Tag: affirmative action

Anti-Affirmative Action Group Sues Naval Academy Over Considering Race In Admissions

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The Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group that opposes affirmative action, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the U.S. Naval Academy for using race in its admissions decisions.

The 28-page lawsuit aims to stop the Naval Academy from taking race into account when accepting students, arguing that an applicant’s race — particularly if they are Latino, African American or Native American — gives them an advantage in its admissions process. The group claims that the military school has “no justification for using race-based admissions” now that it has been outlawed for other colleges across the country.

SFFA had filed a similar lawsuit last month against West Point, just a few months after winning its lawsuit against Harvard over race-conscious admissions. In that case in June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The ruling affects colleges nationwide and puts an end to programs that were created to help students from marginalized groups secure spots in higher education.

But in a footnote to the ruling, the Supreme Court permitted race-based affirmative action for military academies, as the courts hadn’t addressed “the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context.”

President Joe Biden disagreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling and said that the U.S. military — which he described as “the finest fighting force in the history of the world” — is proof that diversity brought strength.

In fall 2021, 13% of midshipmen at the Naval Academy were Latino, 10% multiracial, 8% of Asian descent and 6% Black or African American, according to The Washington Post

Multiple military academy leaders have said that their admissions process is holistic and that they take other factors into account when accepting students, The Washington Post reported.

In the lawsuit, SFFA argues that the academy’s policy violates the Fifth Amendment, which grants equal protection. The group also points to a 2010 New York Times opinion piece written by a Naval Academy professor about the admissions process. The professor wrote that “if an applicant identifies himself or herself as non-white, the bar for qualification immediately drops.”

“Because the Academy discriminates based on race, its admission policy should be declared unlawful and enjoined,” the lawsuit says.

A spokesperson told HuffPost that the Naval Academy does not comment on any pending litigation and declined to comment on the lawsuit.

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October 5, 2023
US education chief considers new ways to discourage college admissions preference for kids of alumni

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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s education chief said he’s open to using “whatever levers” are available — including federal money — to discourage colleges from giving admissions preference to the children of alumni and donors.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said legacy admissions must be revisited for the sake of diversity on campuses following the recent Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. In a step beyond his previous comments, Cardona said he would consider taking stronger action to deter the practice.

“I would be interested in pulling whatever levers I can pull as secretary of Education to ensure that, especially if we’re giving out financial aid and loans, that we’re doing it for institutions that are providing value,” Cardona said Wednesday. He made the remark when asked about using federal money as a carrot or rod on legacy admissions.

Legacy admissions, long seen as a perk for the white and wealthy at selective colleges, have come under renewed fire since the ruling in June that colleges can no longer consider the race of applicants. By banning affirmative action but allowing legacy preferences, critics say the court left admissions even more lopsided against students of color.

Cardona didn’t elaborate on his options, but the federal government oversees vast sums of money that go to colleges in the form of student financial aid and research grants. The Education Department can also issue fines for civil rights violations, including racial discrimination.

The agency recently opened an investigation at Harvard University after a federal complaint alleged that legacy admissions amount to racial discrimination.

A handful of small colleges have disavowed legacy admissions in the wake of the affirmative action decision, but there’s been no sign of change in the upper echelons of America’s universities.

Some colleges and alumni defend the practice, saying it builds community and encourages fundraising. And as campuses become more diverse, they argue, the benefit increasingly extends to students of color and their families.

Cardona, who attended a technical high school and earned his bachelor’s degree from Central Connecticut State University, has added his voice to the advocates, civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers denouncing the practice.

“Your last name could get you into a school, or the fact that you can write a check could get you into a school,” he said. But using affirmative action to promote diversity — “that tool was taken away.”

Still, he shied away from supporting a ban of the type proposed by some Democrats in Congress and in several states. Cardona sees it as a matter of local control, with universities having the final decision.

“There is no edict coming from the secretary of Education,” he said.

Without action, Cardona warned that the nation could face the same setbacks seen in California after it ended affirmative action in 1996. The state’s most selective colleges saw steep decreases in Black and Latino enrollment, and the numbers never fully rebounded.

“If we go the route that California went when they abolished affirmative action, what chance do we have competing against China?” Cardona said. “This is more than just ensuring diverse learning environments. This is about our strength as a country.”

Advocates have also pushed the Education Department to start collecting data showing the number and demographics of legacy students.

“I was hopeful we’d be seeing more colleges volunteering to drop it,” said James Murphy, a deputy director at Education Reform Now, a nonprofit think tank. “I think I think they’ve got to keep the pressure on and shine a light on it.”

On other issues:

— Cardona said during the interview that students should be taught about the impact of slavery, including effects that linger today. When slavery ended, it didn’t end the belief in some that African Americans were inferior, and the country is still seeing the effects of unfair housing and lending policies adopted in more recent decades, he said.

“What we don’t want to do is hide the truth and act as if it didn’t happen, or that when it ended, everything was fine. I definitely don’t want to teach that there were some benefits to that for those who were enslaved,” he said.

His remarks were a veiled reference to new education standards in Florida, endorsed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, that require instruction that enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Conservatives in many states have pushed for restrictions around how schools address topics related to race and slavery.

— He said “schools should be open, period,” even if there is a new COVID-19 surge. “I worry about government overreach, sending down edicts that will lead to school closures because either folks are afraid to go in or are infected and can’t go,” he said.

He said the sense of community was lost when schools closed early in the pandemic, and that in-person instruction “should not be sacrificed for ideology.”

— Cardona declined to speculate on what the administration’s new student loan forgiveness proposal might look like or whether a final regulation could be in place before the 2024 presidential election. “We are going to work as quickly as possible,” he said. “We know there are students that are waiting, borrowers that are waiting. So many folks are struggling right now to get back up.”

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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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September 22, 2023
Group behind Supreme Court affirmative action cases files lawsuit against West Point over admissions policies

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Washington — The anti-affirmative action group behind the pair of cases that led the Supreme Court to strike down race-conscious admissions programs at higher-education institutions has filed a lawsuit against West Point, arguing the service academy unlawfully discriminates against applicants on the basis of race through its admissions policy.

Filed in federal district court in White Plains, New York, the lawsuit from organization Students for Fair Admissions claims that West Point focuses on race when admitting future cadets and engages in racial balancing to meet benchmarks for the portion of African American, Hispanic and Asian students that make up each incoming class. The academy’s use of racial classifications is unconstitutional, the group said, and should be declared unlawful.

Students for Fair Admissions is asking the court to prohibit West Point from “considering or knowing applicants’ race” when making decisions about admissions.

“West Point has no justification for using race-based admissions,” the group said in its complaint. “Those admissions are unconstitutional for all other public institutions of higher education. The Academy is not exempt from the Constitution.”

The U.S. Military Academy’s public affairs office said it “does not comment on pending litigation.”

The West Point lawsuit

The group said its membership includes two White students who are “ready and able” to apply to West Point, one this fall and the other in 2025. The first student is a high school senior in the upper Midwest who is identified as “Member A,” and the second, identified as “Member B,” is a high school student in the Southeast.

The two students wish to remain anonymous because they fear reprisal from West Point and others if their participation in the lawsuit becomes public, according to the filing.

Students for Fair Admissions argued that unless West Point is ordered to stop using race as a factor in admissions, the race of members A and B will prevent them “from competing for admission on an equal footing.”

“If West Point is allowed to continue making admissions decisions based on applicants’ race, SFFA’s members — including Members A and B and other similarly-situated applicants — will suffer harm because they will be denied the opportunity to compete for a West Point appointment on equal grounds, solely because of their race,” the group claimed.

The lawsuit states that West Point’s purported racial preferences come into play during the second stage of its admissions process, after applicants have passed medical and physical-fitness tests and secured a nomination from a member of Congress, the vice president or president. While West Point has said racial diversity provides educational and military benefits, Students for Fair Admissions argues the academy can achieve a diverse student body through race-neutral means.

