Thinking back on his family’s success, Andrew Brennen said affirmative action has always been part of the story. His parents were the first in their families to attend college and the first to go to law school. Brennen talked with pride about his father’s historic appointment as the first Black law school dean in Kentucky.
“I’ve always known what affirmative action was and, even before applying to college, was aware of the policy’s impact on my family,” said Brennen, who graduated in 2019 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was part of the last class admitted to Columbia Law School before the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in higher education in June 2023.
Andrew Brennen, 28, Columbia Law School student.
Jabari Simama also experienced the benefits of affirmative action. Raised in Missouri, he enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black college, before moving across the country to attend the University of Bridgeport, a primarily White institution in Connecticut, on a scholarship for promising Black applicants.
After graduating, Simama moved to Atlanta in 1973, where he served two terms on the city council, became president of Georgia Piedmont Technical College, and worked as a financial overseer for the 1996 Summer Olympics. He is a columnist for Governing magazine.
As Brennen and Simama found, college can define the path someone follows for the rest of their life: their career, income, and professional connections. Colleges, particularly the elite institutions most affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling, play a disproportionate role in choosing the next generation of leaders. In a world where students from privileged families have long benefited from extra resources and access to those schools, affirmative action has functioned as a support for historically marginalized students. It could take years to realize the full impact of the court’s decision, but data from states that had already banned affirmative action offers some clues about what to expect. The signs are not good.At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in admissions has already led to a dramatic decline in the number of minority students in their incoming class. Another elite school, Amherst College, reported a similar drop leading Dean of Admissions Matthew McGann to write that, “as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision, the incoming class is not as racially diverse as recent classes have been.”
Jabari Simama (center), sworn in to the Atlanta City Council April 7, 1987, by Municipal Court Judge Leah Ward Sears.
What happens when affirmative action is banned?
In 1996, California passed Proposition 209 and became the first state to end affirmative action in college admissions for its public universities. According to a 2020 study by Zachary Bleemer, a labor economist at Princeton University who studies higher education, since the law went into effect in 1997, there has been a significant drop in the number of minority applicants to the University of California system’s most competitive schools such as UC Berkeley and UCLA.
Brennen worried that Black student enrollment would drop after affirmative action in college admissions ended. He recalled a class discussion about affirmative action during his first year at Columbia when a classmate questioned whether the policy makes it difficult to know whether Black students deserve to attend.
“I was one of two Black students in the class at the time and felt like I failed to come to the defense of my entire race in responding to my classmate’s comments,” Brennen said. “Experiences like that [leave us] feeling like we are asked to be spokespeople of our race because of how few Black students there are on campus.”
Black
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International & Unknown
Click a year to see the racial composition of students admitted to UC Berkeley.
After California enacted Proposition 209, eight more states banned affirmative action, beginning with Florida in 1999. After that, Florida and Texas adopted policies that required admitting percentages of the top students of high school graduating classes to ease the effects of their bans.
Under Florida’s initiative, known as One Florida or the Talented Twenty program, the top 20% of a high school graduating class is admitted to at least one of the state’s public universities. Many high schools reflect historical patterns of segregation in housing, so the policy was proposed to increase equity, particularly in the state’s flagship universities, Florida State University and the University of Florida. Few students use the Talented Twenty Program, and most of them are not from underrepresented groups, said Miguel Ubiles, a Florida lawyer who wrote a thesis on the program in 2012.
Ubiles noted that the Talented Twenty program did not improve diversity within the Florida university system, calling it “uncoordinated and decentralized.” To boost diversity, top schools such as Florida State University and the University of Florida created a series of minority recruitment and outreach programs. These programs include the Florida Bright Futures scholarship, the UF Alliance Program, and Florida State’s Center for Academic Retention and Enhancement (CARE) — all created following the enactment of the Talented Twenty program in 1999 to mitigate the damage done to diversity in the system — efforts now under threat by conservatives targeting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives.
