February 26, 2025 - 11:00am
It hasn’t even been two years since the US Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that it won’t be long before the hot-button issue returns to court.
While black student enrolment has dropped markedly at many elite universities in the wake of the 2023 ruling — the expected result of banning admissions policies designed to favour African American applicants — the Atlantic, the New York Times and others have reported that some elite universities have in fact seen an increase in black student admissions. And earlier this month, an Asian plaintiff filed a discrimination lawsuit in California after being rejected or waitlisted by 16 out of 18 universities, including five institutions in California, despite his 3.97 Grade Point Average and a near-perfect score of 1590 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Students for Fair Admissions, the group which challenged affirmative action at the Supreme Court in 2023, has already put select colleges on notice, arguing that their admissions demographics appear too suspicious to be explained by random chance. Still, admissions officers at elite universities have been surprisingly forthcoming on the podcast circuit about their industry secrets. And it all comes down to standardised testing, where African American applicants have long registered lower scores than their peers.
Standardised tests are the best predictors of a student’s success in college, admissions officers say, but that doesn’t mean what most people assume. In the arcane redoubts of college admissions, standardised tests are not read as raw scores, but are instead interpreted “holistically” and “contextually” based on a host of factors. And these factors can look a lot like proxies for race, especially considering that admissions officers explain their strategies in the context of affirmative action and diversity.
As a Yale admissions officer explained a year ago: “Simply put, the same score can mean two very different things in two very different contexts.” Interpreting a score in the context of a student’s “background”, high school and neighbourhood, “can be a really powerful way to actually increase the diversity of the Yale student body”, another admissions officer explained.
Dartmouth economists calculated the precise benefits of this approach for underprivileged applicants in a paper published last month with the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Less advantaged applicants with scores of 1400 and above can boost their probability of admission by 3.6 times by submitting scores,” the Dartmouth team wrote. “Even well-informed students cannot be expected to know how reading SAT scores in context is operationalised.”
One can assume that critics of such subjective methods will take the same data and recalculate the probabilities to show how they disadvantage white and Asian students. And this time around, the opponents of affirmative action have a powerful ally in Donald Trump. Given his zero-tolerance policy on DEI — notably his Executive Order repealing Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 decree that birthed affirmative action — Trump’s presidency could deliver a major setback to academia’s entrenched activists.
The public will remain unaware of what’s going on behind closed doors in college admissions decisions until a discrimination lawsuit or a federal investigation forces universities to cough up internal memos and emails detailing their procedures. If the universities can show that they are adjusting the standardised test scores of all disadvantaged applicants, regardless of ethnicity, they could succeed in persuading courts that discrimination is not taking place.
It’s clear from the podcast discussions that admissions officers are confident they are not breaking any laws, and they are well-practiced in the nuances of civil rights advocacy. According to a September 2023 podcast, some colleges tout their “diversity fly-in programme” to recruit “diverse” students, insisting that the Supreme Court decision has nothing to do with how students are recruited, only how their application files are read. Some are even adding a question encouraging students to highlight their “lived experience” and their “life journey”.
Academia has been politically committed to affirmative action for decades, and universities have told the Supreme Court that their racial balancing targets can’t be achieved without explicitly weighting race. Academia has devised creative ways to engage in affirmative action, but Trump’s election could prove to be the greatest challenge for race-based — and gender-based — preferences in the past half-century.
Indeed, the way things are going, the new administration might act sooner than Students for Fair Admissions.
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SubscribeAre US universities ignoring the affirmative action ban?
Well, of course they are. It was naive to assume they would ever heed it in the first place.
Naturally, institutions that insist on free speech for only one side of every argument are highly law abiding. And, of course, they are in the marvellous position of being able to judge correctly good government rules from bad ones. Oh that we were all so perfect!
They won’t comply until they’re made to pay massive damages or have their Federal funding threatened. Both need to happen ASAP.
