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Despite all the money spent by right-wing legal activists to get the Supreme Court to strike down race-conscious college admissions policies, and despite all the attention on the resulting decision, only a small minority of college students ever attend schools that use(d) affirmative action. The court’s decision sends an awful message that will set back the cause of equality at the nation’s most selective schools and create a barrier for some applicants to those schools. But for most would-be college students in the U.S., it’s not going to be a new barrier to admission.
The reality, as sociologists Richard Arum and Mitchell Stevens wrote in The New York Times, is that a majority of Black, Hispanic, and white students attend colleges or universities that admit 75% or more of their applicants. Only Asian students are more likely than not to attend schools that admit less. (This is part of why, after failing with some white plaintiffs, right-wing legal activists turned to Asian students as their cudgel against race-conscious admissions.) Schools like Harvard University loom large in elite circles and the popular imagination, but just 6% of students attend colleges that accept 25% or less of applicants. Only 10% of students attend schools that admit between 25% and 50% of applicants. And, of course, nearly 40% of high school graduates don’t immediately go to college.
The Supreme Court decision is most directly and concretely about who is admitted to the most elite circles, the small set of higher education institutions from which a disproportionate number of members of Congress and Wall Street bankers and corporate executives and high-end management consultants—and, heaven knows, Supreme Court justices—are drawn. It sends a loud message about the importance of protecting racial hierarchies in the U.S., insisting that efforts to promote equality more generally are illegitimate forms of discrimination. And it hints at the possibility of future decisions dismantling equality efforts in other areas of life, such as in anti-discrimination efforts in corporate hiring. The decision may also do concrete damage outside of the most selective schools if potential college applicants—not realizing that the schools they were going to apply to never used race as a factor in admissions—decide not to apply at all. Black and Latino students may get the message that rejection is likely and opt out when in reality their chances haven’t changed at all.
But Arum and Stevens argue that there is a way to meaningfully promote equality through higher education that doesn’t involve Harvard or top public universities like the University of North Carolina. It’s by funding and supporting the schools that a majority of students actually attend. The funding disparities are shocking:
Consider the amount of money schools report spending on student instruction each year. For example, in our state, California, U.C.L.A. and the private liberal-arts college Pomona report spending richly per student at $60,528 and $40,275, respectively. Meanwhile, less selective and more diverse institutions like San Francisco State ($8,087) and California State University, Los Angeles ($6,631), report expenditures that are less than a quarter of those amounts.
Undo some of that inequality in funding and you promote opportunity for the large number of students who attend the currently underfunded schools. This is a policy question. According to a 2008 analysis by economist Philip Trostel, between 1984 and 2004, funding for higher education dropped from 4.1% of state budgets to 1.8% of state budgets. A 2020 report from the National Education Association found that 32 states were spending less on public higher education than they had in 2008, at the beginning of the Great Recession. Additionally, the NEA found that more public higher education dollars were going to things that don’t directly help student learning, like hiring administrators and servicing debt for construction. To the first point, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that the number of business and financial operations staff rose by 25% between 2012 and 2018, while the number of full-time faculty rose by just 5% and the number of student-facing support staff fell by 10%. To the latter point, Massachusetts public colleges and universities were paying $2,500 per student per year to cover capital debt.
There’s a huge problem of overall investment in public higher education, in other words, and particularly outside of the high-profile flagship state schools. As a college degree has become more important in getting more of the jobs that actually pay a living wage, per-student public funding has cratered. (That in turn contributes to the student debt crisis as tuition rises to make up for effective decreases in public funding.) There’s additionally a problem of money going to things like more and more administrators rather than teachers. All of that can be solved without running up against this Supreme Court decision.
The right-wing Supreme Court majority’s rejection of college affirmative action was racist, historically illiterate, and highly selective in its targets. It’s an abomination. But there are policy answers that are completely race-blind and would directly affect far more students: Those answers start with funding public higher education. States can go back and look at their inflation-adjusted per-student funding levels of decades past and start passing budgets that restore those levels. By doing that, they would broaden opportunity, promote inequality, and fight the student debt crisis all at the same time.
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Laura Clawson
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