Affirmative action is (probably mostly) dead

The dial is turned down, if not all the way off

As many expected, the Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action. Colleges will no longer be able to consider race in admission. We’re going to sidestep the culture war—the market for hot takes is well supplied—and focus on what this means for your kid.

What does it mean for your kid?

We’ll start with the obvious. If your child belongs to a racial group other than white or Asian-American, he or she now faces a narrower path into colleges than previously. The largest benefit lost is probably for Black applicants.

If your child is white or Asian-American, he or she now faces less of a disadvantage in admission. How much broader is that path in, now? It depends on the extent to which colleges find and use workarounds.

Colleges may find partial workarounds

We can look to California and Michigan to see how colleges may respond. After those two states banned race-based affirmative action, the UC system and the University of Michigan tried to get to the same racial admission outcomes without considering race. Here’s how UMich describes it:

“In continued efforts to cultivate and support a diverse student body, the university made significant commitments to practices, policies and procedures focused on race-neutral factors. These considerable efforts—buoyed by a large, campuswide diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan initiative — have resulted in noteworthy diversity strides in the representation of more socio-economically disadvantaged students and of some racial/ethnic communities.”

At UC Berkeley, the essential changes were encouraging more Black and Latino students to apply and changing the order of application review to make admission readers read essays before looking at GPA.

That latter practice is a luxury. Reading essays first means a lot more work for admission officers, who prefer to weed out the “auto-denies” using objective measures like GPA, number of APs, and test scores. I doubt this practice will catch on widely, because it would make colleges pay for more admission officer man-hours.

These changes haven’t yielded the same ethnic makeup that prevailed before the state banned affirmative action. A Cal administrator explains that:

“UC Berkeley has spent many millions of dollars and tons of time and effort to increase diversity in race-neutral ways and yet has found no single method that led to pre-Prop. 209 diversity numbers.”

I expect the colleges that can afford more outreach and more admission-office labor may use these and other workarounds, but that those workarounds won’t enable them to admit the same racial makeup as before. The dial on racial preferences will be turned down, if not all the way off.

How will we know?

Obviously, regression results would provide clear insight. What are the new coefficients on the dummy variables for Black, Latino, Native American, etc.? We won’t see that data. The lawsuits that forced the end of affirmative action also pried open Harvard and UNC admission data, and there won’t be any more of those lawsuits now.

Instead, we’ll have to look at the racial makeup that prevails at a given college that just had to end race-based affirmative action. We can discern something about the race-neutral workarounds described above by comparing that college’s racial distribution to those of colleges that do not consider race in admission, like the UCs and UMichigan.

These comparisons will be imperfect. The University of Michigan, for example, almost certainly enrolls more Arab-Americans than colleges in other states; there is no UC Dearborn. But we forge on amid uncertainty.

Socioeconomic affirmative action may happen at the colleges least exposed to competition

One of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses argued for affirmative action based on socioeconomic status, rather than race. This is kind of sweetly naïve. He’s asking colleges to take food out of their own mouths. Most of them won’t do that; they already give students who don’t need financial aid a boost in admission.

The colleges most shielded from competition, either by state taxpayers or wide moats of prestige, may be able to indulge ideologically by giving poor kids an admission boost. These are the same kinds of schools that can afford to ignore applicants’ test scores.

Many colleges can’t afford to do either.

Ignore the test-optional hype

Colleges may start banging the test-optional drum as a way to look DEI-concerned in the wake of this Supreme Court decision. Don’t believe their press releases. Believe their behavior, revealed preferences, admission numbers. What share of the admitted class submitted test scores? If somebody claims to be taking food out of his own mouth, my starting response is skepticism.

Test-optional policies are a smokescreen. Test scores help a college assess whether an admitted student will bring four years of tuition payments or wash out halfway through freshman year. Test scores boost a college up the US News rankings.

I’ll be watching the admission landscape closely as admission offices comply (or not) with this ruling. If you want to know how the trends I see affect your kid’s chances, you can book a one-on-one session. I look forward to working with your family!