Colleges Still Trying to Get Around Supreme Court Ruling on Affirmative Action
“some schools aren’t even remotely subtle about their motivations”
It’s like the campus left doesn’t even know how to operate without this policy. They cannot let it go.
The New York Post reports:
How colleges brazenly get around Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling
Now that race-based affirmative action in college admissions has been overturned in a landmark Supreme Court decision, colleges, and universities are scrambling to diversify their student bodies without running afoul of civil rights law.
Several top-ranked schools are rolling out a slew of new essay prompts that fish for demographic information with leading questions — and some are going so far as to directly ask about prospective students’ race.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore asks students to “tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual…”
Meanwhile, Rice University in Houston asks applicants: “What perspectives shaped by your background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity inspire you to join our community of change agents at Rice?”
And every single Ivy League school has added an application question about students’ backgrounds, according to college admission expert and Ivy Coach managing partner Brian Taylor.
It’s a clever loophole: ask about race … without expressly requiring students to write about their race.
And some schools aren’t even remotely subtle about their motivations.
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Comments
Unless they had outlawed the college essay, it’s hard to imagine that SCOTUS could have stopped this sort of thing. They mentioned it in their ruling, not to give colleges the idea (they need no help with that) but to warn against abuse of the technique.
Now if the result of the admissions season is a racial breakdown like the past, where data show that the objective criteria are much lower for some races than others (however colleges want to push words around) I expect they can be sued and lose again in a class action, this time with at least thousands of dollars of damages per denied student in the class.
SCOTUS said “don’t try”. It’s hard to imagine that they could have been clearer.
I remember seeing an interview with, I think, the dean of the Howard University medical school. Since it’s a HBCU, they might have even more interest in racially discriminating in favor of black applicants, but they think that now would be illegal.
The dean wondering how he could word an essay prompt to get applicants to disclose their race without explicitly asking for it. It seems that schools have settled on asking for it explicitly, within a list of other things the student might mention. It seems to me that SCOTUS requires that it not be in that list, so some of these prompts should now be illegal.
Sounds like it’s time to sue and go for damages. I think asking for the entire endowment Harvard is sitting on would be a good start.
With this, it’s just a matter of time before it’s back before the Supreme Court–an examination of the applicants, the questions, and the responses, with the success rates should demonstrate it’s still going on–just not quite as blatantly
Rice University in Houston asks applicants: “What perspectives shaped by your background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity inspire you to join our community of change agents at Rice?”
Uh, no, I think I’ll be going to Texas A&M. They don’t have a “community of change agents.” They just have a bunch of engineers.