Washington State Voters Will Decide Whether to Reinstate Affirmative Action. Here’s What You Need to Know.

When Washington State voters head to the polls next month, they’ll have a chance to second-guess the Legislature’s decision to restore affirmative action in a state that’s banned it for more than two decades.

The measure they’ll be voting on is Referendum 88, which asks for a thumbs up or down on a measure state lawmakers approved in April. The reason voters will get to decide is that after the initiative restoring affirmative action passed, opponents, led by a group of Asian American citizens, gathered more than 200,000 signatures to force a public referendum on the matter.

Harvard on Trial

Detailed background on the lawsuit over the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, the case’s implications for selective colleges, and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.

• Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants, U.S. Appeals Court Rules
• 3 Takeaways From the Appeal of the Harvard Admissions Lawsuit
• A Judge Advised Harvard to Give Its Admissions Officers Training to Stop Bias. Will That Help?

As a result, just months after its supporters celebrated a victory, the fate of affirmative action in Washington once again hangs in the balance.

As with a pending lawsuit against Harvard University, opposition to affirmative action here is based largely on the perception that opening doors to more black, Hispanic, and other underrepresented students means unfairly shutting out Asian American applicants. A federal judge rejected that argument in the Harvard case, ruling this month that the university’s use of race-conscious admissions was a legitimate, nondiscriminatory way to increase student diversity. The decision has been appealed, with the plaintiff vowing to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

Here are answers to some common questions about Referendum 88 that will catch you up on the debate.

How did Referendum 88 come about?

It goes back to 1998, when Washington voters approved a measure that essentially banned affirmative action. Twenty-one years later, a citizens group argued that the measure had limited opportunities for black and Hispanic people. The activists presented the Legislature with an initiative to dismantle that ban.

Lawmakers could have punted and sent the contentious matter back to voters in a referendum. But the Legislature, which has grown more racially and ethnically diverse in recent years, decided to take it up. The legislation, I-1000, was approved along party lines, with Democrats overwhelmingly favoring it.

Meanwhile, the measure’s opponents, many of whom argued that their relatives’ chances of getting into the flagship University of Washington campus could suffer, weren’t about to concede defeat. They got to work gathering the signatures needed to put the matter on the November ballot.

What exactly would the referendum do?

If it wins approval from voters, it will allow the measure the Legislature approved, I-1000, to become law. That measure would allow the state to “remedy discrimination against, or underrepresentation of,” certain disadvantaged groups. It would amend, but not completely replace, the state’s 1998 affirmative-action ban. Here’s how:

It would allow the consideration of race and gender as factors in public-university admissions as well as in government hiring and contracting. Those couldn’t be the only factors, though, and quotas would not be allowed. It would prohibit preferential treatment, which it defines as using factors like race or gender as the sole criterion for selecting a less-qualified applicant over someone more qualified. And it would create a governor’s commission on diversity, equity, and inclusion to monitor and enforce compliance with the law.

If Referendum 88 is rejected, the state’s ban on affirmative action will continue.

Who supports it?

Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington, has said that the affirmative-action ban has put the flagship at a competitive disadvantage in trying to attract the best minority students and employees. In a letter to lawmakers last year, she wrote that Washington competes with other top research universities for faculty and staff members, and that the affirmative-action ban “sends the message that the UW, and Washington as a whole, does not welcome or value diversity …”

High-achieving minority students, particularly those in the middle or upper class, are heavily recruited by private universities as well as out-of-state public universities, she wrote, “and when they leave our state to attend college, they are less likely to return. This costs our work force and our innovation-driven economy at a time when we’re recognizing the need for more diversity in the tech and health industries.”

When a group of college Republicans held an “affirmative-action bake sale,” in which customers were charged different prices based on their race and gender, she condemned the protest as crude and offensive.

Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, also backs the move to restore affirmative action, as do three former governors. Other supporters include a coalition called Washington Fairness, whose members include the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, tech giants like Microsoft, a national association of minority contractors, and a local chapter of the League of Women Voters. Supporters also include some prominent Asian American political and business leaders who argue that greater diversity helps everyone succeed.

Who’s opposed?

The fight is being led by a group called Washington Asians for Equality, which says it opposes racial preferences of any kind. “The other side has tried to paint this as a group of Asian Americans worried about losing spots at UW,” said Linda Yang, a leader of the group. The issue, she said, is broader. “Race has no place in American life or law.”

The legislation, the group contends, “would abolish the standard of equality for all, regardless of race … and replace it with a system that uses different rules for people of different races.”