Really, who didn’t expect exactly this sort of shenanigans given the lengths they went to to defend their affirmative action policies in the first place. There are too many people in too many positions of power in these institutions who are deeply ideologically committed to this notion that they can somehow fix historic injustices by perpetrating other injustices in the present, and until they’re forced out of power, they’ll circumvent the law as much as they can. They are no more respectful of the law or the courts than they are respectful towards any other viewpoint that might not align with their definition of fairness. They need to be removed. Period. There’s already been some progress with the hearings about antisemitism on college campuses outing some of the heads of colleges as incompetent pushers of ideology rather than capable administrators. In places that lean conservative, this will happen through the political process, as most universities are supported by state funds. In liberal areas, the states will provide political cover instead, so in those cases, it will be a long process of failure and decline wherever the ideologues retain control. Other universities that abandon ideology in favor of just picking the best students will gain in reputation and accolades at the expense of those who prioritize ideology. The free market will eventually put an end to this, but it will take a while.
There can actually be legitimate case for not going on raw exam results. In the UK, Oxbridge uses interviews and explicitly give extra points to people from less elite schools, in an attempt to get the most intelligent students as opposed to those (from private schools) that have the best grooming and coaching. Of course, to accept that approach you have to trust that the selectors are genuinely trying to get the best students and are not acting out of racial politics. I’d trust that in the case of Oxbridge, but not necessarily in the case of US universities.
I don’t think the author doubts that raw exam results alone aren’t the only arbiter for admission.
This is pretty much the same point you’re making, but it’s always been the case in the UK. I benefitted from it in the 1970s! I was offered places at uni at grade levels below the standard admission grades because of my life circumstances.
I remember reading article by founder of Lampl Trust in uk many decades ago.
According to him attending elite private school gives you 3/4 grade advantage in A level grades in comparison to average comprehensive.
So someone with weak A level grade A from Eaton is weaker candidate than someone with strong B in sink comprehensive.
The difference in uk now and USA is priority given to black students over other ethnic groups.
Black people have much worse IQ scores than other ethnic groups.
IQ can not be faked in tests.
So, I am all for giving helping hand to clever black people from disadvantage background but against doing it for black people just because of their skin colour.
Eton
I wouldn’t trust Oxbridge for a moment
American universities continue the reductionist approach of treating individuals as nothing more than their skin tone and genitals. It is profoundly dehumanizing but the (mostly) white progressives behind this do not see minorities as people with agency in the first place. They treat those people as pets and mascots.
I agree with your general point but not that Oxbridge is not giving preference to students based on skin colour.
We need Free Speach Union to test it in court.
I am for helping all clever students from disadvantaged background but against discrimination against white students based on skin colour.
Otherwise we will have self perpetuating elites.
First there is a world of difference between UK university interviews conducted by faculty versus US University entrance decisions conducted by admissions officers who have no academic credentials of any sort. Second, if I’m not mistaken, interviews are carried out and entrance offers made at UK universities before students (pupils in the UK) have even taken their A level exams (or whatever they take now. In the US, the students already have their SAT scores in hand. Third, the SAT test is an aptitude test that cannot be confused with in-depth subject matter exams in the UK. A smart 15 year old could get a top score on a SAT exam easily but would not be able to get a passing grade on an A level subject exam (obviously because they wouldn’t have yet covered the subject matter no matter how smart they were).
If you have ideologically motivated admissions staff of course they will find ways to game the system to achieve their ends. The only real way to stop such bias operating is to change the staff.
A telling statement: “Even well-informed students cannot be expected to know how reading SAT scores in context is operationalised.” When abstract nouns (which are often pretty empty things to start with) are turned into verbs, who knows what’s being said? Not even the speaker, I’d guess.
The only place on campus where merit matters is the athletic program. No one is recruiting for “diversity,” just talent.
Many of the bureaucratic jobs at the universities depend upon ‘Affirmative Action’, DEI etc. so they will still promote it, to preserve their jobs.
Is ‘Affirmative Action’ also used for their football and basketball teams?
Not the winning ones.
In 1996, the California voters passed Proposition 209, which outlawed race-based affirmative action. The UC system (UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc.) has violated that state law each & every semester. Soon, the UC system will be violating federal law, too.
It won’t change immediately, but once white students will start raiding universities slush funds via lawsuits the message will be heard more clearly.
Next step, we need a few discriminated white students to become millionaires through the lawsuit bingo.
Now it could change literally immediately from one day to the next. All the federal government has to do is issue an executive order going forward (so no violation or tort law) that no university who engages in DEI or affirmative action (explicit or implicit, open or hidden) will receive federal grant money from the NIH or NSF. There will be an instant turn around because the universities depend on indirect costs from STEM grants to fund their boondoggles and humanities departments (despite the exhorbitant tuition fees they charge).