“West Point’s status as a military academy does not mean that courts must defer to its conclusory assertions that it needs to employ racial preferences, let alone diminish” constitutional violations, the group claimed.

The Supreme Court affirmative action decision

Students for Fair Admissions’ challenge to West Point’s admissions policies is not unexpected — the organization indicated it was turning its attention to the service academy in August, when it launched a website called “West Point Not Fair” that sought information from prospective or unsuccessful applicants to the service academies.

The call for potential plaintiffs came on the heels of the Supreme Court’s June decision that said colleges and universities could not consider race as a factor in admissions, bringing an end to affirmative action in higher education. The landmark ruling stemmed from two challenges to the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina brought by Students for Fair Admissions

In the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s conservative majority said race-conscious admissions policies could not be reconciled with the Constitution. The programs from Harvard and the University of North Carolina used race in a negative manner and lacked meaningful endpoints, the court found.

In a footnote, Roberts singled out the military academies and effectively exempted them from the Supreme Court’s ruling, noting that the “propriety of race-based admissions systems” was not addressed in the context of the military academies.

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September 20, 2023
Harvard reworks essay requirements after affirmative action ban, emphasizes life experiences

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Harvard College is changing its essay requirements for high school seniors applying for admission, nodding to the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions.

Under the new guidelines, applicants will be required to answer five questions instead of the previous single optional essay. Students will be asked to share how their life experiences, academic achievements and extracurricular activities have shaped them, and describe their aspirations for the future, according to Harvard spokesman Jonathan Palumbo.

US college admissions offices face a challenging task as the application period begins this month. School officials will need to juggle the Supreme Court’s ban on race-based admissions with still finding ways to promote diversity in the student population.

The Supreme Court’s June ruling, delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, said that universities could still take into account an applicant’s views of how race affected their life, as long as it was directly tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the applicant can contribute to the university’s community. Roberts cautioned that “universities may not simply establish through the application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

Harvard and the University of North Carolina were named defendants in the case.

The Harvard Crimson previously reported the changes to the school’s essay requirements. Versions of Harvard’s new format existed in previous applications. Now, all applicants will have to answer the same set of questions.

Other US colleges are also adapting their approach to admissions. The University of Virginia is offering applicants a chance to explain their backgrounds and how those experiences will contribute to the school.

A revised application offers an optional essay opportunity that gives “all students – not only, for example, the children of our graduates, but also the descendants of ancestors who labored at the university, as well as those with other relationships – the chance to tell their unique stories,” President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom wrote in a letter this week.

Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college in Bronxville, New York, has even incorporated Roberts’s words into an essay prompt, requesting applicants to reflect on how they believe the court’s decision might impact or influence their goals for a college education.

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Janet Lorin, Bloomberg

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August 5, 2023
Federal court strikes down Alabama congressional map after legislature snubbed Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

A federal court blocked a newly drawn Alabama congressional map on Tuesday because it didn’t create a second majority-Black district as the Supreme Court had ordered earlier this year.

In a unanimous decision from a three-judge panel, which had overseen the case before it reached the Supreme Court, the judges wrote that they were “disturbed” by Alabama’s actions in the case.

The state had snubbed the Supreme Court’s order – a surprise 5-4 decision in June – that the maps should be redrawn. White voters currently make up the majority in six of the state’s seven congressional districts, although 27% of the state’s population is Black.

“We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires,” wrote the judges, two of whom were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

Alabama officials on Tuesday filed notice that they are appealing the ruling.

“While we are disappointed in today’s decision, we strongly believe that the Legislature’s map complies with the Voting Rights Act and the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,” the office of Alabama Attorney General Steven Marshall said in a statement. “We intend to promptly seek review from the Supreme Court to ensure that the State can use its lawful congressional districts in 2024 and beyond.”

Alabama officials also asked the three-judge court to freeze its opinion invalidating the congressional map but said they will formally ask the Supreme Court for a stay on Thursday.

This redistricting battle – and separate, pending litigation over congressional maps in states such as Georgia and Florida – could determine which party controls the US House of Representatives after next year’s elections. Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority in the chamber.

The three federal judges overseeing the Alabama case on Tuesday ordered a special master to submit three proposed maps that would create a second Black-majority district by September 25.

The panel wrote that it was “not aware of any other case” in which a state legislature had responded to being ordered to a draw map with a second majority-minority district by creating one that the state itself admitted didn’t create the required district.

“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” and Alabama’s new map, they wrote, “plainly fails to do so.”

JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, which has been fighting the case, praised the ruling: “Elected officials ignored their responsibilities and chose to violate our democracy. We hope the court’s special master helps steward a process that ensures a fair map that Black Alabamians and our state deserve.”

This summer, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, had affirmed an earlier decision by the three-judge panel and ordered the state to redraw congressional maps to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”

The Supreme Court’s surprise decision in Alabama – coming after the right-leaning high court has chipped away at other parts of the Voting Rights Act in recent years – has given fresh hope to voting rights activists and Democrats that they could prevail in challenges to other maps they view as discriminating against minorities.

But the new map approved by Alabama’s Republican-dominated legislature – and signed into law by GOP Gov. Kay Ivey – in July created only one majority-Black district and boosted the share of Black voters in a second district from roughly 30% to nearly 40%.

The pending cases center on whether GOP state legislators drew congressional maps after the 2020 census that weakened the power of Black voters in violation of Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act.

Republicans control all statewide offices in Alabama and all but one congressional seat. The single Black-majority congressional district is represented by Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, the state’s first Black woman elected to Congress.

Alabama officials have argued that the map as redrawn by state lawmakers was aimed at maintaining traditional guidelines for congressional redistricting, such as keeping together communities of interest. And they have signaled that they hope to sway one of the Supreme Court justices who sided with the majority in June.

The state’s briefs before the three-judge panel referenced a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh – one of the two conservatives who sided with the liberal justices on the high court to vote against the original Alabama map – that questioned whether “race-based redistricting” can “extend indefinitely into the future.”

The lower-court judges weren’t convinced by the state’s arguments.

They wrote that after reviewing the concurrence, as well as a part of the Supreme Court’s ruling which Kavanaugh didn’t join, “We do not understand either of those writings as undermining any aspect of the Supreme Court’s affirmance; if they did, the Court would not have affirmed the injunction.”

The judges also rejected Alabama’s argument that drawing a second Black-majority district would unconstitutionally constitute “affirmative action in redistricting.”

“Unlike affirmative action in the admissions programs the Supreme Court analyzed in [this year’s affirmative action case], which was expressly aimed at achieving balanced racial outcomes in the makeup of the universities’ student bodies, the Voting Rights Act guarantees only ‘equality of opportunity, not a guarantee of electoral success for minority-preferred candidates of whatever race,’” the panel wrote.

“The Voting Rights Act does not provide a leg up for Black voters – it merely prevents them from being kept down with regard to what is arguably the most ‘fundamental political right,’ in that it is ‘preservative of all rights’ – the right to vote.”

Earlier, in a letter to state lawmakers, Marshall had argued that a separate Supreme Court ruling in June – after the high court’s Alabama redistricting decision came down – that ended affirmative action in college admissions meant that using a map in which “race predominates” would open up the state to claims that it was violating the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
Attending an Ivy Plus college doesn’t guarantee a higher salary, but it does open the door to elite jobs, study finds

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Until recently, economists believed Ivy League colleges weren’t necessarily worth the price tag, in terms of the additional income their graduates earn. A seminal report in 2002 found that good students at non-Ivy League colleges went on to earn on average the same salaries as students who graduated from the “Ivy Plus schools”—the eight Ivy League schools plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago.

However, a report released Monday re-examines the value of an Ivy League education, factoring in prestige and career achievement. Conducted by researchers from Harvard and Brown, the study finds that while an Ivy League degree may not always result in higher earnings than other schools, it improves a graduate’s chances of getting into a prestigious firm or eventually becoming a power player in their industry.

