Editor’s note, June 29, 2023: The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended affirmative action in higher education in a pair of cases concerning admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Read our latest coverage here. The original story, on a separate 2016 case out of Texas, follows.
The University of Texas Austin was Abigail Fisher’s dream school. Fisher, from Sugar Land, Texas, a wealthy Houston suburb, earned a 3.59 GPA in high school and scored an 1180 on the SATs.
Not bad, but not enough for the highly selective UT Austin in fall 2008; Fisher’s dreams were dashed when she was denied admission.
In response, Fisher sued. Her argument? That applicants of color, whose racial backgrounds were included as a component of the university’s holistic review process, were less-qualified students and had displaced her.
Students graduating in the top 10 percent of any Texas high school are granted an automatic spot at UT Austin. Other students are evaluated through a holistic review process including a race-blind review of essays and creating a personal achievement score based on leadership potential, honors and awards, work experience, and special circumstances that include socioeconomic considerations such as race.
A few are accepted through provisional slots that include attending a summer program prior to the fall. One black student, four Latino students, and 42 white students with lower scores than Fisher were accepted under these terms. Also rejected were 168 African-American and Latino students with better scores than Fisher.
According to court documents, even if Fisher had received a perfect personal achievement score that included race (which, in itself, oversimplifies the admissions process), she still would not have necessarily qualified under UT’s admission rubric.
In fact, when she applied for the class of 2012, the admission rate for non-automatic admits was more competitive than that of Harvard University.
Nonetheless, Fisher…
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