Affirmative Action

 The Court's decision today to essentially end affirmative action should come as no surprise. While the Court has shown some sympathy towards preserving some vestiges of democracy, it has and will continue to be willing to privilege the position of White, straight people when it can. There is also a plausible if strained reading of the XIVth Amendment that supports their decision.

It is unlikely that colleges will suddenly become all Asian and White, however. Educators and administrators do see their roles as opening doors for young people, so they will find ways to continue to admit historically disadvantaged groups. One preliminary step is the move of colleges to go "test optional" in their admissions process. The main piece of evidence to prove that Asians are being discriminated against is SAT and ACT scores. 

In fact, historically, the emergence of standardized testing first led to the overrepresentation of Jewish students. This led Admissions Departments to go to a "holistic" approach that looked at things like legacy connections and extracurriculars. Of course, there is also athletics to consider.

While standardized testing is a decent predictor of Freshman year success, it's not a measure of much more than that. Moving away from those tests will make Admissions work much harder. Those overworked young people will have to read a lot more applications, and they will be looking for easy "no's" in the pile. Good people will get passed over for certain schools, because of one thing here or there that allows someone who has about 10 minutes to read an entire kid's life story to move them into the rejection pile. It was already brutal, and this decision will likely make it more so.

Affirmative action worked. It helped raise two generations of Black and Brown students to being the first in their families to attend college. And maybe that meant that Chad and Kimberly had to go to Middlebury or Davidson instead of Yale or Duke, but this was a societal "good" that we erased today. I do think many schools will continue to work to find a way to admit minority students, but it's going to be a damned mess.