The Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative action policies at two colleges, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, are illegal, a decision that is likely to drastically limit admissions officers’ consideration of race as a factor in college applications, and has the potential to transform the makeup of the American student body.
The Court has supported the use of race in admissions for nearly 50 years, but what’s different now is its new conservative supermajority. Out of nine justices, six are conservative, and with Chief Justice John Roberts’s acknowledgment of his preference for race-neutral admissions policies, sweeping restrictions on affirmative action were all but certain. In the Court’s decision, those six justices all voted to effectively end race-conscious admissions, arguing that such policies violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
The immediate question in the two lawsuits before the Supreme Court — Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students For Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — was whether the Supreme Court should overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 case that held that race may play a limited role in college admissions. In practice, race often functions as a tiebreaker when universities are deciding among many well-qualified students.
According to Vox’s Ian Millhiser, the decision does not explicitly overrule the Court’s previous decisions permitting affirmative action, but it will almost certainly have the same effect as a total ban.
The overarching stakes in these cases, however, are much broader. The plaintiffs advocated that a “colorblind” theory of the Constitution that would prohibit the government from considering race in virtually any context, including efforts to voluntarily integrate racially segregated grade schools and other institutions. Decisions such as Grutter have given the…
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