This past June, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions, instating a national ban on affirmative action. Not only will this lead to overt drops in African American and Latinx enrollment in colleges and universities throughout the country, but it perpetuates myths of America’s meritocracy and “fairness.”
It is important to establish that meritocracy in college admissions has never existed. Since their founding, educational institutions didn’t admit “deserving African American applicants.” Noting that the system we are discussing openly barred admission to students of color for decades, it would be nearly impossible to argue that we’ve altered these systems enough to have merit alone even be a viable option. Merit-based admissions tie acceptance to a student’s skill level–this means heavy reliance on measures like class ranking, GPA, and test scores. When considering historical factors such as redlining, slavery, and Jim Crow era segregation, the problem with this system of evaluation becomes clear. Under a meritocratic system of education, the lack of access to resources for low income students, of which African American students make up a disproportionate amount, who have been pushed into underfunded school systems is blatantly disregarded. Hence, systemic racism, classism, and marginalization are perpetuated through the usage of conventional metrics.
In banning Affirmative Action, regardless of the intentions of the Supreme Court, the percentage of African American and Latinx students enrolled in universities will inevitably decrease–a phenomenon we have witnessed before. In 1996, California banned race-based Affirmative Action at public universities. According to Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University, when the ban took effect two years later, enrollment among Black and Latinx students at UCLA and UC Berkeley dropped by 40%. It would be willfully inaccurate to assert that this is simply due to more qualified white applicants than African American applicants. There are, however, more wealthy white applicants than there are wealthy African American applicants, which alludes to a second potential type of Affirmative Action based on socioeconomic factors.
When the solution isn’t tailored to the problem, the problem doesn’t change. I digress; socioeconomic-based affirmative action would provide a sense of equity within the college admissions process, but that equity is limited to socioeconomic factors, not race. Framing an argument around the idea that socioeconomic affirmative action can or will provide the same racial diversity that race-based affirmative action has for decades is a false equivalency, not to mention numerically incorrect. Simply, there are more white Americans in this country than African Americans. The actual pool of economically disadvantaged applicants will therefore continue to be primarily white, despite a larger portion of the African American population being economically disadvantaged in comparison to the share of the white population in that regard. According to the most recent Federal Reserve data, only 31% of adolescents from households in the lowest-income quarter of the national wealth distribution (those with net worths of $12,400 or less) are Black. If preference in admissions were given to students in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (net worth of $121,700 or less), only a mere 24% of the low-wealth eligible applicants would be Black. Evidently so, the transition to socioeconomic -based affirmative action would have little bearing on the overall racial diversification of a university. Racism is built into our systems; there is no resolution for institutionalized racism in a solution that fails to encompass or even acknowledge racial disparities at all.
Affirmative action alone is not the perfect remedy to providing equity; however, combined with programs that provide educational and economical resources to underprivileged communities, it has helped to bridge racial gaps in higher education. The notion that college admissions should be a pure meritocracy is ludicrous when taking into account the historic and ongoing discrimination against specific communities of color. Not only does affirmative action provide the necessary opportunities to higher education for African American and Latino applicants, but it also provides a clearer picture for admissions officers when reviewing an applicant’s background and the resources available to them. The solution has been clear since 1961, when the term “affirmative action” was first coined. We just refuse to act on what we know.
