Supreme Court affirmative action ruling bars colleges from considering race in admissions decisions

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the use of race as a factor in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina was unconstitutional, departing from a nearly half-century of guidance on affirmative action and erecting new hurdles for underrepresented students of color and efforts by schools to ensure diversity in their classrooms.

The court, in a 6-3 decision that was among the most widely anticipated of the concluding term, ruled the schools’ admission programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Court precedent from 1978, eroded in subsequent decisions, allowed race to be considered in higher education under narrow circumstances.

“The Supreme Court has yet again taken us back in time by barring institutions of higher education from using race-conscious admissions policies," Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat, said in a statement shortly after the ruling. "These policies are critical to ensuring that our Black and brown students, who have already experienced redlining and systemic underinvestment in their schools and communities, have an equitable shot at higher education to pursue their dreams."

But Yiatin Chu, a New York City public school parent and co-founder of the advocacy group Asian Wave Alliance, cheered the ruling.

"The United States is a country of limitless opportunities and equal protection, and treating students equally regardless of race is a fundamental right that the court has now returned to us," Chu said in a statement. "Students should be evaluated on their talents, accomplishments and potential, not penalized for a checkbox on race in their college applications."

The ruling means diversity-minded private and public schools will be pressed into relying on race-neutral criteria like income and geography to continue offering opportunity to underrepresented students of color who are deemed worthy of admission but who underachieve on such measures as the SAT.

The decision will most certainly also mean fewer Black and Latino students being admitted to selective schools, where competition for seats remains fierce even in the face of the enrollment drops affecting many less-competitive and regional schools, experts on college admissions predict.

The court’s conservative majority said time had run out on race-conscious admissions.

“Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in the UNC case, said the court had turned its back on decades of “precedent and momentous progress.”

The majority "holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits. In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter,” Sotomayor wrote.

The court said its ruling will first apply to the admissions process for the college class of 2028, the next class to be admitted.

Here’s more to know about the case.

Who sued and why?

The decision stems from 2014 lawsuits filed against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina by a conservative group called Students for Fair Admissions. It alleged that Harvard, the nation’s oldest college, violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, because it discriminates against Asian American applicants, who are less likely to gain admission than similarly qualified white, Black or Latino students. SFFA charged that UNC, a public institution, violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by needlessly considering race as part of its admissions decision-making.

Lower federal courts rejected the group’s claims and ruled for the schools.

What did the Supreme Court’s conservative majority say?

The court rejected a long list of justifications for considering race in the schools’ decision-making on admissions, and took issue with some of the racial categories themselves, calling them “imprecise,” “opaque,” “overly broad” and “underinclusive.” Roberts wrote in the opinion of the court that it was “far from evident” to discern how assigning students to racial categories and making admissions decisions based on them furthers the educational benefits the universities claim to pursue.

“Universities may define their missions as they see fit. The Constitution defines ours. Courts may not license separating students on the basis of race without an exceedingly persuasive justification that is measurable and concrete enough to permit judicial review. As this Court has repeatedly reaffirmed, ‘[r]acial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification,’” Roberts wrote.

What did the court’s liberal bloc have to say?

In dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the court was wrong on the law and history, citing the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which “recognized the constitutional necessity of racially integrated schools in light of the harm inflicted by segregation and the 'importance of education to our democratic society.'”

She added: “This limited use of race has helped equalize educational opportunities for all students of every race and background and has improved racial diversity on college campuses. Although progress has been slow and imperfect, race-conscious college admissions policies have advanced the Constitution’s guarantee of equality and have promoted Brown’s vision of a nation with more inclusive schools.”

What’s the expected impact of the ruling?

Schools won’t have to change much, the plaintiffs asserted in court papers ahead of the ruling.

“Most universities ‘can keep their [admissions] systems exactly as they are’—with holistic, individualized review that considers all legitimate factors — ‘only they cannot’ use race itself as a factor,” according to an SFFA filing.

But a Washington Post review of the impact from affirmative action bans in eight states that already ban race-conscious admissions suggests the ruling “could change the racial and ethnic makeup of American schools considerably” – especially where selective colleges and universities are concerned. In California, which banned affirmative action plans in 1998, Black and Latino student enrollment at UC Berkeley, one of the state’s most selective schools, dropped 50% immediately following the state’s ban, according to the Post review.

At the same time, states where non-white enrollment decreased at selective universities, less-selective schools saw increases in those same demographics.