College admissions and race relations
College admissions and race relations in North America are deeply intertwined issues that reflect broader societal dynamics. A college degree is often seen as a pathway to success, yet there are significant disparities in enrollment and graduation rates among different racial and ethnic groups. Historically, affirmative action policies were introduced in the late 20th century to address these inequalities, allowing for race-conscious admissions that aimed to boost the representation of underrepresented minorities. However, these policies have been controversial, with arguments about fairness and the implications of admitting students under different standards.
Critics point out that such practices can lead to perceptions of lowered academic rigor and the underpreparedness of admitted students, resulting in high dropout rates among some minority groups. Additionally, measures like California's Proposition 209 have sought to eliminate affirmative action, leading to declines in admissions for students of color at prestigious institutions. Recent legal challenges, including cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, have reignited debates about the constitutionality and future of race-conscious admissions. The ongoing discussions highlight the complex balance between promoting diversity and ensuring equitable access to educational opportunities for all students.
College admissions and race relations
In North America, a degree from a college or university has long been viewed as an important means of attaining a measure of financial and social success. For a combination of reasons, however, certain ethnic and racial groups matriculate at considerably lower rates than White and Asian American students. Certain minority groups are even more underrepresented among graduating students. This phenomenon is commonly viewed as one reason that people of color experience higher levels of poverty and lower social standing.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many colleges and universities implemented affirmative action components in their admissions processes, also known as race-conscious admissions policies. Such policies frequently included provisions that allowed applicants from targeted minority groups to be admitted with lower test scores than those in nontargeted groups. Some programs set quotas for certain categories of students, essentially dividing the available slots into blocks defined by race, gender, or ethnicity. Such outright quota setting was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision.
For the next two decades, race and ethnicity continued to influence college admissions policies and decisions, albeit not as the sole criterion. The practice became increasingly controversial, however. Many White people, like Allan Bakke, believed that affirmative action discriminated against them. Affirmative action was attacked on other grounds as well. Some students of color resented the fact that, irrespective of their actual abilities, it was assumed that they were accepted to college under a lower standard. Others chafed at the very notion that certain groups of people, by simple virtue of their skin color, required special accommodations to enter college. Also some qualified nontargeted applicants of color, such as some Asian Americans, were denied admission to make way for targeted applicants of color.
Another controversial effect of affirmative action in college admissions was the presence of large numbers of students of color who, being admitted under lower standards, were underprepared for the rigors of college. As a result, many minority groups have experienced disproportionately high failure and dropout rates. Some see such failures as evidence of curricula and standards biased against people of color. Others have charged that underprepared students do not belong in college and that efforts to retain these at-risk students have essentially lowered standards in curricula and graduation requirements.
As the academic and social consequences of affirmative action in college admissions became more openly debated in the 1990s, efforts to end the practice became more vigorous. Affirmative action suffered a number of blows in the late 1990s, including a 1995 decision by the Regents of the University of California to end affirmative action in admissions and hiring. The following year, the state’s voters passed Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, which placed the Regents’ ban on affirmative action in state law and extended it to all public hiring and admissions. Similar actions were taken in other states, notably Texas. The immediate effects were mixed, with some of the more prestigious universities experiencing sharp drops in admissions of people of color. Conservatives have viewed these results as proof that racial preferences had been allowing unqualified applicants to be admitted simply on the basis of skin color or ethnicity. Liberals decry the resultant lack of racial and ethnic diversity on some campuses. By the end of the 1990s, efforts were under way at some campuses to reintroduce diversity by using a different criterion, such as socioeconomic status, in processing admissions.
During the early 21st century, many college campuses continued to grow increasingly diverse due to affirmative action policies. At Harvard University, for example, the number of students of color increased from about half of all undergraduate students in 2010 to two-thirds of the student population by 2019. However, some critics maintained that the admissions systems at some elite schools like Harvard still gave preference to "legacy" admissions—that is, admissions of the children of alumni, who often come from wealthy, White families. This results in institutions with student bodies that are still skewed, despite affirmative action policies, toward the wealthy, who experience unfair advantages like not having to work campus jobs while attending school.
In October 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court heard two cases related to affirmative action. The cases, brought by students at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, both alleged that affirmative action causes unfair disadvantages to White and Asian American students. Opponents of the cases feared that campuses would become much less diverse if the Court struck down race-conscious admission policies. The decision of the Court, led by a conservative majority and released in 2023, deemed that the race-conscious policies of both universities were unconstitutional.
Bibliography
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