The study surveyed over 2 million students from Ivy Plus schools and state schools, and compared students who were similar based on their GPAs, test scores, and nonacademic credentials. For people with similar academic and extracurricular achievement, they determined that an Ivy Plus student’s chance of getting hired by an elite firm was 17.6 percentage points higher than if they had a state school degree.

“Do you become a highly paid professional at a very good company? For those kind of outcomes, the school you go to matters a little but not a ton,” Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist who co-authored the study, told the Wall Street Journal. “Where it matters enormously is reaching the upper tail, the path to becoming a CEO, leading scientist at a top graduate school, political leader.”

For example, 25% of U.S. senators attended Ivy Plus schools, and eight of the nine Supreme Court justices attended the Ivy League. Some of this may be attributed to the schools’ reputation of prestige influencing hiring, but also their powerful alumni networks and the mentorship of top professors.

It’s important to note that the nation’s top schools are disproportionately populated with the children of the wealthiest and most powerful families. The same study also found that children who were already in the top 1% had over double the chance of getting into Ivy Plus schools than those from the middle class, with comparable credentials.

The Ivy League, according to the study, perpetuates privilege that’s not necessarily earned, as its name brand gives its alums a noticeable boost compared to their equally qualified peers from non-elite institutions. In addition to helping get its students into top firms, the Ivy League boosts its graduates’ chances of admission to elite graduate schools by 5.5 percentage points.

So while the schools’ hefty price tags—Harvard’s annual tuition and fees are $79,000 annually, and Stanford’s are $82,000—don’t translate into higher salaries, they’re an investment in social cachet that opens guarded doors. Students can become wealthy and ascend the professional ladder coming out of any college, but elite institutions allow their graduates to hop over a few rungs.

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Rachel Shin

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July 28, 2023
Education Department Opens Civil Rights Probe Into Harvard Legacy Admissions

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The Department of Education has launched a civil rights probe into Harvard University’s policy on legacy admissions in what can be seen as the next step in the legal fight over U.S. college admissions.

Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based nonprofit, filed a federal civil rights complaint earlier this month on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England. The complaint, filed with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, accuses Harvard of engaging in the “discriminatory practice of giving preferential treatment in the admissions process to applicants with familial ties to wealthy donors and alumni.”

The complaint asks the department to deem practices relating to legacy and donor preferences illegal and to order Harvard to stop such practices if it wants to continue receiving funds from the federal government.

LCR said that the Education Department contacted the group on Monday about its request to open an investigation under Title VI into Harvard’s legacy admissions. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs and institutions receiving federal financial assistance. An Education Department spokesperson separately confirmed the inquiry to HuffPost on Tuesday but declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing investigation.

Efforts to target the common practice of favoring applicants with “legacy” status in the college admissions process have ramped up since the conservative Supreme Court ruled last month to end race-based affirmative action in college admissions. One of the two universities at the center of that case was Harvard.

Democrats have since coalesced around the idea of eliminating legacy admissions, with Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.) announcing a plan to reintroduce their bill aimed at targeting policies that give an unfair advantage to college applicants who are the children of alumni and wealthy donors.

President Joe Biden has not directly supported eliminating legacy admissions. But after the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling, he did argue that the college admissions process does not favor the working class. With studies showing that eliminating legacy preferences would do little to compensate for the loss of affirmative action, however, the White House is also looking at alternative ways to respond to the ruling.

According to the LCR complaint, nearly 70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white. Donor-related applicants are almost seven times more likely to be admitted than non-donor-related applicants, and legacy applicants are almost six times more likely to be admitted.

A study released Monday by Harvard and Brown researchers found that wealthy students were twice as likely to be admitted to elite colleges as their lower- or middle-income counterparts with similar standardized test scores.

“There’s no birthright to Harvard. As the Supreme Court recently noted, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ There should be no way to identify who your parents are in the college application process,” said LCR Executive Director Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal.

“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” he continued. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”

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July 25, 2023
Department of Education opens investigation into Harvard University’s legacy admissions

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The U.S. Department of Education has opened an investigation into Harvard University’s policies on legacy admissions, according to a group that alleges the practice is discriminatory. The department notified Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, on Monday that it was investigating the group’s claim that alleges the university “discriminates on the basis of race by using donor and legacy preferences in its undergraduate admissions process.”

Top colleges’ preferential treatment of children of alumni has been facing new scrutiny since the Supreme Court last month struck down the use of affirmative action as a tool to diversify college campuses. The court’s conservative majority effectively overturned cases reaching back 45 years, forcing institutions of higher education to seek new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed its Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation at Harvard and declined further comment.

The complaint was filed July 3 on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England. The civil rights group argued that students with legacy ties are up to seven times more likely to be admitted to Harvard and can make up nearly a third of a class, and that about 70% are White. For the Class of 2019, about 28% of the class were legacies with a parent or other relative who went to Harvard.

“Qualified and highly deserving applicants of color are harmed as a result, as admissions slots are given instead to the overwhelmingly white applicants who benefit from Harvard’s legacy and donor preferences,” the group said in a statement. “Even worse, this preferential treatment has nothing to do with an applicant’s merit. Instead, it is an unfair and unearned benefit that is conferred solely based on the family that the applicant is born into.”

A spokesperson for Harvard on Tuesday said in a statement to CBS News that the university has been reviewing its admissions policies to ensure compliance with the law following the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action.

“Our review includes examination of a range of data and information, along with learnings from Harvard’s efforts over the past decade to strengthen our ability to attract and support a diverse intellectual community that is fundamental to our pursuit of academic excellence,” the spokesperson said. “As this work continues, and moving forward, Harvard remains dedicated to opening doors to opportunity and to redoubling our efforts to encourage students from many different backgrounds to apply for admission.”

Last week, Wesleyan University in Connecticut announced that it would end its policy of giving preferential treatment in admissions to those whose families have historical ties to the school. Wesleyan President Michael Roth said a student’s “legacy status” has played a negligible role in admissions but would now be eliminated entirely.

In recent years, several schools, including Amherst College in Massachusetts, Carnegie Melon University in Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland have also eliminated legacy admissions.

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July 25, 2023
Ivy colleges favor rich kids for admission, while middle-class students face obstacles, study finds

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Admission to an Ivy League college or a similar elite institution like MIT is often seen as a golden ticket offering entry into academic institutions that have collectively produced more than 4 in 10 U.S. presidents and 1 in 8 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

But that ticket is far more likely to be handed out to students who are already privileged irrespective of their academic credentials— the children of the top 1% of U.S. income earners, a new analysis finds.

Ivy-plus colleges — the eight Ivy League colleges along with MIT, Stanford, Duke and University of Chicago — admit children from families in the top 1% at more than twice the rate of students in any other income group with similar SAT or ACT scores, according to the new analysis from the Opportunity Insights, a group of economists at Harvard University who study inequality. Families in the top 1% of earners typically have annual income of around $611,000, the researchers said.

Stuck in the middle

It may come as no surprise that the likes of Harvard, Yale and Princeton favor the children of the ultra-wealthy, but the study also shows that academically high-performing students from middle-income families are among the least likely to gain admission to one these elite colleges.

About 40% of students from the richest families who scored at the 99th percentile on the SAT or ACT class attend an Ivy-Plus college, compared with 20% of students with the same scores who come from the poorest U.S. families. Among middle-class students who have the same top SAT or ACT scores, only about 10% attend an Ivy-Plus college, the analysis found.

The study comes as the Supreme Court recently ended affirmative action in college admission decisions, effectively ending the use of race as a basis for consideration in whether to accept an applicant. The end of affirmative action has drawn scrutiny to other forms of preference at top colleges, such as children whose parents are alumni, called “legacy” admissions, or who are wealthy.

“Highly selective private colleges serve as gateways to the upper echelons of society in the United States,” wrote co-authors Raj Chetty and David Deming of Harvard and John Friedman of Brown University. “Because these colleges currently admit students from high-income families at substantially higher rates than students from lower-income families with comparable academic credentials, they perpetuate privilege across generations.”

