Going Backwards on Our Commitment to Racial Justice
By Anthony P. Carnevale
The new school year is approaching in the aftermath of two recent US Supreme Court decisions that fail to acknowledge the deep wounds of our racist history. We are going back to school as usual while going backward on our commitment to racial justice.
First, the loss of race-conscious affirmative action in admissions will make it more difficult for selective universities to enroll diverse student bodies. The small gains made over generations in the representation of Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Indigenous students at the nation’s most elite universities are likely to be dramatically reversed. Without sweeping changes in selective admissions practices, the nation’s future elites in every domain will look less and less like America.
Second, the court’s failure to uphold President Biden’s student loan cancellation plan will intensify long-held racial disparities, as Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino students take out more student debt on average than their white peers. Student loan debt functions as negative wealth, influencing young people’s decisions about whether to buy a home or have children, and preventing the accumulation of assets that could support future generations’ educational attainment. While President Biden has already announced a new route for some student loan cancellation, new lawsuits will follow.
In response to these decisions, the country must shift gears if it hopes to rectify racial inequities in the educational system. One potential avenue highlighted by the Supreme Court is the use of admissions essays to account for the impact of race or ethnicity in applicants’ lives. The majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts gives mixed hope on this point. In it, Chief Justice Roberts confirms that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” However, he also warns that “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
While essays on how racial or ethnic identity contributed to an applicant’s character may still be permitted, expecting applicants to prove the personal impacts of systemic racism puts an unfair burden on marginalized students. Marginalized applicants may feel compelled to compete for admissions through hard-luck stories that are personally humiliating and that advance negative stereotypes of minority families and communities, while students with privilege continue to silently benefit from their advantages. The result can be an invasion of privacy based on a forced performance that borders on exploitation. Furthermore, most 18-year-olds can’t meaningfully articulate the forces that shaped them. Like the SAT- and ACT-prep industry, the college essay industry will remain eager to help those affluent enough to afford it.
(I must confess that my reaction to the new focus on application essays comes from personal experience: as a young adult, I learned to use my own carefully honed hard-luck story to get out of trouble with various authorities and get into college. I can testify that being encouraged to develop such stories, however true they may be, encourages diffidence, mistrust of authority and elites, and cynicism.)
The court’s decision also seems to leave the door open to considering factors other than race, such as socioeconomic status, when weighing prospective students’ hardships. Statistical metrics — like community of origin (reflecting K–12 school segregation by race and class), rates of participation in free and reduced-price lunch programs (a good proxy for family income), school quality, parental education (including first-generation college status), and access to advanced placement courses — are far preferable to hard-luck stories in giving a sense of the barriers a student has overcome. However, our research shows that although class-conscious alternatives to race-conscious admissions policies can curtail some losses of racial diversity, they are far from a complete substitute for direct consideration of race. Ultimately, being in a marginalized racial group is a liability that has its own power: the effects of race can be supercharged by the effects of class, but race is not the same thing as class.
Whatever approach colleges and universities take now, they will want to be cautious. College admissions are under the microscope, and lawsuits focused on admissions will continue to arise. Following the affirmative action ruling, an advocacy group immediately filed a civil-rights lawsuit challenging Harvard’s legacy admissions practices, which give preferential treatment predominantly to white students. In addition, the ongoing lawsuit challenging “race-blind” admissions practices that aim to increase diversity at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia — the nation’s top public high school — suggests that race-neutral admissions based on socioeconomic status and geographic location will be the next legal battleground, and K–12 schools will be among the targets.
With the ever-widening race and class chasms in this country, creating an equitable educational system is increasingly imperative. Postsecondary education remains the most reliable path to upward economic mobility, and if universities are no longer doing their part to provide economic opportunity, the responsibility will shift heavily to the K–12 system. In 1973, the Supreme Court’s ruling in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez held that the US Constitution does not establish a federal right to equitably funded education. However, several states have enshrined a right to education in their constitutions. Local districts should do everything possible to ensure that their graduates are career- and college-ready — and if they don’t, they should be held accountable.
Dr. Carnevale is the director and research professor at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. CEW is a research and policy institute within Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy that studies the links among education, career qualifications, and workforce demands.
Thanks to Kathryn Peltier Campbell, Martin Van Der Werf, and Maryam Noor for editorial feedback; Fan Zhang for graphic design; and Johnna Guillerman and Maryam Noor for publication support.
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