Supreme Court Slashes Affirmative Action, Rejecting Catholic Universities’ Support for Race-Based Admissions

Jul 1, 2023 by Jill

by Jason Chahyadi, Juicy Ecumenism:

Today, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. Harvard, holding that affirmative action in the college admissions process is unconstitutional as it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion. The Court’s central objection to affirmative action in college admissions is that it offends the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. In Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Court argued that the right to education “must be made available to all on equal terms.” A year after Brown, the Court reinforced Brown by holding that schools must admit students “on a racially non-discriminatory basis.” In the present case, Roberts wrote that, “the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed ‘that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons…shall stand equal before the law[.]’”

Harvard claims that it uses affirmative action to ensure racial diversity in each incoming class of students. However, recent studies such as a 2018 econometric study by Peter Arcidiacono on Harvard’s admissions process show that the college’s use of affirmative action advantages black and Hispanic applicants at the detriment of Asian applicants. The Court took note of this result from Harvard’s race-based application process and reviewed it through the highest judicial standard of review: strict scrutiny. This standard is satisfied when the defendant shows that their policy promotes an interest “of the highest order” with a means that is the least restrictive method to accomplishing the policy’s goal. The Court found this standard of review appropriate to use when analyzing affirmative action for “racial and ethnic distinctions of any sort are inherently suspect.” In Regents of California v. Bakke, the Court allowed universities to consider race in their admissions process so long as it acted as a “plus” for an applicant’s case, not a “minus.”

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Read also: The end of affirmative action is a victory for racial equality by Kevin Yuill, spiked