In 2006, after Michigan voters approved banning affirmative action in admissions decisions at the state’s public universities, the University of Michigan took steps to increase minority enrollment. Enrollment declined even though Michigan spent millions of dollars increasing financial support for minority students, creating a Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and establishing the Center for Educational Outreach to open the Ann Arbor campus to the rest of the state.
In a 2023 amicus brief, the University of Michigan contended that their efforts had proven unsuccessful: “Despite persistent, vigorous, and varied efforts to increase student-body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means, admission and enrollment of underrepresented minority students have fallen precipitously in many of U-M’s schools and colleges.”
“Over the past 16 years, the proportion of Black students at the University has dwindled from 7% to 4%,” the university said.
As diversity dwindles in top institutions, problems grow in campus culture, said Jonathan Mijs, an associate professor of sociology at Boston University. Mijs, who studies social inequality has written extensively on how higher education plays a role in how we perceive class differences.
“It’s really, really important for students to have some kind of exposure to others from different backgrounds,” he said. “And what’s unfortunate about highly selective universities is that they don’t do a terrific job in providing. Universities should provide opportunities for students to cross economic, sometimes racial, and ethnic lines. Unfortunately, these universities are a bit of an echo chamber, a bit of a bubble, and that’s gonna be getting worse because of the Supreme Court decision.”
Brennen said he witnessed the effects of a campus culture that was a mostly-White bubble. “I was a student at UNC when I saw my first Confederate rally on campus,” he said. When Brennen first heard about the suit brought by Students for Fair Admission that led to the Supreme Court ruling, “I kind of assumed it was to address the lack of minority representation. I was really surprised when I learned that, in fact, they were suing because they felt like the university was too diverse.”
“America is getting more and more diverse, and knowing that there is a difference in educational attainment in sub-populations, you would think there would be policy interest in helping close that gap. But unfortunately that is not what policy makers want to do.”
Miguel Ubiles Orlando-based attorney
Long-term effects of the Supreme Court ruling
Banning affirmative action affects more than enrollment rates for students of racial minority groups. It could have lifelong implications on students’ economic mobility, according to a 2022 study of economic mobility by Bleemer.
He found that Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans in California attended less selective colleges after Proposition 209 passed — a drop he described as a cascading effect. In turn, those students went on to earn smaller wages in their 20s or 30s than their peers. Bleemer also found that the largest shifts in the data following Proposition 209 were to the academic achievements of Black students and the wages of Hispanic students. He said the removal of affirmative action has “first-order implications for intergenerational mobility and socioeconomic gaps by ethnicity”.
Access matters in the long term. Elite universities, or highly selective schools, are “where most of our leaders go,” said Aaron Taylor, a former law school admissions officer and executive director of AccessLex Institute, a nonprofit organization. “They acquire job opportunities, business opportunities. They make more powerful connections there. It is important that these institutions are diverse.”
Those opportunities and connections also translate to substantial wealth. Graduating from one of the nation’s most selective private colleges and universities — what researchers call “Ivy-Plus” schools — instead of a flagship public college triples students' chances of obtaining jobs at prestigious companies, according to research by Harvard economists Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman at Harvard. Attending one of the 12 Ivy-Plus schools (the Ivy League plus the University of Chicago, Stanford University, MIT, and Duke University) instead of a flagship public college triples students' chances of obtaining jobs at prestigious companies and substantially increases their chances of earning in the top 1%.
Such high economic mobility rates aren’t the norm for graduates of schools that admit and educate “a vast majority of students from low-income backgrounds,” said David Forte, director of research translation and strategic initiatives for Harvard’s Opportunity Insights.
Chetty argues that changing admissions policies to reduce income-based biases could significantly diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America's leaders without compromising the quality of the student body, thereby contributing to social mobility and making leadership more representative of society. He also notes that adjusting admissions policies could boost by 8.8 percentage points student representation from the bottom 95% of income families at Ivy-Plus colleges.
