Colleges Weigh In on Supreme Court Decision

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Another approach is to put greater emphasis on students who have overcome adversity. Legacy preferences where children of alumni are given admissions boosts are being examined as well.

Standardized tests like the SAT and ACT may become optional.  In fact, during the pandemic, hundreds of colleges made entrance exams optional and there is a growing push to make the change permanent.

It is important to note that diversity and inclusion programs which have become code words for Left-leaning and Marxist ideas have now become big business.  College diversity and inclusion offices “rake in sky-high salaries as debt-saddled students face rising costs.” In fact, “Robert Sellers, Michigan’s vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer…  took in $431,000 annually [.]”

Martha Bradley-Dorsey asks 

Just how much taxpayer money is being spent on DEI, and what are the offices doing? In order to find out, I began a research project for CSPI to gather basic budgetary information across a large number of universities. Unfortunately, it failed miserably. 

Cutting the project several ways, I first cast a wide net to find budget information for 200 publicly funded universities from all 50 states’ budget officials. While nearly all responded to my ‘public-information law’ requests, I learned that many state fiscal officials don’t maintain any detailed university budget information. Considering that public universities receive about $171 billion in government funding [emphasis mine] annually, it was frustrating to find out that information about how money was spent was not easily available.

It has become a permanent diversity-industrial complex and universities will fight to maintain a system of racial spoils, even as Chief Justice Roberts warns that ‘universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

Now that affirmative action has been in place for over a half a century, how has it actually fared?  In A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, Michael Barone writes that “Good intentions all too often produce bad results.  Racial quotas and preferences in high education… [which were violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] have not only harmed colleges and universities but have hurt most of all the intended beneficiaries.”

Ramesh Thakur writes that

The primary victims of the US universities’ race-based admissions for several decades have been Asian-Americans. Yet, in another irony, the mother of all affirmative action programs, along with the many pathologies that arise from them and fossilize into a settled and stable equilibrium, is India.

India is the biggest laboratory in human history for affirmative action policies mandated by the constitution. However, by institutionalizing affirmative action in favour of any one group, the actions inescapably discriminate against individuals from other groups, alienate them, feed their sense of grievance and can contribute to a growing militancy –without necessarily helping the most needy.

Every affirmative action produces an equal and opposite sectarian reaction. If a government frames public policy in a group-conscious way, it cannot expect groups suffering relative deprivation to ignore group identity. For any one student admitted under a racial quota, only one alternative person would have succeeded in a merit system. But hundreds of rejected students end up feeling aggrieved and resentful for having lost out…

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court ruling, many “universities have made no secret that, regardless of how the Court ruled, they would continue to bring to campus students who wouldn’t have made the cut if they had not been black.” How can universities do an end-run around the Supreme Court?

To salvage its rapidly diminishing fortunes, the College Board itself has joined the bandwagon. Tucked into [The College Board] SAT digitization project is the disclosure that test items will be removed if different races perform differently on them. The College Board thus aims to create a Harrison Bergeron test, rigged to equalize outcomes by race.

The next step for universities is to concoct a set of proxies for race that are facially race-neutral in order to deliver ‘enough’ blacks to campus. Socioeconomic preference is the leading criterion. The University of California system already deploys it with increasing finesse; Asian families in California have reported the devastating impact of the preference.

Not to be outdone, Biden announced actions to promote diversity and without any shame, the U.S. Department of Education maintains that diversity, equity, and inclusion training are consistent with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In fact, the “diversity conceit” flies in the “face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal.”

What seems to be hidden in this entire issue is that “traditional public schools are dumbing down their curriculum, either in favor of ideological indoctrination or just to hide academic outcomes.”  Why, for example, has California stopped offering algebra in eighth grade and calculus in high school?  Is it any wonder black and Hispanic students will not get into Harvard based on test scores alone?  In reality, we wouldn’t need affirmative action if K-12 Schools actually worked.

Paul Frijters writes that “not only do our children have lower IQs and a reduced capacity to think abstractly, but the mobility of young people is lower.”  He asserts that bureaucratic bloat needs to be reduced. Moreover, universities have become “businesses run for personal glory and profit of its management, rather than an institution servicing a public good function that reflects the desire for knowledge in a whole community.”  In addition, “mediocrity and cowardice” too often describe today’s schools of higher learning. 

Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com

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