Talking About Race Preferences in College Admissions

The Supreme Court ruled recently that it is unconstitutional to consider race in college admissions decisions (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina).  Chief Justice Roberts wrote “For too long universities have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.  Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”  Roberts said admissions officers could consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise… The difference is that the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”  Roberts’ language echoes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the epochal 1963 civil rights March on Washington:  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”.

America was born in race-based moral contradiction.  The 1776 Declaration of Independence read “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”.  But slavery was widespread in colonial America, and many signers of the Declaration including Thomas Jefferson were slaveowners.  In 1787, in what was known as “The Three-Fifths Compromise”, the new U.S. Constitution counted slaves as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of determining congressional representation.  This was necessary to secure agreement from slavery states to join a new union which they feared might be dominated by larger-population non-slavery states.  This race-based moral contradiction endured seventy-plus years until it exploded in the 1860 Civil War.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1868, shortly after the end of the Civil War.  It granted citizenship to all persons “born or naturalized in the United States”, including former slaves recently freed, and provided all citizens with “equal protection under the law”.  This equal protection promise is one basis of the Students for Fair Admissions legal complaints against Harvard and University of North Carolina.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth constitutional amendments together are known as the Reconstruction Amendments — abolishing slavery  (13th Amendment, 1865), providing equal citizenship (14th Amendment, 1868), and granting voting rights to African American men (15th amendment, 1870).  This led to a second era of race-based moral contradiction, in which African Americans were equal under law but not in practice as the laws were not enforced.  African Americans suffered enormously under unequal law enforcement.  Pernicious racial segregation, racial discrimination, and antiblack mob violence was the norm in America for the next ninety-plus years until the 1960s.

Federal government efforts to relieve the burdens of discrimination commenced in 1948 with President Harry Truman’s Executive Orders 9980 and 9981, ordering desegregation of the federal workforce and military.  The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education overruled the sixty-year-old precedent Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” doctrine.  President John Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 in 1961, regarded as the beginning of “affirmative action”,  read “The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin”.  Other civil rights era legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing Rights Act of 1968 had similar focus on preventing harm inflicted on African Americans by racial discrimination.

During the 1960s colleges began considering race as a positive factor for blacks when admitting students.  This began as “affirmative action” efforts to increase representation of qualified students of color who had historically been denied admission because of race.  Over time this well-intentioned effort morphed into reduced standards for black applicants, particularly with regards to standardized testing results (SAT, ACT, GRE, etc.) — tests which were designed and served historically as “objective” measures of student achievement and “academic merit”.  Opponents of standardized testing argued “standardized testing is racist”, and “standardized testing really only reflects applicant income”.  There may be arguable merit to the income argument, reflecting that higher income families have access to higher quality K-12 schools.  On the other hand, outstanding test performance by many low-income Asian Americans, and low-income African Americans attending high-performing charter schools, suggests that the tests are fair and objective measures of academic achievement without regard to race or income.  College affirmative action policies admitting more black and Latino students with lower test scores triggered backlash among some white and Asian American applicants, who perceived themselves as victims of “reverse discrimination”.

When universities initiated affirmative action in black student admissions in the 1960s, their rationale was atonement for slavery and redress for many decades of racial discrimination in which most universities excluded qualified students of color.  As colleges lowered admissions standards to deepen the black and Latino applicant pool, their rationale shifted to the “benefits of diversity” for the education of all students.  But this was treacherous territory — instead of acting to prevent harm caused by discrimination against black and Latino applicants, colleges were discriminating in favor of them.  This unequal treatment caused harm to some white and Asian American applicants (denial of admission they would have received if equal standards were applied to all applicants).  This became a third era of race-based moral contradiction, lasting sixty years from the 1960s to 2023, and is at the heart of the recent Supreme Court case.  The Harvard Crimson reported that data submitted to the court showed that “Over an 18-year period stretching from 1995 to 2013, Asian American students admitted to Harvard scored higher on the SAT than did their peers from other racial groups… Asian American applicants to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 726.  White applicants earned an average of 713, Native American and Native Hawaiian applicants an average of 658, Hispanic American applicants a score 0f 650, and African American applicants a score of 622.  Across the same time span, Asian Americans saw the lowest acceptance rate of any racial group… White applicants saw the second-lowest acceptance rate, and African American applicants saw the highest acceptance rate”. (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american-admit-sat-scores/)

A recent study “Investigating Ivy:  Black Undergraduate Students at Select Ivy League Institutions” (Journal of Postsecondary Student Success, December 13, 2021) reported interesting findings.  “As of 2017, Black students within the Ivy League made up 9% of freshmen and 15% of college-age Americans.  More recent data suggests an upward trend in admitting a higher proportion of Black students amid the political unrest and protests surrounding the 2020 death of George Floyd.  For example, a report in the New York Times highlights admissions trends at Harvard University, which shows that the proportion of admitted students who are Black jumped to 18% from 14.8% the previous year.  Despite the increasing number of Black students enrolled in college, Black native students (students born and raised in the United States) remain underrepresented at Ivy League and other highly selective institutions in comparison to their Black immigrant peers.  At selective colleges and universities, Black immigrants or children of immigrants (individuals of the Diaspora including Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America who were born outside of the United States) represent up to a quarter of the Black students enrolled.”

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education headlined a recent News & Views article (July 5, 2023):  “Most Black Students at Harvard Are From High Income Families”, and read in part as follows.  “In his 2005 book, The Chosen, Professor Jerome Karabel of the University of California at Berkeley has produced credible research showing that most minority students at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale come from high income families… A 2004 survey of black students at 28 selective colleges and universities conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University found that 41 percent of all black students at these 28 campuses identified themselves as immigrants or children of immigrants.  Only 9 percent of the total black population in the United States can be classified as immigrants or children of immigrants.”

With regards to the “benefits of diversity” rationale argued by colleges in support of race-based admissions preferences, I refer readers to my 2021 blog “Talking About Diversity, Equity, and Belonging” (https://tomjones69.comtalking-about-diversity-equity-and-belonging).  Based on a webinar I attended (“Foundations of Diversity, Equity, and Belonging”) presented by Cornell University’s Dean of Students Office, my blog suggests that the identity politics and critical race theory ideology in vogue at Cornell and many other universities does not foster diverse communities of learning and intellectual inquiry.

Racial preferences in college admissions are America’s third era of race-based moral contradiction.  It is time for that to end.  There is no convincing moral justification for continuing to extend college admissions preferences to recent Caribbean and African immigrants, whose families voluntarily came to America and did not suffer slavery or decades of racial segregation and discrimination in America.  And there is no persuasive moral justification for continuing to extend college admissions preferences to children of high income families of color, who should compete on the same basis as other high income children.

In fairness, the era of racial preferences in college admissions did achieve some good.  The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education estimates that approximately 10,000 African Americans held a four-year college degree in the 1920s.  The U.S. Bureau of the Census (Educational Attainment in the United States, February 2022) estimates that eight million living African Americans held at least a four year college degree in 2021 (28.1% of living African Americans 25 years or older, compared to 41.9% of non-Hispanic whites).  This is great progress.  The next wave of progress should be driven by black parents demanding improved performance from the K-12 schools their children attend, thereby enabling more black students to compete for college admission on a level playing field.  Increased black voter support for expansion of high-performing charter schools would be a good step in the right direction.

I think American law and public policy should be neutral in regard to race.  We should adhere to our constitutional principles that all Americans are created equal, and all Americans deserve equal protection under law.  America cannot succeed as a multiracial and multicultural democracy on any other basis.  The Supreme Court majority opinion was correct — college admissions should be based on individual applicant merit, not group identity.

What do you think?