Ruth Simmons on impact of affirmative action ruling and how schools can work towards diversity

04:34

These colleges could make their student bodies more socioeconomically diverse by changing their admissions policies, the researchers noted. These steps would include ending legacy admissions and evaluating non-academic qualities that account for the impact of privilege.

The findings also suggest that middle-income students may be at a disadvantage compared with either their wealthy or low-income peers. In effect, such students may not be rich enough to give them a foot in the door, nor are they among the demographic groups that colleges have courted in recent decades to foster diversity.

Ivy League impact

The impact of getting an Ivy-Plus education can be significant in a student’s trajectory after college, the researchers noted. The group analyzed applicants who were put on the waitlist at Ivy-Plus institutions, and then compared the outcomes of those students who were either admitted off the waitlist or were ultimately rejected.

“Compared to attending highly selective flagship public colleges, students who attend Ivy-Plus colleges are 60% more likely to earn in the top 1%, twice as likely to attend a graduate school ranked in the top 10, and three times more likely to work at prestigious employers in medicine, research, law, finance and other fields,” they noted.

Of course, plenty of students who attend colleges that aren’t among the Ivy-Plus achieve success in their careers. And the Ivy-Plus colleges enroll less than 1% of college students. Yet because the oversize impact of these schools in creating the next generation of leaders and the rich, they face more scrutiny for their acceptance policies than other universities.

“We conclude that even though they educate a small share of students overall and therefore cannot change rates of social mobility by themselves, Ivy-Plus colleges could meaningfully diversify the socioeconomic origins of society’s leaders by changing their admissions practices,” the authors noted.

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July 24, 2023
Wesleyan To End Legacy Admissions In Light Of SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ruling

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Wesleyan University’s president announced Wednesday that the school is formally eliminating its legacy admissions policy in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action.

The prestigious Connecticut college’s decision follows outrage from Democrats, who say if the court insists on doing away with a program designed to help minorities access higher education after centuries of racial discrimination, then universities should also be banned from giving a leg up in the admissions process to children of alumni and donors.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth said in his announcement Wednesday that while legacy status has played a “negligible role” in the private university’s admissions for many years, the school is officially ending the policy.

“We still value the ongoing relationships that come from multi-generational Wesleyan attendance, but there will be no ‘bump’ in the selection process,” Roth said. “As has been almost always the case for a long time, family members of alumni will be admitted on their own merits.”

Wesleyan “has never fixated on a checked box indicating a student’s racial identification or family affiliations,” Roth continued, but rather “taken an individualized, holistic view of an applicant’s lived experience—as seen through the college essay, high school record, letters of recommendation, and interactions with our community.”

While it’s true that some top universities accept more legacy students each year than Black and Latino students combined, a Duke University study found that the “increase in diversity resulting from the elimination of legacy and athlete preferences pales in comparison to the diversity benefits stemming from racial preferences.”

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July 19, 2023
Progressive Issue Groups Find Public Enemy No. 1: The Supreme Court

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It didn’t land with the same kind of political explosion as Dobbs. But the Supreme Court’s decision last year in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency was every bit as outrageous: The six-member conservative majority, in handcuffing the EPA’s regulatory authority, had “declared war on governing,” as my colleague Cristian Farias put it at the time—and underscored, for Doug Lindner, the desperate need for judicial reform.

“We decided that that was a step too far,” says Lindner, senior director of judiciary and democracy at the League of Conservation Voters, the influential environmental advocacy group. The Court, he tells me, was “serving the interests of the polluters,” and had not only shifted too far to the right—it had become too powerful.

Lindner is hardly alone in that sentiment; he’s part of a growing recognition on the left that progress in the policy arena could be entirely undermined by an activist, right-wing court that has come to seem less like a judicial body and more like an unelected “superlegislature,” as Democratic representative Ritchie Torres put it last week. That’s why a diverse coalition of advocacy organizations—including the League of Conservation Voters—has banded together recently to form United for Democracy, which hopes to move the needle on Supreme Court reform. Stasha Rhodes, the director of the campaign, acknowledges that “it’s not an easy fight.” The Supreme Court is “broken,” she says, and Democrats can’t fix it right now without the support of the very Republicans who helped break it. But Rhodes tells me that she remains “hopeful that the momentum will turn into something.”

“Issue groups that may have been hesitant to weigh in on the Supreme Court before now understand that they don’t have a choice, because the Supreme Court impacts all of our issues, from pollution and the water we drink to safety in our communities to our most personal health care decisions,” Rhodes says of the effort, which has so far sought to build public pressure on lawmakers to act. “As we start to increase the drumbeat on this issue, and include more people outside of Washington in the conversation, I think we feel really good about our ability to move Congress in a way that they start to take action.”

The campaign—which launched in mid-June, before the conservative majority further undermined the Environmental Protection Agency; struck down Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and affirmative action in college admissions; and effectively authorized discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans—includes a number of progressive heavy hitters, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest and most influential unions in the country. The hope, for Rhodes and the groups involved, is that there will be strength in numbers—that these disparate organizations will be able to highlight, for Democratic- and Republican-leaning voters alike, the Court’s “willingness to break those traditional norms, showing that they’re too powerful, too political, and unfit to meet today’s challenges,” Rhodes explains.

“We’re not going to stand by as corrupt justices repeal our fundamental rights,” echoes SEIU president Mary Kay Henry, “while acting like the rules don’t apply to them.”

That could add to the already growing momentum around Supreme Court reform that has built up in the wake of devastating decisions like Dobbs and the conflict of interest scandals that have erupted around Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two stalwarts of the right-wing supermajority. The question now is: How can the campaign best channel that momentum? And will it be enough to actually effect change?

Legal fights have always been instrumental to movements for labor, abortion, gun control, civil rights, and beyond. But Dobbs—which overturned half a century of precedent last year in ending the federal right to an abortion—threw the Supreme Court’s outsize role in those battles into stark relief. It’s as if “there’s this one massive national veto pen, basically, in the Supreme Court, that can change or dictate our rights on a whim,” says Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications and research at NARAL Pro-Choice America.

So far, several proposals have gained traction on the left—from adding seats to the bench to imposing stricter, more common-sense ethics and transparency rules—to avoid further politicizing the scandal-plagued court. Even Nancy Pelosi—the former House Speaker who’s often at loggerheads with her progressive flank—has recently come out in favor of term-limiting justices.

But those reforms have hit a brick wall in Washington: Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues have brushed off concerns about ethics scandals and partisan rulings; Republicans have accused Democrats of mounting political attacks on the conservative majority; and President Joe Biden has so far refused to embrace major reform, even as he correctly laments that the Roberts court is “not a normal court.”

Still, popular outrage and growing activism around reform over the past year do seem to be having an impact, at least on the Democratic lawmakers who have become more assertive in their calls for Supreme Court overhauls. Meanwhile, some of the most influential issue groups in the country—including Planned Parenthood, which endorsed Supreme Court expansion, term limits, and ethics reform in May—are adding even more fuel to the fire.

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To be sure, the path forward for reform is very rocky. Public trust in the Supreme Court has been at a historic low, and that has so far seemed to have little effect on the conservative justices and their Republican defenders, who have made change all but impossible in the current Congress.

Any substantive action, then, will likely depend on Democrats winning back the House, expanding their majority in the Senate, and retaining the presidency in 2024. That’s not impossible: The GOP already suffered the public’s outrage at the Court last cycle, and could pay the price again next fall. But unless and until that happens, the hope for reform will continue to butt up against the reality of a divided Washington. “I wish that Supreme Court ethics weren’t a partisan issue,” Lindner says. “Ethics never should be a partisan issue. But then again, neither should clean air, clean water, or voting rights be partisan issues, and yet here we are.”

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July 7, 2023
Affirmative action in college admissions and why military academies were exempted by the Supreme Court

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Washington — The landmark Supreme Court decision rejecting race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities exempts military service academies, an exception that dissenting justices consider inconsistent and that some constitutional scholars say undercuts the majority’s argument.

