Here are a couple of thoughts to add to the mix as legal experts and university administrators work out the meaning of today’s unsurprising ruling on affirmative action in elite college admissions.
First, the framing of higher education as a competitive prize to be won, which is shared by many parties on both sides of the issue, probably made the ruling more likely and will also get in the way of efforts to shape admissions practices more productively post-2023. I don’t know if U.S. News rankings are a cause or a symptom here, but they’re certainly part of the disease.
Speaking of health care, how would the arguments be different if the question were instead about the use of race in determining eligibility or priority for an expensive treatment protocol at the UNC Medical Center or Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital if there were evidence that Black patients benefited more? There would be appropriate scientific questions about the validity and definition of race as a variable–maybe there are more direct means or stronger proxies–but would the court step in to say that it could never be considered at all? But neither the plaintiffs nor the defendants in this case really took the view that the goal should be to prioritize in admissions those who would benefit the most from the education these institutions provide.
Second, whether education is a prize at the end of the game or preparation for playing it, it’s worth noting just how un-level the playing field is. Black students attend institutions that spend, on average $7,000 per student on instruction, while white students attend institutions that spend $9,000 and Asian students attend institutions that spend $13,000. (See post below on disaggregated finance measures.) The gaps are even starker when research and other expenses are included. While race in elite college admissions may no longer be as useful a tool to address these disparities, we need to change how we perceive the function of education as we figure out what to do next.