Should Race-Conscious College Admissions Be Restored?

“The achievement gap between Black and white students is a documented product of 80 years of explicitly race-based federal housing and education policy: redlining, school segregation, GI Bill exclusion. Using race-neutral admissions to fix a race-created problem is not neutral; it is a deliberate choice to ignore cause and effect.”

“California banned affirmative action in 1996. By 2006, Black enrollment at UCLA Law School had fallen by 80 percent. A generation of qualified students was diverted to less prestigious schools, and the pipeline to the state's legal and political leadership narrowed dramatically. The real-world consequences of colorblindness are documented and severe.”

“The Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause applies to individuals, not demographic groups. Admissions officers make decisions about individual applicants, and using race as a factor in those decisions is a racial classification. The Supreme Court has now confirmed this interpretation twice, and a constitutional amendment would be required to override it.”

“Race-conscious admissions at elite schools have been most harmful to Asian American applicants, who faced documented caps and lower effective evaluation standards than other groups at Harvard and other selective schools. Correcting one historical injustice by creating another is not a principled approach to equality.”