Chief Justice John Roberts noted the court’s decision does not apply to military service academies — for now — in a brief footnote in the 237-page opinion. He cited two reasons: first that the academies were not parties in the cases, and second, that there were “potentially distinct interests” involved.

“No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context,” the footnote said. “The opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

Though Roberts did not elaborate on what those “distinct interests” are, a friend-of-the-court brief filed by thirty-five former military leaders — including four former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen — argued that affirmative action in higher education was essential for national security.

The former military leaders asked the Supreme Court to consider how reversing the longstanding admissions policy would affect the military’s ability “to serve our nation’s security interests.”

In particular, they argued that diversity in the officer corps, the graduates of the academies, was necessary because the forces they would be leading are diverse.

“The importance of maintaining a diverse, highly qualified officer corps has been beyond legitimate dispute for decades,” the brief said. “History has shown that placing a diverse Armed Forces under the command of homogenous leadership is a recipe for internal resentment, discord, and violence.”

“By contrast, units that are diverse across all levels are more cohesive, collaborative, and effective,” the brief continued.

“Prohibiting educational institutions from using modest, race-conscious admissions policies would impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness,” the brief said.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned the majority’s narrow exemption, and questioned why religious institutions of higher learning, which also weren’t a party to the case, weren’t granted a similar exemption.

“To the extent the Court suggests national security interests are ‘distinct,’ those interests cannot explain the Court’s narrow exemption, as national security interests are also implicated at civilian universities,” Sotomayor wrote.

Some legal experts appeared to agree with Sotomayor’s assessment that Roberts’ justification for the carveout —while he doesn’t elaborate on it — appears flawed. Jessica Levinson, a CBS News contributor and Loyola Law School professor who teaches constitutional law, said it’s “absolutely true” that many students who attend public colleges and private universities end up working in national security fields.

“If we’re concerned that diversity promotes national security, then this carveout is such an incredibly narrow way to try and achieve that goal,” she said.

The academies differ from public and private colleges and universities in that all graduating students work in national security — their tuition, room and board are free, in return for a minimum of five years of service as commissioned officers in the military.

Still, F. Michael Higginbotham, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who focuses on constitutional law and race relations, thinks that the majority’s exemption for military academies appears to undermine its own argument. Certainly, the federal government has some unique responsibilities, he said, but “the concerns of universities, especially in creating diversity, are the same.”

“I think that Justice Sotomayor had it right,” Higginbotham said. “It kind of highlights the inconsistencies of the decision of the majority’s position. And I don’t really understand the exemption for the military academies. They are colleges and universities just like many many other institutions in the country.”

Levinson suggested the arguments for preserving race-conscious admissions in military academies are inconsistent with the decision to end them for other colleges and universities.

“It definitely undercuts the argument that the way to end racial discrimination is to end race-conscious decisions, because the court is allowing military academies to make race-conscious decisions and they’re saying and there’s a really good reason for that…” Levinson said. “They’re seemingly acknowledging that you don’t want people in leadership positions to be wholly unrepresentative of those whom they’re leading.”

But the Supreme Court’s landmark decision is not likely to be the end of affirmative action cases, and it’s possible that the military academies could be a party in a future case.

“It is entirely possible that the court is going to have to address this again,” Levinson said. “At a certain point, they’re going to have to answer the question of how broadly this ruling applies.”

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Caitlin Yilek

Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital. Reach her at caitlin.yilek@cbsinteractive.com. Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hausofcait

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July 6, 2023
Affirmative action for white people? Legacy college admissions come under renewed scrutiny

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The next big fight over college admissions already has taken hold, and it centers on a different kind of minority group that gets a boost: children of alumni.

In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that strikes down affirmative action in admissions, colleges are coming under renewed pressure to put an end to legacy preferences — the practice of favoring applicants with family ties to alumni. Long seen as a perk for the white and wealthy, opponents say it’s no longer defensible in a world with no counterbalance in affirmative action.

President Joe Biden suggested colleges should rethink the practice after the court’s ruling, saying legacy preferences “expand privilege instead of opportunity.” Several Democrats in Congress demanded an end to the policy in light of the court’s decision to remove race from the admissions process. So did Republicans including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination.

“Let’s be clear: affirmative action still exists for white people. It’s called legacy admissions,” Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said on Twitter.

For critics of legacy admissions, the renewed debate over fairness in admissions has offered a chance to swing public sentiment behind their cause.

As colleges across the U.S. pledge their commitment to diversity following the court’s ruling, activists have a simple response: prove it. If schools want to enroll more Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students, activists say, removing legacy preferences would be an easy first step.

“Now more than ever, there’s no justification for allowing this process to continue,” said Viet Nguyen, a graduate of Brown and Harvard who leads Ed Mobilizer, a nonprofit that has fought legacy preferences since 2018. “No other country in the world does legacy preferences. Now is a chance to catch up with the rest of the world.”

Using the Supreme Court decision as a catalyst, Nguyen’s group is rallying the alumni of top colleges to press their alma maters to end the practice. The goal is to get graduates of the 30 schools to withhold donations until the policy ends. The schools include Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which were at the center of the court case, along with the rest of the Ivy League and the University of Southern California.

It builds on other efforts taking aim at the practice. Colorado banned it at public universities in 2021, and lawmakers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York have introduced similar bills. In Congress, Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both Democrats, are reviving legislation that would forbid it at all universities that accept federal money.

Legacy preferences have become an easy target in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that hinged on questions of merit in the college application process, said Julie Park, who studies college admissions and racial equity at the University of Maryland. Instead of getting in on their own merit, she said, legacy students are just “standing on their parents’ shoulders.”

“It’s just low-hanging fruit,” she said. “People want something to do, and there’s a strong rationale to get rid of it.”

Secretary Miguel Cardona urged colleges to “ask themselves the tough questions,” adding that legacy admissions and other types of special treatment “have long denied well-qualified students of all backgrounds a level playing field.”

“In the wake of this ruling, they could further tip the scales against students who already have the cards stacked against them,” Cardona said in a statement to The Associated Press.

In the hazy world of college admissions, it’s unclear exactly which schools provide a legacy boost and how much it helps. In California, where state law requires schools to disclose the practice, USC reported that 14% of last year’s admitted students had family ties to alumni or donors. Stanford reported a similar rate.

At Harvard, which released years of records as part of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court, legacy students were eight times more likely to be admitted, and nearly 70% were white, researchers found.

An Associated Press survey of the nation’s most selective colleges last year found that legacy students in the freshman class ranged from 4% to 23%. At four schools — Notre Dame, USC, Cornell and Dartmouth — legacy students outnumbered Black students.

Supporters of the policy say it builds an alumni community and encourages donations. A 2022 study of an undisclosed college in the Northeast found that legacy students were more likely to make donations, but at a cost to diversity — the vast majority were white.

Some prestigious colleges have abandoned the policy in recent years, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. In the first year after dropping it, Amherst saw its share of legacy students in the freshman class fall by about half, while 19% of first-year students were the first in their families to attend college, the most in the school’s history.

Some colleges argue that, as their student bodies become more racially diverse, the benefits of legacy status will extend to more students of color. Opponents argue that white families still have an advantage, with generations of relatives who had access to any college.

Ivory Toldson went to college at Louisiana State University, but it wasn’t an option for his parents in the Jim Crow South.

“My parents couldn’t legally go to LSU. Discrimination is a lot more recent in our history than a lot of people seem to understand,” said Toldson, a Howard University professor and the director of education, innovation and research for the NAACP.

Toldson said there’s growing awareness of the irony that preferences for athletes and legacy students are still allowed, while race must be ignored.

In May, an AP-NORC poll found that few Americans think legacy admissions or donations should play much of a role in college admissions. Just 9% say it should be very important that a family member attended and 18% say it should be somewhat important. Likewise, only 10% say donations to the school should be very important and 17% say that should be somewhat important.

