WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday banned colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in admissions decisions, a practice known as affirmative action.
In the context of higher education, affirmative action refers to efforts by admissions offices to increase the numbers of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other students of color on campus.
The court's six conservative justices ruled in a pair of controversial decisions that Harvard and the University of South Carolina at Chapel Hill were illegally discriminating based on race.
For decades, the Supreme Court upheld race-conscious college admissions. Thursday's ruling overturned 45 years of legal precedent.
Hundreds of private colleges and roughly 25 public universities nationwide will now need to do away with affirmative action in their admissions offices and opt for race-neutral application reviews. News of the ruling was met with protesters at the Capitol in Washington D.C.
Washington and Idaho are among nine states in the country that previously set bans on race-based admissions. But private colleges and universities in states with existing bans — such as Gonzaga — will still need to change admissions policies.
Gonzaga president Thayne McCulloh issued a public statement Thursday, saying the ruling will not change the university's missions of supporting diversity and inclusion.
"We are an institution committed to the thriving of all individuals, and thus will continue to foster engagement between people of different identities, cultures, and backgrounds to facilitate the intellectual development, critical thinking, ethical discernment, and commitment to social justice that defines an excellent Jesuit university education."
For the 2022-2023 academic year, Gonzaga listed "race/ethnic status" as one of the nonacademic factors considered in student applications. Other factors the university considered included a student's volunteer work, their admissions interview and if they were a first-generation college student.
The ban means Black, Hispanic and Indigenous college applicants around the country may have more trouble getting into selective colleges and universities, said Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale. This could lead to increased enrollment at less selective state schools and community colleges.
In 1996, California adopted a statewide ban on affirmative action. Bleemer has researched economic impacts of that ban by tracking students who went to California schools before and after it took effect. He said the nationwide impacts of the Supreme Court's ban will likely mirror what happened in California, meaning it will hurt the economy, Bleemer said.
"Going to more selective universities, on average, is beneficial," the economist said. "But for kids from relatively privileged backgrounds, it just doesn't matter that much. For people who already have networks, getting into the most selective university just doesn't change their life very much. These selective universities really do change the lives of relatively more disadvantaged kids."
Bleemer predicts the national ban will cause a net total decline in labor market success among college graduates. This is because the economic costs faced by Black, Indigenous and Hispanic applicants who don't get into selective colleges and universities substantially exceed the gain white and Asian applicants get for being accepted.
"The less you have before you get to college, the more a more selective university is able to give you," Bleemer said. "So affirmative action is one way that universities were trying to target those students and pull them in."
Colleges and universities who used affirmative action must now look for alternative ways to build a diverse student body.
There are four main race-neutral admissions methods, Bleemer said, but none of them are anywhere near as effective in creating diverse student bodies as affirmative action.
The four most common methods are:
* Large-scale outreach efforts: Admissions officers contact disadvantaged high schools, trying to encourage kids to apply to college.
* Top-percent policies: Top percentiles of students graduating from every high school in a state are automatically guaranteed admission to some public universities in those states.
* Holistic review: Admissions offices weigh the various pieces of a student's application in context, instead of just assigning points to things like GPA and test scores.
* Going test-optional or test-blind: Admissions officers do not require standardized tests be submitted in a student's application.
Of those four admissions policies, holistic review is the most successful in building diverse student bodies. Even so, it only increases racial diversity by roughly 30% the magnitude of race-based affirmative action, Bleemer said.
In 2022, the University of California system filed a brief with the Supreme Court, urging it rule in favor of upholding affirmative action. After California banned affirmative action, the number of freshman students from "underrepresented minority groups" dropped by 50% at the university's most selective campuses, the brief says.
Admissions officials wrote the university has implemented "numerous and wide-ranging race-neutral measures designed to increase diversity of all sorts, including racial diversity."
Yet the University of California still struggles to enroll a student body that officials deem racially diverse enough.
"The shortfall is especially apparent at UC's most selective campuses," reads the brief, "where African American, Native American, and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.
Like California, Washington's decades-long ban on affirmative action has forced public universities to look for race-neutral application screening tactics.
At the University of Washington, officials say outreach seems to be the best way to build a diverse body. Director of admissions Paul Seegurt said university counselors visit high schools and adopt a holistic approach when reviewing applications.
"The University of Washington wants to have classes that reflect the citizens of the state as much as possible," Seegurt said.
In 2020, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed into law a statewide ban on affirmative action.
At the University of Idaho, there is no capped enrollment, and all students who meet application criteria are admitted, said Dean Keller, the university's vice provost of enrollment management.
"We have plenty of space," he said.
A 2021 survey from Gallup showed that 62% of American adults support affirmative action, an 8% increase from the 54% who expressed approval in 2018.
Gonzaga law professor Jason A. Gillmer said the decision suggests the Supreme Court no longer thinks enhancing diversity through affirmative action is compelling enough to be protected under the 14th Amendment.
"This court is more hostile towards race-based classifications — including those designed to benefit minorities — than previous courts," Gillmer said.
The law professor said there are misconceptions about how affirmative action actually works. Before Thursday's ban, it was illegal for colleges or universities to implement race-based quotas or assign extra admissions points to Black, Indigenous and Hispanic students.
"People think, 'If I check this box, I will get into this school,'" Gillmer said. "It doesn't work that way. It never worked that way."
The day before the court's ruling, Spokane NAACP President Kurtis Robinson said he was disappointed by the potential ban.
"For them to roll back affirmative action? From my perspective that's a white supremacy support group," he said. "Because that policy was put in place to protect from white supremacy. As a human being, as a multi-racial person, it feels terrible to know that a country that espouses such great, almost unprecedented concepts like freedom and justice for all would roll this back."
In 1978, the court upheld affirmative action in the landmark case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke after schools started trying to correct the effects of racial segregation. The court ruled it was unconstitutional for a university to use racial "quotas" in its admissions process, but the use of affirmative action to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances.
Again in separate 2003 and 2016 rulings, the court upheld affirmative action was in line with the 14th Amendment.
Thursday's Supreme Court cases were brought by the Students for Fair Admissions, a group headed by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum. Blum has spent over five years fighting affirmative action in multiple legal cases. In both of the cases, Blum and other plaintiffs alleged the schools' admissions policy were unlawfully discriminatory.
The Harvard case contended the school's admissions policy discriminated against Asian-American applicants. The South Carolina case contended the school's admissions policy discriminated against both white and Asian-American applicants.
This week's controversial ruling was not the first time Blum sought legal action. In 2020, the Students for Fair Admissions filed a complaint accusing the University of Texas at Austin of violating the constitution's Equal Protection Clause.
In the majority opinion issued Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the admissions programs at Harvard and the University of South Carolina could not be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.
The universities' 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," the chief justice wrote.
Roberts was joined in the majority by justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the decision "rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress."
Sotomayor was joined in dissent by justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
In the North Carolina case, the ruling was 6-3. In the Harvard case, it was 6-2. Jackson sat out on the Harvard ruling because she once served on a university advisory board.
