Life
Will Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision hurt black students?
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas is undoubtedly a death-knell for race-based affirmative action in university admissions.
Although no one can posit precisely what will happen in the future, social scientists have generated a wealth of data on affirmative action programs over the last decade that leave us in a very good position to make predictions about the world after race-based affirmative action.
One thing that we know for sure is that the vast majority of African-American students applying to college the next few years will not be affected by the ruling in the Fisher case.
On first glance, this might sound like good news. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the limited impact on African-American students is a function of how deeply entrenched race-based educational and economic inequalities are in our society and how weak existing affirmative action programs have been in addressing these problems.
Social scientists have known for decades that affirmative action programs really only matter at the top ten to fifteen percent of the more than 3,500 colleges and universities in America. This is so because it is only at these 350 to 500 institutions of higher education where the gap on standardized tests between white students and their counterparts from traditionally underrepresented groups is large enough to warrant the use of race-based affirmative action.
We know through several recent students that somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of African-Americans enrolled in college today are matriculating at institutions that are not competitive enough to utilize race-based affirmative action in admissions..