For the vast majority of college-admissions offices, last week’s landmark rulings on affirmative action by the U.S. Supreme Court are more likely to be the topic of applicant essays than a factor in admitting students.
That’s because relatively few institutions have selective admissions. Most colleges essentially accept all qualified applicants, regardless of race. And even among that exclusive group of public and private colleges that have considered race, many have abandoned the formulaic point systems that gave an edge to minority students, following a wave of lawsuits in the 1990s attacking affirmative action.
Still, colleges in several states -- notably, California and Texas -- have operated for much of the past decade under a different set of rules than their competitors in other states, the result of conflicting court rulings, ballot measures, and state policies that have limited affirmative action. Last week -- after the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as a factor in admissions in one case, while emphasizing the need for such policies to be as narrowly tailored as possible in the other decision -- leaders of a few of those institutions, most prominently the University of Texas at Austin, said they were likely to bring back race-conscious admissions.
Even with the Supreme Court’s backing, the future of affirmative action is not assured. The organizer of successful ballot measures in California and Washington that outlawed affirmative action in university admissions -- and that still stand despite the Supreme Court decisions -- said last week that colleges should not view the rulings as “open invitations” to consider race in admissions.
“They dodged a bullet on explicit race preferences, but the gun is still loaded,” said Ward Connerly, who is also a member of the University of California’s Board of Regents, speaking hours after the decisions were handed down. “If I didn’t have a commitment tomorrow, I’d be in Michigan to see what it takes to get a referendum banning affirmative action on the ballot there. Michigan is the primary target now.”
Changes in Texas
The lasting effects of the Supreme Court decisions will reach far beyond the University of Michigan, but the most drastic changes are likely to be felt in such states as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Colleges in those states were prohibited from using race in admissions following a 1996 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in a case known as Hopwood v. Texas.
While federal desegregation orders and the lack of competitive admissions at colleges in Louisiana and Mississippi muted the effects of the Hopwood decision in those states, Texas’ flagship institutions, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station, watched their minority enrollments plummet. The percentage of black students on the Austin campus, for instance, fell from 4.1 percent of the freshman class in the last year that affirmative action was used to 2.7 percent in the year after the court decision.
Minority enrollments rebounded to pre-Hopwood levels only after state legislators passed a law that automatically admitted to the two universities the top 10 percent of each high-school graduating class in the state. (But at the graduate and professional schools, which are not covered by the 10-percent law, such enrollments remain lower.)
“Hopwood is no longer the law,” said Douglas Laycock, a professor and associate dean at the University of Texas School of Law. “This completely supplants Hopwood. Now we read this opinion to figure out what we can do.”
The president of the Austin campus, Larry R. Faulkner, said the university would “fairly quickly” take steps to modify its admissions policies so that they will take race into consideration for students applying to enter the university in the fall of 2004. What’s more, he said, the university can begin using race again to award financial aid, another prohibition that resulted from the Hopwood decision.
How those policies will work is still unclear. Mr. Faulkner said the university’s lawyers would study the Michigan decisions to determine what is permissible. “We need to have clear policies by the middle of the fall,” he said, “and I think we have enough time to do that.”
One complicating factor is that 70 percent of this fall’s freshman class on the Austin campus was automatically admitted under the 10-percent plan, so that even if admissions counselors had been allowed to consider race, they would have been able to use it for only the remaining 30 percent of the class. Within a few years, Mr. Faulkner said, it is possible that his entire freshman class could be admitted under the 10-percent law, making it imperative that lawmakers change the program. The Texas Legislature adjourned in May without taking up a proposal to cap the number of students who could be admitted based on class rank alone.
Where a race-conscious admissions policy could make an immediate and significant difference is at the university’s graduate and professional schools. “There’s a more pressing need to reinstitute [race-conscious] policies in those programs,” Mr. Faulkner said.
Officials at Texas A&M were reserved in response to the rulings. Robert M. Gates, the university’s president, said the institution would “look to the state’s attorney general’s office to interpret” the Supreme Court decisions. A spokeswoman for the attorney general, Greg Abbott, said he was still reviewing the decisions last week and would not comment for now.
At Rice University, a private institution in Houston that was covered by Hopwood because it receives federal funds, the president, Malcolm Gillis, said in an interview that “to the extent that the decision allows us to go back to considering race, we will be doing exactly that.”
He praised the decision for returning Texas institutions “to a level playing field” in competing for minority applicants with colleges in states that have never banned affirmative action.
Meanwhile, the president of the University of Georgia, Michael F. Adams, said its lawyers would study the decisions to see if the institution could start considering race again. Georgia abandoned race-conscious admissions two years ago, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down its admissions policy. “Our advice is not to comment until we have more time to study the opinion,” said Mr. Adams. The earliest that change might come, he said, would be for students seeking admission for the fall of 2004.
Affirmative Action at a Cost
While the exact effects of the Michigan rulings on campus diversity are still unclear, one thing is certain: The court’s undergraduate decision is likely to be costly for a few colleges -- particularly large, top-ranked public institutions -- that will need to hire more admissions officers. Although most colleges are secretive about their admissions processes, several higher-education lawyers said that a few institutions still use point-based numerical systems, like Michigan’s, in an effort to deal quickly with the large number of undergraduate applications they receive. But in his majority opinion, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that colleges could not use “administrative challenges” as an excuse for relying on formulas instead of “individualized consideration.”
The pressure to adopt a more wide-ranging set of admissions criteria, which will require admissions counselors to read all applications carefully, comes at a time when the appropriations of many public colleges are being slashed by state lawmakers seeking to close budget shortfalls. Still, some prestigious public colleges have been reading every admissions folder for decades. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, for instance, hire temporary staff members to read applications. Combined, the two universities receive 32,000 applications annually. Officials at both institutions admit that taking essays and other written material into consideration is more subjective than using only grades and test scores, but they point out that that each application is reviewed by two or more readers to ensure consistency.
While most college leaders praised the rulings, officials in California and Washington were somewhat less enthusiastic because they will still have to abide by bans on affirmative action that were approved by voters.
“The University of California will continue to comply” with the voter initiative, the university’s president, Richard C. Atkinson, said in a written statement, “and we will continue to work through other, legal means to achieve excellence and diversity on our campuses.”
The Supreme Court decisions are likely to lead some affirmative-action supporters in those two states to push to overturn the measures. Even Mr. Connerly, the ardent foe of affirmative action, expects that to happen.
“But I don’t believe the voters have changed their minds,” he said.
And in Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush, a Republican who signed an executive order in 1999 prohibiting the use of affirmative action, issued a statement saying that his policy would stand. “We’re going to stay the course on race-neutral admissions,” he said, “and expand our programs to reach all Florida students who yearn for higher education.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 49, Issue 43, Page S5