That same poll found that most Americans support affirmative action in higher education but think race should play a small role. Sixty-three percent said the Supreme Court should not block colleges from considering race in admissions, but 68% said it should not be a big factor.

Several colleges declined to say whether they will continue providing a boost for legacy students next year, including Cornell and the University of Notre Dame.

Meanwhile, Nguyen said he’s more optimistic than ever. In the past, colleges have been reluctant to be among the first to make the change, he said. Now he thinks that’s changing.

“In the next few months, I think the hesitancy will actually be who will be the last,” he said. “No university wants to be the last.”

___

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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July 3, 2023
GOP presidential candidates praise Supreme Court rulings

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GOP presidential candidates praise Supreme Court rulings – CBS News

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Former President Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates over the weekend praised the recent rulings by the Supreme Court. The court’s six conservative-leaning justices ruled against affirmative action and President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan last week, among other decisions. CBS News’ Skyler Henry and senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe have more on the responses from both sides of the aisle.

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July 3, 2023
Activists sue Harvard over legacy admissions after affirmative action ruling

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A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.

It’s the latest effort in a growing push against legacy admissions, the practice of giving admissions priority to the children of alumni. Backlash against the practice has been building in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in college admissions.

Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, filed the suit Monday on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvard’s admissions system violates the Civil Rights Act.

“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the group’s executive director. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”

Opponents say the practice is no longer defensible without affirmative action providing a counterbalance. The court’s ruling says colleges must ignore the race of applicants, activists point out, but schools can still give a boost to the children of alumni and donors.

A separate campaign is urging the alumni of 30 prestigious colleges to withhold donations until their schools end legacy admissions. That initiative, led by Ed Mobilizer, also targets Harvard and other Ivy League schools.

President Joe Biden suggested last week that universities should rethink the practice, saying legacy admissions “expand privilege instead of opportunity.”

Several Democrats in Congress demanded an end to the policy in light of the court’s decision, along with Republicans including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination.

The new lawsuit draws on Harvard data that came to light amid the affirmative action case that landed before the Supreme Court. The records revealed that 70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and being a legacy student makes an applicant roughly six times more likely to be admitted.

It draws attention to other colleges that have abandoned the practice amid questions about its fairness, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University.

The suit alleges that Harvard’s legacy preference has nothing to do with merit and takes away slots from qualified students of color. It asks the U.S. Education Department to declare the practice illegal and force Harvard to abandon it as long as the university receives federal funding. Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

“A spot given to a legacy or donor-related applicant is a spot that becomes unavailable to an applicant who meets the admissions criteria based purely on his or her own merit,” according to the complaint. If legacy and donor preferences were removed, it adds, “more students of color would be admitted to Harvard.”

The suit was filed on behalf of Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network.

It’s unclear exactly which schools provide a legacy boost and how much it helps. In California, where state law requires schools to disclose the practice, the University of Southern California reported that 14% of last year’s admitted students had family ties to alumni or donors. Stanford reported a similar rate.

An Associated Press survey of the nation’s most selective colleges last year found that legacy students in the freshman class ranged from 4% to 23%. At four schools — Notre Dame, USC, Cornell and Dartmouth — legacy students outnumbered Black students.

Supporters of the policy say it builds an alumni community and encourages donations. A 2022 study of an undisclosed college in the Northeast found that legacy students were more likely to make donations, but at a cost to diversity — the vast majority were white.

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July 3, 2023
Stephen Miller Threatens Law Schools Who Ignore SCOTUS Affirmative Action Decision

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Former White House adviser Stephen Miller sent a testy message to top law schools over the weekend following the Supreme Court’s decision banning colleges from using affirmative action in their admission decisions.

The Republican gadfly preemptively pestered 200 of the nation’s law school deans with the threat of legal action if they “violate, circumvent, bypass, subvert or otherwise program around” the ruling in Students for Fair Admissions cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

In its decision, the Supreme Court determined colleges cannot consider race as a factor in admissions based on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Miller, who served as a top adviser to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021 and is now the president of America First Legal, announced his legal plans in a smug Twitter video on Saturday.

BREAKING: @America1stLegal sent a legal threat letter to every law school in America: comply with the Supreme Court ruling on “affirmative action” — or see you in court.

If you’re a victim of discrimination call us at 1-877-AFL-5454 pic.twitter.com/BsUbaMYM1L

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 30, 2023

In the video, he told followers, “Today, we sent a warning letter to the deans of 200 law schools around America, telling them that they must obey the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down illegal racial discrimination and affirmative action.”

“If they try to violate, circumvent, bypass, subvert or otherwise program around that ruling, we are going to take them to court,” Miller went on. “We are going to hold them to account.”

Further details about the campaign were not clear. HuffPost has reached out to America First Legal requesting more information about its plans.

While this week’s Supreme Court decision dealt a heavy blow to the practice of race-conscious college admissions, the opinion does not bar university applicants from discussing race outright.

The ruling, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, still allows prospective students to discuss race in regard to their individual life experiences.

Affirmative action policies emerged after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, aiming to increase educational opportunities for Black and Latino students.

The policies incited accusations of “reverse racism” from white Americans, and in recent years, conservatives have argued affirmative action unfairly disadvantages Asian American college applicants.

Asian American students’ claims were the basis for both of the cases that led the Supreme Court to declare affirmative action programs in colleges unconstitutional.

Stephen Miller speaks during a television interview outside the White House on August 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Studies show that abandoning the practice will have profound effects on the number of Black and Latino students accepted into the nation’s most selective schools.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored a dissent regarding the case against UNC, writing, “It is no small irony that the judgment the majority hands down today will forestall the end of race-based disparities in this country, making the colorblind world the majority wistfully touts much more difficult to accomplish.”

Miller’s America First Legal group has made a habit of inserting itself into hot-button conservative conflicts.

In May, the group hinted at action against beer giant Anheuser-Busch after its flagship brand Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

America First Legal asked shareholders upset with companies “promoting transgender, LGBTQ and PRIDE products” to get in contact, signaling possible plans for a class-action suit.

In 2021, AFL filed suit against the Biden administration, accusing them of discriminating against white farmers in its $1.9 billion COVID relief plans.

During the 2022 midterm elections, the group paid for radio ads accusing President Biden and his administration of broad discrimination, asking, “When did racism against white people become OK?”

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July 2, 2023
Face The Nation: Holder, Drake, Gorman

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Face The Nation: Holder, Drake, Gorman – CBS News

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Missed the second half of the show? The latest on…Eric Holder, who served as Attorney General under former President Obama, tells “Face the Nation” that “the notion of affirmative action is to take into account one of many things, when you look at qualified students applying to college”, Michael Drake, the president of the University of California system, notes to “Face the Nation” that “affirmative action was one tool we used in the past that was removed” to create opportunities for a diverse student body, and Lindsay Gorman, a technology expert at the German Marshall Fund, discusses on “Face the Nation” how to differentiate AI-generated images online from real ones.

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July 2, 2023
In 370 days, Supreme Court conservatives dash decades of abortion and affirmative action precedents

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades.

In a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both a reality.

Last June, the court ended nationwide protections for abortion rights. This past week, the court’s conservative majority decided that race-conscious admissions programs at the oldest private and public colleges in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were unlawful.

Asian shares are mostly higher after a rally on Wall Street driven by reports that showed inflation abating, alleviating fears over the threat of a recession.

A much-feared backup of U.S. passport applications has snarled summer plans for would-be travelers around the world.

The United Nations body that regulates the world’s ocean floor is preparing to resume negotiations that could open the international seabed for mining, including for materials vital for the green energy transition.

Nearly six months after the Democratic Party approved Biden’s plan to overhaul which states lead off its presidential primary, implementing the revamped order has proven anything but simple.

Precedents that had stood since the 1970s were overturned, explicitly in the case of abortion and effectively in the affirmative action context.

“That is what is notable about this court. It’s making huge changes in highly salient areas in a very short period of time,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas.

