Addressing Affirmative Action: Admissions After the Fact

When they were still in place, affirmative action policies allowed college admissions officers to consider race when making decisions; this “positive discrimination,” as it’s often called, gave Black and Latinx students a greater chance of getting into college and provided schools with the opportunity to diversify their admitted class. Affirmative action was created to address the centuries of oppression of Black Americans not only in the form of slavery but also in the segregation of workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. Martin Luther King said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” When affirmative action was first established, the United States was mostly white and Black. When the Hart Cellar Act was passed in 1965 and immigration began to rise, affirmative action grew to include these new communities. Up until ten months ago, affirmative action primarily helped Black and Latinx college applicants as these two racial groups tend to have lower median incomes and limited access to academic resources such as tutoring due to systemic racism. 

The recent controversy around affirmative action policies began with two trials: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. Students for Fair Admissions is a nonprofit group of students and parents that aims to eliminate racial bias in college admissions. SFA sued both universities for discrimination against Asian American students on the basis that, while Asian American students tended to perform higher on standardized tests than any other racial group, the percentage of them admitted to selective colleges did not reflect this fact. Both institutions responded to the accusation by declaring that their lawful race-conscious policies were used to promote diversity at their respective schools. Ultimately, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court decided that race-conscious admissions programs were unlawful in that they went against the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

It’s important to note that, after the decision to strike down affirmative action, students are still allowed to discuss their race in their essays, and admissions officers are permitted to consider how race affected the applicant’s life. After the decision was released to the public, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “Although the court has stripped out almost all uses of race in college admissions, universities can and should continue to use all available tools to meet society’s need for diversity in education.” 

I spoke to Anneke Sallis, an admissions counselor at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, to get a sense of the steps that colleges and universities are taking to increase and maintain diversity among their student bodies. She shared with me some of the adjustments that Trinity has made to their admissions and application process since the court’s ruling last summer. 

“While the Supreme Court ruling has changed what data we have access to during the admissions process, it has not changed our stance on the value of considering a student’s background. Our supplement specifically encourages students to write about their identity and background in the context of their college journey. We continue to connect with underserved communities by forming and maintaining close relationships with community based organizations and by offering programs like our fly-in program to increase college access for diverse students.”

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At this point, a full admissions season has gone by since the elimination of affirmative action nationally. Although it will still be a while before we are able to glean the full impact of the court’s ruling on diversity across college campuses, we can take a look at some initial trends. 

As of January 1, 2024, the number of college applications submitted rose 9% compared to the year before. More applicants identified themselves as an underrepresented minority than in previous years; the number of Black applicants jumped 12% and the number of Latinx applicants jumped 13%. Although applications from these racial groups increased, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we will see them more widely represented on campuses in the fall. When UCLA eliminated race-conscious decisions in 1996, representation of minority racial groups in their classes fell by 12%. In 2000, 2% of their incoming freshmen were Black, whereas 7% of them were Black in 1994. Similarly, the state of Michigan passed an amendment in 2006 that prohibited public universities from considering race in admissions. As a result, Black enrollment at the University of Michigan dropped by almost half from 2006 to 2021 despite the school’s efforts to use alternate methods to increase diversity. 

Affirmative action gave underrepresented, largely low-income, minority communities an avenue to be admitted to selective colleges that they may not have had with their given academic resources and living conditions. Undoubtedly, removing admissions officers’ access to racial information about applicants slants the playing field. Let’s keep an eye out for further updates as to how this change impacts diversity on campuses and the lives of college students and applicants more broadly.