Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed: Are Elite Colleges Circumventing the Supreme Court?, by Peter Arcidiacono (Duke; Google Scholar) & Tyler Ransom (Oklahoma; Google Scholar):
In the era of race-neutral admissions, data from entering classes don’t add up.
On July 2023, the Supreme Court issued landmark decisions in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC, ruling that using race as a factor in college admissions is unconstitutional. For many years, elite universities had been given the benefit of the doubt regarding the fairness and legality of their admissions decisions. But for understandable reasons, trust in higher education has been declining over the past decade — especially among Republicans. Now, as universities report their first post-SFFA admissions results, they’re again asking for trust — even as the data suggests some may not deserve it.
What raises questions is the wide variation in how the ruling has affected universities, even within the same tier of selectivity. While some elite universities saw large drops in their Black and Hispanic enrollment — exactly what many predicted would happen — others saw no change, or even increases, in those populations. Further clouding the issue, universities have reported their demographic data in inconsistent ways, and some haven’t reported numbers at all. This pattern of varied results and opaque reporting raises the question: Are some elite universities finding ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling? Some observers have argued that they clearly are, while others suggest they are not. Still others caution that it is too early to tell.
At face value, the more highly ranked a school is, the more suspicious it is to see no change in its underrepresented-minority (URM) enrollment. This is because racial preferences — at least at the undergraduate level — primarily affect where students attend college, not whether they go to college at all. Hence, schools outside of the very top tier should expect diversity declines from their own removal of affirmative action to be partially, if not fully, offset as a result of fewer minority students being admitted to the schools ranked above them. Minority students shut out of Harvard and MIT, the theory goes, would be admitted to schools like Emory or Georgetown, and so on down the line. This redistribution effect should help maintain diversity at schools below the very top, and far enough down the selectivity ladder, could even increase it.
However, several warning signs suggest some universities may not be fully complying with the court’s ruling. First, many highly ranked universities previously argued in amicus briefs that their diversity goals could not be achieved without explicitly considering race. Yet these same institutions now claim to have maintained their desired diversity levels without any explanation beyond saying that they took a harder look at their files. Second, on average, schools with the smallest drops in URM enrollment also show the smallest increases in socioeconomic-diversity measures like first-generation status and Pell Grant eligibility. This pattern runs contrary to evidence that upweighting socioeconomic factors is one of the most effective race-neutral ways to maintain racial diversity. Such discrepancies lead longtime observers of college admissions to question whether these institutions have truly abandoned race-conscious admissions or are merely obscuring their continued use. …
The current situation is further complicated by inconsistent and often opaque reporting of racial demographics. While Princeton deserves credit for providing clear, mathematically coherent statistics that sum to 100 percent and are consistent with federal reporting mandates, many institutions have muddied the waters with overlapping categories, selective reporting of certain groups, or complete omission of key demographic data. This is not the way to rebuild trust.
To rebuild trust in higher education — particularly among skeptical conservatives — universities must embrace transparency in their admissions data. This means standardized and real-time reporting of demographic categories, clear documentation of methodological changes, and consistent disclosure of socioeconomic indicators alongside racial demographics. Competition has historically incentivized colleges and universities to withhold or obscure their admissions data for strategic advantage. This culture of opacity must give way to one of open collaboration if elite academic institutions hope to regain public confidence in the fairness and legality of their admissions practices.
Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:
- Michael C. Dorf (Cornell; Google Scholar), Does Diversity Have A Future In Legal Education? (Sept. 6, 2023)
- Richard R. W. Brooks (NYU), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern; Google Scholar) & Sarath Sanga (Yale; Google Scholar), Affirmative Action And Racial Diversity In U.S. Law Schools, 1980-2021 (Mar. 29 2024)
- Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, The State of Law School Diversity in the Wake of Affirmative Action Bans (July 16, 2024)
- Wall Street Journal, Merit, Excellence And Intelligence: An Anti-DEI Approach Catches On In Companies — Is Higher Ed Next? (July 31, 2024)
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