LOS ANGELES – What should parents and students expect if the Supreme Court bans affirmative action in public and private universities? Consider the case of California, which banned race-based admissions in 1996.
Despite spending some $500 million on outreach programs to boost Black and Latino enrollment, the state’s elite universities still failed to improve racial diversity on campus. California even recently eliminated standardized tests — the ACT and SAT — hoping to reduce high-scoring Asian students from outperforming competitors, but it too failed to change the racial makeup of University of California (UC) students.
“Despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity,” UC wrote in an amicus brief to the court. “The shortfall is especially apparent at UC’s most selective campuses, where African American, Native American, and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.”
In 2021, 54% of the state’s high school seniors were Latino, 5.4% Black. By contrast, UC’s incoming freshmen were 26% Latino – a 28-point gap – and 4.4% Black. At UC Berkley, just 20% of incoming freshmen were Latino, 3% Black. In all, there were just 228 Black students compared to more than 2,800 incoming Asian students out of a total enrollment of 6,750.
Today, the elite UC system’s nine undergraduate universities have been using 13 factors to build a freshman class. Their “holistic” admissions review has included high school GPAs, class ranks, high school zip codes, family income and education, student essays and outside accomplishments.
Should the court ban affirmative action, education consultant Arvin Vohra predicted other universities will adopt the California model and develop algorithms or software to try achieving racial equity even if race is not allowed as an input.
Already, even with affirmative action, top state schools are having a hard time finding minority students who could compete with higher-scoring Asian and White students. In a study of 101 of the nation’s most selective public universities, the Education Trust found Black and Latino students vastly underrepresented.
“The overwhelming majority of the nation’s most selective public colleges are still inaccessible for Black and Latino undergraduates,” the report concluded. “Over half of the 101 institutions earned D’s and F’s for access for both Black and Latino students.”
RED STATES OUTPACING PROGRESSIVE-RUN STATES IN ‘RACIAL EQUALITY IN EDUCATION,’ NEW STUDY REVEALS
If history is any guide, if the court bans affirmative action in higher ed, elite schools will likely see minority enrollment drop. That was true at Berkeley, where minority enrollment fell 40% post-Prop 209. At UCLA, freshman Black enrollment dropped from 7.1% in 1995 to 3.4% in 1998. Latino students dropped from 21% to 10% over the same period.
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