As the Supreme Court revisits the use of race in college admissions
next week, critics of affirmative action are hopeful the justices will
roll back the practice. A new report out Wednesday offers a big reason
for their optimism: evidence from at least some of the nine states that
don't use affirmative action that leading public universities can bring
meaningful diversity to their campuses through race-neutral means.
That
conclusion is vigorously disputed by supporters of race-based
affirmative action, including universities in states like California
which cannot under state law factor race into admissions decisions. The
new report, by the Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century
Foundation and prominent advocate of class-based affirmative action,
calls those states' race-neutral policies largely successful. The
University of California and others call them a failure that's left
their campuses inadequately representative of the states they serve.
Kahlenberg
also acknowledges that highly selective universities like UCLA and the
Universities of California-Berkeley and Michigan haven't recovered from
drop-offs in minority enrollments after voters in those states outlawed
racial preferences.
But in most places, the report argues, a
combination of measures -- aggressive outreach, de-emphasizing of
standardized tests, affirmative action based on class instead of race,
and even getting rid of legacy preferences that mostly benefit whites --
has allowed minority representation on their campuses to recover to
previous levels.
Seven states have banned racial preferences in
admissions outright -- Washington, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New
Hampshire, California and Florida. In Texas and Georgia leading public
universities use a race-neutral system, though the University of Texas
has maintained some use of affirmative action. It's that policy at UT
that's now before the court in a case brought by Abigail Fisher, a
rejected white applicant. Arguments are next Wednesday.
In its
last two major affirmative action decisions, in 1978 and 2003, the court
essentially took universities at their word when they argued it's
impossible to achieve adequate racial diversity without factoring race
into admissions. But in the 2003 decision, involving the University of
Michigan, the court also indicated it would pay close attention to
race-neutral experiments in the states to make sure racial preferences
were really necessary to achieve diversity.
This time around, the
swing vote is likely Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in the case
nine years ago, precisely because he believed colleges need to try
harder to achieve diversity by other means before resorting to racial
preferences.
"It's the central question in Fisher: whether race-neutral alternatives will work," Kahlenberg said.
Kahlenberg says the state data, compiled by Halley Potter, shows they do.
At
the University of Washington, for instance, black and Latino enrollment
fell after the use of race was banned but has since surpassed previous
levels. At the University of Florida, Hispanic enrollment is higher and
black enrollment is comparable to before race was banned (though the
report's figures show black enrollment has fallen lately from nearly 15%
to below 10%).
In Texas, diversity numbers plummeted during a
period in the late 1990s when the university wasn't using affirmative
action. The state implemented a "Top 10 percent" plan granting automatic
admission to top high school students based on class rank, and its
enrollment of underrepresented minorities has risen overall.
But
supporters of affirmative action draw different lessons from the
experiences of the states trying race-neutral methods. For one thing,
they note states like California, Florida and Texas are much more
diverse now, so holding minority numbers steady isn't progress. UT,
which now uses race as a factor for a small part of its class, argues
the Top 10 percent plan failed to provide sufficient diversity, noting
blacks remain underrepresented and many classrooms lack minority voices.
"If
there were a better way we'd love to see it happen, but we haven't,"
Hilary Shelton, senior vice president for policy and advocacy at the
NAACP, said of race-neutral alternatives to ensuring minorities are
represented at leading colleges ."What we keep seeing happen is when
these programs are stripped away we end up doing much worse in the areas
of integration."
The nearly 100 briefs filed in the Fisher case
also include several from social science researchers arguing
race-neutral alternatives don't work. In its brief supporting Texas, the
University of California argues that when state voters ended
affirmative action in 1996, it was unable to enroll a critical mass of
black students, particularly the two most prominent campuses -- Berkeley
and UCLA.
California spent tens of millions of dollars expanding
outreach, de-emphasized standardized tests and even implemented a policy
similar to Texas' Top 10 percent plan, the university told the court.
But the results weren't satisfactory. In 1995, black students accounted
for 7.3% of admitted freshmen at Berkeley and 6.7% at UCLA; the figures
today are 3.9% and 3.8%, respectively.
"The University of
California has tried almost everything (to recruit more minority
students)," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project
at UCLA. "It's true the least selective colleges of the University of
California are highly diversified, but we've had almost a disappearance
of black students here at UCLA."
Highly selective institutions
like Berkeley and UCLA generate a disproportionate share of future
leaders, Orfield says, and are key pathways to professional and graduate
schools. Without using race in admissions, such universities will look
hardly anything like the states they're supposed to serve, and minority
students won't have access to critical opportunities.
"We have to
figure out a way to develop their talents and we have to figure out a
way to create leadership that can work together across racial and ethnic
lines in this country," he said, noting the country's two largest
regions, the South and West, now have a majority of non-white students.
Already, he said, black students one-fifth as likely to be admitted to
highly selective institutions as white students, and Latinos one-third.
Were the court to force colleges nationwide to try race-neutral programs "it would just make a bad situation worse," he said.
Kahlenberg
agrees low minority enrollments at elite institutions as a problem. But
he says at all but the most selective universities, race-neutral
alternatives have produced at least as much diversity as policies that
considered race. And at the most elite, like Berkeley, a blanket ban on
using race would solve the problem because those schools would no longer
lose so many minority applicants to top private colleges that can use
race.
To Kahlenberg, the arguments all point to affirmative action
based on class, not race. Even President Obama, he notes, has said that
his own daughters shouldn't receive preferences because of their race.
"It's
far easier for universities to provide a racial preference that brings
in upper-middle class students of color," he said, than to spend money
on financial aid and support services for low-income students of any
race.
Associated Press