and hiring was a matter of racial and social justice.
Yet in a state dominated politically by Democrats and liberals, this referendum, Proposition 16, lost badly, with more than 57 percent of voters opposing it.
A recent Times analysis of that vote exposed a gulf between the party establishment and its voters. The analysis found that the opposition included a majority of Asian American and white voters and half of all Hispanics. Only Black voters offered majority support for the referendum. [See also… And see, from a scholar at the Progressive Policy Institute…]
The California results suggest the issue — and the Supreme Court decision — might have far less political salience than some Democratic activists predict.
June 30th, 2023 at 3:49PM
Opinion journals of all stripes have long weighed in against legacy admissions. My first recollection of such editorializing is in Washington Monthly, and that might have been over thirty years ago now.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to create a suspect classification under civil rights law for legacies, the way the Indian and Chinese plaintiffs in those Students cases were able to use racial preferences.
The cynical part of me can’t help but note that the children of prominent politicians often get legacy-adjacent admissions to those universities with the U. S. News problem.
Populist me shrugs it off: there’s little by way of preferential admission, let alone legacies, at Kishwaukee or Northern Illinois or Wisconsin-Whitewater.
June 30th, 2023 at 8:04PM
Stephen: It’ll be very interesting to see if places like the Ivies are able/willing to do anything at all about legacies. Lots of money is on the line; so-called “development families” will only keep giving big bucks if at least one kid per generation gets in.
July 1st, 2023 at 8:46AM
Apparently the “dean’s interest list” at the places that sell prestige serves a similar function as Championship Class donors at the state flagships with notions of sport supremacy. Curate the class, curate the coaches. Who knew places that present themselves as Above Mere Commerce are so so motivated by money? (irony off)
July 2nd, 2023 at 3:00AM
Stephen: You don’t end up sitting on fifty three billion dollars by being unmotivated by money.
And I mean sitting on – Harvard could do so much by dispensing some of its obscene hoard in the direction of needy, worthy causes of all sorts. But it plants its fat ass on that amount and seeks to make it grow.