“[Elite] universities may end up undermining rather than promoting their civic role of producing responsible democratic citizens because they will be instilling this same meritocratic narrative that tells us that those who deserve it find a way and those who struggle must have done something wrong and are to blame.”
Jonathan Mijs Professor of Sociology at Boston University
A precarious system made worse
In the years after California stopped considering race in college admissions, Bleemer noticed fewer Black and Latino students enrolled in elite University of California schools, opting for less selective public colleges and universities. “When White and Asian students do not get into Berkeley, they often can go to the University of Southern California, a private institution,” said Bleemer. “When Black or Hispanic students get rejected from the top level, they typically go to a more regional school, a U.C. Riverside or Davis.”
If access to elite schools is reduced, could HBCUs offer a solution? For Simama, the possibility of minority students being shut out of selective schools and turning to HBCUs could be a mixed blessing. “It is kind of bittersweet,” said Simama. “The sweet part is that there have always been great institutions that have nurtured Black and brown students, and provided access, and protected underserved communities, and have gotten them where they need to be, where they can make enormous contributions to society.
“And at the same time, historically black colleges have struggled in the past with enrollment, and getting the proper attention for the great jobs that they do.”
What's next for diversity in tech fields?
Black college applicants now must try to set themselves apart from other applicants by “telling triumphant stories of individualism, bootstrapping and resilience in the face of racial hardships,” Saida Grundy, an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, wrote last year in an op-ed for The Guardian.
Studies of previous affirmative action bans suggest there will be negative economic outcomes for underrepresented groups. In 2015, the Equal Justice Society published a study that found businesses owned by women and people of color in California have lost a billion dollars in potential contracts since Proposition 209 passed. Dollars spent on contracting work by women and minorities fell by 52% in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after the state banned affirmative action.
Economic decline is no coincidence. Lack of access to skill development, mixed with stagnant wages, has large implications for the future of the American economy. This includes necessary and lucrative fields such as science, technology, engineering, and math — also known as STEM.
Simama thought back to his time working as a technology leader in Atlanta. “There are many fields that will clearly have a shortage…We had trouble recruiting in tech. If it was not for immigrant labor, we would not be able to fulfill that job, we would not be able to keep these jobs open.
“Part of the problem is we are not getting enough students in technology,” he said “Anything that suppresses the talent pool in the U.S., specifically, anything that discriminates against minorities in STEM or other fields, that hurts us on the global stage.”
The next target: DEI programs
Some people see the end of affirmation action as the start of new efforts by conservatives to cut DEI programs. According to a 2023 report by the consulting firm Paradigm HQ on the state of DEI, momentum fueling DEI slowed because of “change driven by a combination of economic uncertainty, the increasing politicization of diversity-related topics, and fatigue.”
Last year, Florida and Texas banned DEI initiatives at public colleges. Some students at the University of Texas at Austin said leaders there are over-applying the new laws.
“There is already a push by law firms to remove diversity programs, and I believe that is wholly unnecessary at this point,” said Taylor, the former law school admissions officer. “The thing to keep in mind is there are already federal and state discrimination laws that employers have to comply with. Employers must comply with the 14th Amendment and that includes giving weight to diversity and access programs.”
Any hope for future DEI measures must come from more direct measures targeted toward minority communities rather than large-scale ones given the current political climate, Ubiles said.
To help people of color financially and through student services, universities must initiate “proactive outreach to students to tell them that they can be successful,” he said. “And if the university can instill that they have a future, then perhaps we could offset the hostile public policy.”
This project was reported and designed by the Media Innovation Studio at Northeastern University's School of Journalism, part of its graduate program in Media Innovation + Data Communication. The student reporting teams interviewed dozens of graduating high school seniors, admissions officers and researchers across the US to produce the stories and data visualizations.
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The Supreme Court ended affirmative action for higher education. The impact could be felt for years to come.
by Yuchen Hong, Sabira Khalili, Matthew Rushford and Sixun Ren, The Emancipator October 7, 2024