As ethical questions swirled around the court and public trust in the institution had already dipped to a 50-year low, there were other consequential decisions in which the six conservatives prevailed.

They rejected the Biden administration’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness program and held that a Christian graphic artist can refuse on free speech grounds to design websites for same-sex couples, despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and other characteristics.

The court, by a 5-4 vote, also sharply limited the federal government’s authority to police water pollution into certain wetlands, although all nine justices rejected the administration’s position.

Affirmative action was arguably the biggest constitutional decision of the year, and it showcased fiercely opposing opinions from the court’s two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

They offered sharply contrasting takes on affirmative action. Thomas was in the majority to end it. Jackson, in her first year on the court, was in dissent.

The past year also had a number of notable surprises.

Differing coalitions of conservative and liberal justices ruled in favor of Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case and refused to embrace broad arguments in a North Carolina redistricting case that could have left state legislatures unchecked and dramatically altered elections for Congress and president.

The court also ruled for the Biden administration in a fight over deportation priorities and left in place the Indian Child Welfare Act, the federal law aimed at keeping Native American children with Native families.

Those cases reflected the control that Chief Justice John Roberts asserted, or perhaps reasserted, over the court following a year in which the other five conservatives moved more quickly than he wanted in some areas, including abortion.

Roberts wrote a disproportionate share of the term’s biggest cases: conservative outcomes on affirmative action and the student loan plan, and liberal victories in Alabama and North Carolina.

The Alabama case may have been the most surprising because Roberts had consistently sought to narrow the landmark Voting Rights Act since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. As chief justice, he wrote the decision 10 years ago that gutted a key provision of the law.

But in the Alabama case and elsewhere, Roberts was part of majorities that rejected the most aggressive legal arguments put forth by Republican elected officials and conservative legal advocates.

The mixed bag of decisions almost seemed designed to counter arguments about the court’s legitimacy, raised by Democratic and liberal critics — and some justices — in response to last year’s abortion ruling, among others. The narrative was amplified by published reports of undisclosed, paid jet travel and fancy trips for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito from billionaire Republican donors.

“I don’t think the court consciously takes opinion into account,” Grove said. “But I think if there’s anyone who might consciously think about these issues, it’s the institutionalist, the chief justice. He’s been extremely concerned about the attacks on the Supreme Court.”

On the term’s final day, Roberts urged the public to not mistake disagreement among the justices for disparagement of the court. “Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he wrote in the student loans case in response to a stinging dissent by Justice Elena Kagan.

Roberts has resisted instituting a code of ethics for the court and has questioned whether Congress has the authority to impose one. Still, he has said, without providing specifics, that the justices would do more to show they adhere to high ethical standards.

Some conservative law professors rejected the idea that the court bowed to outside pressures, consciously or otherwise.

“There were a lot of external atmospherics that really could have affected court business, but didn’t,” said Jennifer Mascott, a George Mason University law professor.

Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, pointed to roughly equal numbers of major decisions that could be characterized as politically liberal or conservative.

Levey said conservatives “were not disappointed by this term.” Democrats and their allies “warned the nation about an ideologically extreme Supreme Court but wound up cheering as many major decisions as they decried,” Levey wrote in an email.

But some liberal critics were not mollified.

Brian Fallon, director of the court reform group Demand Justice, called the past year “another disastrous Supreme Court term” and mocked experts who “squint to find so-called silver linings in the Court’s decisions to suggest all is not lost, or they will emphasize one or two so-called moderate decisions from the term to suggest the Court is not as extreme as we think and can still be persuaded from time to time.”

Biden himself said on MSNBC on Thursday that the current court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.” He cited as examples the overturning of abortion protections and other decisions that had been precedent for decades.

Still, Biden said, he thought some on the high court “are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways it hasn’t been questioned in the past.”

The justices are now embarking on a long summer break. They return to the bench on the first Monday in October for a term that so far appears to lack the blockbuster cases that made the past two terms so momentous.

The court will examine the legal fallout from last year’s major expansion of gun rights, in a case over a domestic violence gun ban that was struck down by a lower court.

A new legal battle over abortion also could make its way to the court in coming months. In April, the court preserved access to mifepristone, a drug used in the most common method of abortion, while a lawsuit over it makes its way through federal court.

The conservative majority also will have opportunities to further constrain federal regulatory agencies, including a case that asks them to overturn the so-called Chevron decision that defers to regulators when they seek to give effect to big-picture, sometimes vague, laws written by Congress. The 1984 decision has been cited by judges more than 15,000 times.

Just seven years ago, months before Trump’s surprising presidential victory, then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflected on the term that had just ended and made two predictions. One was way off base and the other was strikingly accurate.

In July 2016, the court had just ended a term in which the justices upheld a University of Texas affirmative action plan and struck down state restrictions on abortion clinics.

Her first prediction was that those issues would not soon return to the high court. Her second was that if Trump became president, “everything is up for grabs.”

Ginsburg’s death in 2020 allowed Trump to put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court and cement conservative control.

Commenting on the student loan decision, liberal legal scholar Melissa Murray wrote on Twitter that Biden’s plan “was absolutely undone by the Court that his predecessor built.”

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court

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July 2, 2023
Affirmative action for white people? Legacy college admissions come under renewed scrutiny

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WASHINGTON — The next big fight over college admissions already has taken hold, and it centers on a different kind of minority group that gets a boost: children of alumni.

In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that strikes down affirmative action in admissions, colleges are coming under renewed pressure to put an end to legacy preferences — the practice of favoring applicants with family ties to alumni. Long seen as a perk for the white and wealthy, opponents say it’s no longer defensible in a world with no counterbalance in affirmative action.

President Joe Biden suggested colleges should rethink the practice after the court’s ruling, saying legacy preferences “expand privilege instead of opportunity.” Several Democrats in Congress demanded an end to the policy in light of the court’s decision to remove race from the admissions process. So did Republicans including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination.

“Let’s be clear: affirmative action still exists for white people. It’s called legacy admissions,” Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said on Twitter.

For critics of legacy admissions, the renewed debate over fairness in admissions has offered a chance to swing public sentiment behind their cause.

As colleges across the U.S. pledge their commitment to diversity following the court’s ruling, activists have a simple response: prove it. If schools want to enroll more Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students, activists say, removing legacy preferences would be an easy first step.

“Now more than ever, there’s no justification for allowing this process to continue,” said Viet Nguyen, a graduate of Brown and Harvard who leads Ed Mobilizer, a nonprofit that has fought legacy preferences since 2018. “No other country in the world does legacy preferences. Now is a chance to catch up with the rest of the world.”

Using the Supreme Court decision as a catalyst, Nguyen’s group is rallying the alumni of top colleges to press their alma maters to end the practice. The goal is to get graduates of the 30 schools to withhold donations until the policy ends. The schools include Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which were at the center of the court case, along with the rest of the Ivy League and the University of Southern California.

It builds on other efforts taking aim at the practice. Colorado banned it at public universities in 2021, and lawmakers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York have introduced similar bills. In Congress, Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both Democrats, are reviving legislation that would forbid it at all universities that accept federal money.

Legacy preferences have become an easy target in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that hinged on questions of merit in the college application process, said Julie Park, who studies college admissions and racial equity at the University of Maryland. Instead of getting in on their own merit, she said, legacy students are just “standing on their parents’ shoulders.”

“It’s just low-hanging fruit,” she said. “People want something to do, and there’s a strong rationale to get rid of it.”

Secretary Miguel Cardona urged colleges to “ask themselves the tough questions,” adding that legacy admissions and other types of special treatment “have long denied well-qualified students of all backgrounds a level playing field.”

“In the wake of this ruling, they could further tip the scales against students who already have the cards stacked against them,” Cardona said in a statement to The Associated Press.

In the hazy world of college admissions, it’s unclear exactly which schools provide a legacy boost and how much it helps. In California, where state law requires schools to disclose the practice, USC reported that 14% of last year’s admitted students had family ties to alumni or donors. Stanford reported a similar rate.

