A guide to this year’s affirmative-action rulings
It could be any day now. The Supreme Court of the United States will decide two cases filed by the same petitioner, against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The decisions could outright eliminate the use of race in admissions, altering access to selective institutions across the country. As higher-education officials await the decisions, the Race on Campus newsletter assembled a list of must-read articles on the topic and a cheat sheet on why each piece matters to the conversation.
What to Know About Race-Conscious Admissions
The Chronicle has assembled a guide that details the past and current state of race-informed admissions, along with links to deep dives on the issue.
The Supreme Court Is Poised to Reverse Affirmative Action: Here’s What You Need to Know
The Brookings Institution, a progressive think tank, assembled its own explainer on the coming court decisions. Richard O. Lempert lays out the history of decisions that led higher education to this crossroads.
After Affirmative Action, Meritocracy?
In a detailed report, Robert VerBruggen, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, looks at the future of college admissions absent the use of affirmative action. Flagship public universities may become more creative in crafting admissions policies to maintain what diversity they have, he says.
After Affirmative Action: How Effective Are ‘Race Neutral’ Alternatives? California and Michigan Offer Sobering Lessons.
California has been at the game of race-neutral admissions since residents voted to ban affirmative-action programs at the state and local levels in 1996. The result was a significant reduction in the percentage of Black and Hispanic students across the prestigious University of California system. This article, by Katherine Mangan, a senior writer at The Chronicle, also notes the reduction in students of color at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor after that state banned affirmative action in admissions.
Affirmative Action’s Big Win Always Had an Asterisk: A Landmark Decision in 2003 Posed Questions About Fairness That Remain Unresolved
Eric Hoover, a senior writer at The Chronicle, reminds readers that we have been here before in a piece on a victory for proponents of affirmative action in a 2003 Supreme Court case. That narrow win was celebrated at the time, but left race-conscious admissions open to future threats.
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