For more than 50 years,
colleges have taken different approaches towards admissions to make their campuses more
diverse.
Considering an applicant's race,
generally called affirmative action has long been standard at universities from U
Penn to Harvard,
but not anymore.
The Supreme Court has ruled that no college in the US can consider an applicant's race in
admissions.
Nine states have already banned this practice.
California did almost 25 years ago just enough time for a
detailed study on its consequences.
Once you have the data set in hand,
there's an awful lot you can learn honestly pretty quickly.
Right.
Basically,
what I'm doing is just differences in means what happened to the kids after 98.
What happened to the kids before 98?
Just those comparisons tell you an awful lot about not just what happened in California,
but I think what we can expect to happen across the country.
Here's how affirmative action changed college admissions and what the future of higher education
might look like without it before affirmative action,
selecting which of these student applicants would be accepted was fairly simple.
Most colleges would essentially filter students,
they'd set factors like a minimum GPA or a minimum test score.
And voila,
there's your pool of accepted students,
obviously,
the more selective the school,
the higher those standards were,
but a big part of both test scores and grades are pre 18
educational investment and honestly non educational investment.
The degree to which you had a stable household,
the degree to which you had some notion of,
you know,
being able to focus on your work,
the better a high school you go to,
the better the test score you get,
the better uh you know,
sort of access to resources outside of high school,
like tutoring or other services that you had access to before 18,
the better you test,
it's clear if you break down A T scores by the background of the student,
students from higher income households score higher.
Same if you look at who grew up in a household with a parent with a graduate degree versus
no degree that also reflects in race with black and
Hispanic students scoring lower than white and Asian students.
So in the 19 seventies,
when UC Berkeley's admissions really just looked at GPA and test scores,
the student population was less than 5% black and Hispanic students who
might have been really high ability,
just weren't able to get the kind of education that would lead them to the kind of high ST
standardized tests that would get them into a school.
Like Berkeley,
these schools recognized that they needed some way of admitting those students.
And so they started affirmative action policies to try to bring in students from sort of
every part of in this case,
the state of California.
So in the eighties,
they began considering race in their admissions decisions.
It worked by the nineties,
they would chart students on a social diversity index.
If you were low income and a minority and had moderate grades and test scores you were
in,
if you were high income and white,
you needed higher scores to get in some colleges like the UC
Davis School of Medicine used quotas utilizing a similar filtering
system,
but a few spots would be reserved for minority applicants.
In the late seventies.
A white student named Becky fell here not good enough to get in among other white
applicants,
but with higher test scores and GPA than the minority students who got in.
He sued claiming discrimination.
It made it to the Supreme Court.
He won and was admitted.
The court ruled that while the goal of achieving a diverse student body is sufficiently compelling
to justify consideration of race in admissions decisions,
specific quotas went too far.
More than two dozen Supreme Court cases have followed,
including the landmark Grutter V Bolinger in 2003,
which upheld that race could be considered as part of a highly individualized
holistic review of each applicant's file.
That's essentially how affirmative action has worked the last 20 years instead of just
filtering a pool of applicants.
Most colleges look at each person individually like Harvard will look at SAT
and GPA but also things like extra curricular activities,
essays,
awards,
life experiences,
recommendations,
leadership and yes race.
But this is exactly what the Supreme Court has now struck down in two separate
cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Plaintiffs argued this holistic approach was just a cover for discrimination against
white and Asian students.
The Supreme Court agreed ruling that eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating
all of it.
The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual.
Not on the basis of race.
Many universities have for too long done just the opposite,
which means in this holistic review,
race can no longer be considered to the degree that these universities want to maintain their
current level of racial diversity.
California has shown that that is infeasible at least given the policies that California
has tried to implement in the nineties,
Californians voted for proposition 209,
which banned public universities from considering race.
Zach blamer conducted a massive study in California following studentss that applied
before and after prop 209,
looking at where they eventually enrolled,
graduated and then at their wage statements can see so long as they stay in the state of
California where they work and how much they earn all the way through 2020
25 years.
Almost after the affirmative action ban was implemented what he found was that Black and Hispanic
enrollments at more selective schools like Berkeley dramatically fell when they couldn't
include race in their admissions process.
Moderately selective schools had almost no change.
But enrollment at less selective schools actually rose because most Black and
Hispanic students didn't not go to college,
they just went to less esteemed ones.
You got this cascade effect of Black and Hispanic students on average enrolling at a
university that's just a little bit less selective than the universities.
They used to have access to kids who used to go to Berkeley are now going to UC Davis.
Kids who used to go to UC Davis are now going to UC Santa Cruz.
What happened is pretty substantial negative ramifications for these students.
They became less likely to earn stem degrees,
less likely to go to graduate school.
Those with the lowest GPA and test scores became less likely to even graduate.
And overall Black and Hispanic students earned less in their careers than those admitted
before prop 2091 thing we've learned from affirmative action bans is that the
kids who are admitted to more selective universities as a result of race based affirmative action tend
to receive greater value from those institutions in terms of the degree to which those
institutions lead them to more successful jobs or more success generally in the labor
market than the Whiter Asian students who tend to take their places after the end of affirmative
action programs blier has also studied the effects of what's called race neutral
admissions policies which can include outreach and income based admissions as
has Georgetown University,
they both found the same result.
It seems like all of these race neutral alternatives that universities can implement have a
tendency toward increasing the diversity of campuses.
But they don't get you anywhere close to the level of racial diversity that's provided by race based affirmative action.
Harvard said if it were to not include race in their holistic review,
black and Hispanic enrollment will decline by almost half Berkeley.
Even though it has made strides since prop 209 to enroll more Hispanic students,
the black student population is still below where it was when it could consider race in
admissions.
I think we'll see declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment,
potentially in some cases,
quite severe declines in the next couple of years.
And as a result,
you're going to have this sort of downward shift Black and Hispanic students enrolling in less selective schools than they had access
to previously.
There's no clear silver bullet for such universities just to maintain diversity as it is right
now.