At Harvard, which released years of records as part of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court, legacy students were eight times more likely to be admitted, and nearly 70% were white, researchers found.

An Associated Press survey of the nation’s most selective colleges last year found that legacy students in the freshman class ranged from 4% to 23%. At four schools — Notre Dame, USC, Cornell and Dartmouth — legacy students outnumbered Black students.

Supporters of the policy say it builds an alumni community and encourages donations. A 2022 study of an undisclosed college in the Northeast found that legacy students were more likely to make donations, but at a cost to diversity — the vast majority were white.

Some prestigious colleges have abandoned the policy in recent years, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. In the first year after dropping it, Amherst saw its share of legacy students in the freshman class fall by about half, while 19% of first-year students were the first in their families to attend college, the most in the school’s history.

Some colleges argue that, as their student bodies become more racially diverse, the benefits of legacy status will extend to more students of color. Opponents argue that white families still have an advantage, with generations of relatives who had access to any college.

Ivory Toldson went to college at Louisiana State University, but it wasn’t an option for his parents in the Jim Crow South.

“My parents couldn’t legally go to LSU. Discrimination is a lot more recent in our history than a lot of people seem to understand,” said Toldson, a Howard University professor and the director of education, innovation and research for the NAACP.

Toldson said there’s growing awareness of the irony that preferences for athletes and legacy students are still allowed, while race must be ignored.

In May, an AP-NORC poll found that few Americans think legacy admissions or donations should play much of a role in college admissions. Just 9% say it should be very important that a family member attended and 18% say it should be somewhat important. Likewise, only 10% say donations to the school should be very important and 17% say that should be somewhat important.

That same poll found that most Americans support affirmative action in higher education but think race should play a small role. Sixty-three percent said the Supreme Court should not block colleges from considering race in admissions, but 68% said it should not be a big factor.

Several colleges declined to say whether they will continue providing a boost for legacy students next year, including Cornell and the University of Notre Dame.

Meanwhile, Nguyen said he’s more optimistic than ever. In the past, colleges have been reluctant to be among the first to make the change, he said. Now he thinks that’s changing.

“In the next few months, I think the hesitancy will actually be who will be the last,” he said. “No university wants to be the last.”

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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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July 2, 2023
In 370 days, Supreme Court conservatives dash decades of abortion and affirmative action precedents

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WASHINGTON — Overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades.

In a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both a reality.

Last June, the court ended nationwide protections for abortion rights. This past week, the court’s conservative majority decided that race-conscious admissions programs at the oldest private and public colleges in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were unlawful.

Precedents that had stood since the 1970s were overturned, explicitly in the case of abortion and effectively in the affirmative action context.

“That is what is notable about this court. It’s making huge changes in highly salient areas in a very short period of time,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas.

As ethical questions swirled around the court and public trust in the institution had already dipped to a 50-year low, there were other consequential decisions in which the six conservatives prevailed.

They rejected the Biden administration’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness program and held that a Christian graphic artist can refuse on free speech grounds to design websites for same-sex couples, despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and other characteristics.

The court, by a 5-4 vote, also sharply limited the federal government’s authority to police water pollution into certain wetlands, although all nine justices rejected the administration’s position.

Affirmative action was arguably the biggest constitutional decision of the year, and it showcased fiercely opposing opinions from the court’s two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

They offered sharply contrasting takes on affirmative action. Thomas was in the majority to end it. Jackson, in her first year on the court, was in dissent.

The past year also had a number of notable surprises.

Differing coalitions of conservative and liberal justices ruled in favor of Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case and refused to embrace broad arguments in a North Carolina redistricting case that could have left state legislatures unchecked and dramatically altered elections for Congress and president.

The court also ruled for the Biden administration in a fight over deportation priorities and left in place the Indian Child Welfare Act, the federal law aimed at keeping Native American children with Native families.

Those cases reflected the control that Chief Justice John Roberts asserted, or perhaps reasserted, over the court following a year in which the other five conservatives moved more quickly than he wanted in some areas, including abortion.

Roberts wrote a disproportionate share of the term’s biggest cases: conservative outcomes on affirmative action and the student loan plan, and liberal victories in Alabama and North Carolina.

The Alabama case may have been the most surprising because Roberts had consistently sought to narrow the landmark Voting Rights Act since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. As chief justice, he wrote the decision 10 years ago that gutted a key provision of the law.

But in the Alabama case and elsewhere, Roberts was part of majorities that rejected the most aggressive legal arguments put forth by Republican elected officials and conservative legal advocates.

The mixed bag of decisions almost seemed designed to counter arguments about the court’s legitimacy, raised by Democratic and liberal critics — and some justices — in response to last year’s abortion ruling, among others. The narrative was amplified by published reports of undisclosed, paid jet travel and fancy trips for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito from billionaire Republican donors.

“I don’t think the court consciously takes opinion into account,” Grove said. “But I think if there’s anyone who might consciously think about these issues, it’s the institutionalist, the chief justice. He’s been extremely concerned about the attacks on the Supreme Court.”

On the term’s final day, Roberts urged the public to not mistake disagreement among the justices for disparagement of the court. “Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he wrote in the student loans case in response to a stinging dissent by Justice Elena Kagan.

Roberts has resisted instituting a code of ethics for the court and has questioned whether Congress has the authority to impose one. Still, he has said, without providing specifics, that the justices would do more to show they adhere to high ethical standards.

Some conservative law professors rejected the idea that the court bowed to outside pressures, consciously or otherwise.

“There were a lot of external atmospherics that really could have affected court business, but didn’t,” said Jennifer Mascott, a George Mason University law professor.

Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, pointed to roughly equal numbers of major decisions that could be characterized as politically liberal or conservative.

Levey said conservatives “were not disappointed by this term.” Democrats and their allies “warned the nation about an ideologically extreme Supreme Court but wound up cheering as many major decisions as they decried,” Levey wrote in an email.

But some liberal critics were not mollified.

Brian Fallon, director of the court reform group Demand Justice, called the past year “another disastrous Supreme Court term” and mocked experts who “squint to find so-called silver linings in the Court’s decisions to suggest all is not lost, or they will emphasize one or two so-called moderate decisions from the term to suggest the Court is not as extreme as we think and can still be persuaded from time to time.”

Biden himself said on MSNBC on Thursday that the current court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.” He cited as examples the overturning of abortion protections and other decisions that had been precedent for decades.

Still, Biden said, he thought some on the high court “are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways it hasn’t been questioned in the past.”

The justices are now embarking on a long summer break. They return to the bench on the first Monday in October for a term that so far appears to lack the blockbuster cases that made the past two terms so momentous.

The court will examine the legal fallout from last year’s major expansion of gun rights, in a case over a domestic violence gun ban that was struck down by a lower court.

A new legal battle over abortion also could make its way to the court in coming months. In April, the court preserved access to mifepristone, a drug used in the most common method of abortion, while a lawsuit over it makes its way through federal court.

The conservative majority also will have opportunities to further constrain federal regulatory agencies, including a case that asks them to overturn the so-called Chevron decision that defers to regulators when they seek to give effect to big-picture, sometimes vague, laws written by Congress. The 1984 decision has been cited by judges more than 15,000 times.

Just seven years ago, months before Trump’s surprising presidential victory, then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflected on the term that had just ended and made two predictions. One was way off base and the other was strikingly accurate.

In July 2016, the court had just ended a term in which the justices upheld a University of Texas affirmative action plan and struck down state restrictions on abortion clinics.

Her first prediction was that those issues would not soon return to the high court. Her second was that if Trump became president, “everything is up for grabs.”

Ginsburg’s death in 2020 allowed Trump to put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court and cement conservative control.

Commenting on the student loan decision, liberal legal scholar Melissa Murray wrote on Twitter that Biden’s plan “was absolutely undone by the Court that his predecessor built.”

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court

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July 1, 2023