Yvonne Kinoshita Ward, a civil-rights lawyer who is half Japanese, is a leading opponent of what she considers race-based affirmative action. “Asian Americans have been getting screwed over. It’s called the ‘too many Asians movement,’ although no one will admit that,” said Ward, a past president of the Asian Bar Association of Washington. Asian Americans make up 25 percent of the first-year enrollment at Washington, and Asians are the overwhelming majority of its foreign-student population.

Higher education has been moving the goalposts, she contends, to try to limit the number of Asian Americans admitted. When the focus on grades and test scores was broadened to include extracurricular activities, she said, “Asian American families made sure their kids were well rounded.” Then came Harvard’s personality score, a criterion subjective enough that it could be used to restrict Asian American enrollment, Ward said.

A fairer way to diversify the student body, she contends, would be to limit special treatment for children of alumni and big donors. During the Harvard trial, the judge acknowledged that applicants of Asian descent tended to receive lower personality scores, but she did not attribute that to systemic stereotyping. She did, however, suggest training to avoid implicit bias in the admissions process.

Despite what its supporters say, critics of Washington’s affirmative-action initiative argue that it would result in quotas and caps. It’s also unnecessary, they say, since even without affirmative action, the flagship university is more diverse today than it was 20 years ago.

What has happened to enrollments by race at the University of Washington at Seattle since affirmative action was banned, and how does that compare with demographic trends across the state?

After an initial tumble, from 10 percent to 6.6 percent of the first-time, first-year undergraduate population, the percentage of underrepresented minority students at the flagship gradually climbed, to 16.1 percent in 2017.

Still, the numbers haven’t kept up with the increasing proportion of minority residents across the state, which has risen from 17.1 percent to 25.8 percent of the total population.

About the Data

How do the trends at Washington compare with those at flagships in the seven other states that ban affirmative action?

Washington is one of five flagships — the others are at the Universities of Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, and Texas — where undergraduate minority percentages grew despite affirmative-action bans. However, like Washington, most of the others have failed to keep up with trends in their increasingly diverse populations.

The University of California at Berkeley, one of the most selective flagships, was hit hard, with the proportion of underrepresented minority students dropping from 24.8 percent to 20.9 percent of the first-year population. The University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor flagship, which is also highly selective, saw a more modest decline, from 13.7 percent to 13.1 percent. The University of New Hampshire, located in a state where the proportion of minority residents has hovered in the single digits, also dropped, from 7 percent to 5.1 percent.

About the Data

What issues are unique to Washington?

The Seattle flagship has seen huge growth in its number of international students, nearly all of them from Asia, who have been accepted since the 1998 affirmative-action ban. With shrinking state support for higher education, flagships nationwide have turned to admitting more foreign students, who pay higher tuition. But the growth in Washington — from 1.3 percent to 17 percent — has outpaced that of other states with affirmative-action bans. With fewer seats available for in-state students, enrolling a diverse class, with a critical mass of underrepresented-minority students, can be difficult without race-conscious admissions practices, some argue.

“If you’re a Latino or Latina first-generation student from eastern Washington, the odds of your having the resources to get into the University of Washington are slim,” said Deirdre M. Bowen, an associate professor of law at Seattle University and an expert on affirmative action. Well-off foreign applicants can pay full freight, which has added to the big rise in the number of international students the chart above shows. “The fact that a state university designed to educate its residents devotes nearly one in five slots to an international population creates more competition for scarce resources,” she said, and an even tougher hurdle for underrepresented-minority students to overcome.

About the Data (first chart): The state population estimates of 18- to 24-year-olds by race are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bridged-Race Population Estimates. The enrollment figures are from the U.S. Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. They represent all first-time, first-year, degree-seeking undergraduates. “Other” includes those who are two or more races as well as those who listed their race as unknown. “Nonresident” represents only international students.

About the Data (second chart): The state population estimates of 18- to 24-year-olds by race are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bridged-Race Population Estimates. The enrollment figures are from the U.S. Education Department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. They represent all first-time, first-year, degree-seeking undergraduates. “Underrepresented minorities” are defined as American Indians and Alaska Natives, blacks, and Hispanics. The percentage of underrepresented minorities for each year was calculated by dividing the total number of students in those three groups into the total number of students, minus those whose race or ethnicity was unknown, who were nonresident aliens or who were two or more races. The underrepresented-minorities percentages on this chart differ from the preceding chart by the way the total was calculated for this figure.

Jacquelyn Elias is news applications developer. Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.