Last week, the news of the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action in college admissions swept through my feed. Nearly 80 years after being instated, the executive order prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin concerning opportunity for education was overturned. This action downplays the impact affirmative action had on protecting applicants with racial disadvantages who pursued these opportunities.
There are some reasonable concerns about affirmative action. Isn’t discrimination what this order was designed to stand against? Isn’t providing opportunities based on race counterproductive?
“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “[Many universities] have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not the challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.”
This statement might be powerful if it weren’t ignorant of the racial difficulties people face regarding college admissions. The reality is, when it comes to racial opportunity and outcomes, individuals’ experiences are often limited by race, and their challenges are compounded by it. Race is an important aspect of identity that often goes hand-in-hand with social class.
First-generation college students are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to navigating and being accepted into higher education. Both Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill are predominantly white institutions; even though there are significantly more white student attendees than other races combined, 54% of first-generation students are of racial or ethnic minorities.
Social class is also a major contributor to the ability to attend and apply for higher education. This is directly related to race, as Black and Hispanic families hold 2.9% and 2.8% of the country’s respective wealth, despite counting for nearly 16% and 11% of the US population respectively. Even at Harvard, although considerably racially diverse, 70.3% of attendees come from the country's wealthiest 20% of families.
Additionally, Harvard’s practice of legacy admissions, currently the basis for a lawsuit against the university following the Court’s ruling, has allowed historically wealthy and privileged families to continue to attend. According to the official complaint, these students are said to make up 15% of admitted students – a similar number to the 15.4% of admitted students who come from the richest 1% in our country. If we are to evaluate all experiences equally, why would someone’s parents be a determinant factor in admissions decisions?
Socioeconomic class also intersects with the access individuals have to potential experiences, including extracurricular activities and academic engagement. For K-12, nearly two-thirds of students enrolled in private school are white. This is significantly different from the data for public schools in 2021, which show only 45% of students were white. This disparity is critical to note considering private schools have been shown to greatly increase a student’s chance of college admission.
Schools themselves provide different resources to their students based on racial identity. Within poor urban districts, “schools with high concentrations of low-income and 'minority' students receive fewer instructional resources than others in the same district.” This includes fewer experienced educators and lower quality curriculum, as well as school funding. Opportunities for experiences within education are already significantly limited and fewer opportunities for enrichment and summer activities exist.
This is not to say white people do not face difficulties based on their non-racial identities that align with these concerns, such as limited access to opportunities and experiences based on financial or first-generation status. Obviously, not all people of racial minorities face these challenges, but a significantly larger proportion do than within white populations.
This landmark action discounts the discrimination and difficulty all marginalized communities face during college admissions. Now, without affirmative action in place standing against discrimination, introducing support for any students who face challenges during college admissions may face additional resistance.
Admissions boards could, and should, address each issue individually to develop better protections against discrimination for each applicant. Affirmative action was a long-standing way to approach many at once with its foundations in the prohibition of discrimination, as many key issues — like classism — show greater impacts on racial minorities.
If specific policies to protect subsets of marginalized identities were developed and set in place, such as class-based admissions, it would be reasonable to then minimize the impact affirmative action had on decisions. However, the introduction of class-based admissions does not eliminate the important role affirmative action held for students of racial or ethnic minorities.
Challenges such as first-generation schooling status, social class and resource or experience access often compound together within racial minorities to make the college admissions experience even more difficult for these applicants. Affirmative action was never the reason school admissions haven’t been fair, and its overturning, rather than expanding, marks a lack of protection for the marginalized students it was designed to support.
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