The Supreme Court Is Poised to Rip ‘the Bandage Off the Wound’ in Admissions. Healing Would Mean Many Reforms.

The debate over race-conscious admissions policies has been blazing for so long that an observer might have trouble seeing the world beyond the flames. But as a new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce clarifies in great detail, those controversial policies have never been an adequate remedy for the vast racial and socioeconomic inequities found throughout all levels of American education.

Now, with the U.S. Supreme Court seemingly poised to end or curtail race-conscious admissions nationwide, the report’s authors argue that it’s high time to confront those inequities — and for colleges to help lead the way. “We need to recognize that the campus diversity achieved through race-conscious admissions practices has served to conceal, and divert attention from, much bigger problems in education and elsewhere,” the report says. “The Supreme Court will have ripped the bandage off the wound, leaving us no choice but to tend to the segregation, inequality, and bias in education and broader society that hinder” underrepresented minority students applying to selective colleges.

The robust report underscores an important fact: While race-conscious admissions policies have helped colleges enroll more Black and Latino students, those policies haven’t resulted in their equitable representation, relative to their share of the college-age population, at the nation’s most-selective institutions. “Over the past 30 years, white students have consistently held a significant advantage in terms of access to selective colleges, with their share of enrollment more than 10 percentage points above their share of the graduating high-school class,” the report says. “Over the same time frame, the Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino share of enrollment at such institutions has been one-quarter to one-half of their share of all of the nation’s high-school graduates.”

The demise of Grutter, the 2003 Supreme Court decision upholding the limited use of race in admissions, would make it more difficult, if not impossible, for selective colleges to maintain current levels of racial and ethnic diversity — such as it is — on their campuses, the authors write. Recently, the center conducted simulations of enrollment outcomes using six different admissions models, including race-neutral ones, as described in a previous report. Its conclusion: “Nothing substitutes for explicitly considering race or ethnicity in admissions when trying to promote racial and ethnic diversity.”

But if that long-used admissions tool is taken away, what can colleges do? Only by enacting sweeping reforms can institutions offset major declines in underrepresented minority students that would result from a ban on race-conscious admissions, the authors argue. The catch: Many prominent institutions have long resisted substantive changes to the status quo in the admissions realm. Selective colleges, the report says, “would have to take steps they have been loath to consider, such as eliminating admissions preferences for legacy students, student-athletes, and other groups now favored, such as wealthy students who won’t need financial aid.”

The authors argue that so-called class-conscious admissions models could result in greater student diversity than the current system does — but only if all institutions adopted those models, drew from larger, more diverse applicant pools, and discontinued admissions practices that favor legacies, the children of big donors, and athletes. And selective colleges, the report says, also would have to enroll more students with lower standardized-test scores and high-school grade-point averages.

The above scenarios, the authors write, “envision an idealized world that ignores the way that selective colleges now compete: on the basis of prestige and exclusivity. Given the decades that colleges have invested in their brands and attaining their advantages in admissions, they are not at all likely to throw away that model and start anew.” Nor are so-called elite institutions likely to support the report’s unlikely recommendation that the federal government require that federal Pell Grant recipients account for at least one-fifth of enrollment at every college in the nation. (Hold your breath at your own peril, dear reader.)

As the report explains in great detail, the racial and socioeconomic inequities at selective colleges are deeply rooted in the K-12 system. If and when race-conscious admissions becomes extinct, the authors write, the push for greater equity in education will shift to courts and state legislatures grappling with racial segregation and inequitable funding in the nation’s schools.

But colleges leaders, especially admissions and enrollment officials, surely shouldn’t act as if they, too, won’t remain in the spotlight of the nation’s enduring debate about who gets a seat — and an affordable offer — at selective colleges. The choices those officials make, the strategies they emphasize, and the priorities they pursue will continue to shape the educational opportunities of living, breathing students who are underrepresented in higher education.

Colleges tend to operate in a bubble, in which their own wants and wishes reign supreme. The report includes a reminder about the importance of admissions and enrollment leaders helping their institutions see beyond that bubble: Enrollment officials, the report says, “can end up so focused on achieving specific numerical outcomes that they lose sight of how their decisions are affecting students and broader society.”

At the same time, admissions and enrollment leaders are often keen observers of the world beyond their campuses — and are among the staunchest proponents of race-conscious admissions. Its demise, the report concludes, should serve as a wake-up call, one that opens the nation’s eyes to “the conditions that made race-conscious admissions necessary in the first place.”