That Harvard Case - Part 2

In prior posts, we have followed the progression of the admissions case Harvard (and University of North Carolina) that will be decided by the US Supreme Court and is likely to determine the fate of "affirmative action."*

We have noted that since voters in California imposed - and then recently maintained - Prop 209 which bans affirmative action, UC might appear to be unaffected by the forthcoming decision. However, elements of UC's admissions policies could become an issue in the future. For example, the Regents ended use of the SAT/ACT as part of the admissions policy. Recently, however, a court has ruled that a public high school that discontinued such a test did so for racial reasons, essentially, to reduce the share of Asian American students and increase admissions of other groups. 

From the NY Times: A federal judge on Friday struck down changes that had been made to the admissions process at a magnet school in Virginia that is one of the most prestigious high schools in the country, saying that the new rules left Asian American students “disproportionately deprived of a level playing field.” The school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J., which sits just outside of Washington, D.C., in Fairfax County, Va., had adopted the admissions protocols in late 2020 with the aim of diversifying the student body. The new rules did not mention race but eliminated a standardized testing requirement and specifically guaranteed eligibility to top students at middle schools that had sent few students to T.J. in the past. After the rules went into effect, the percentages of Black and Hispanic students in the incoming class more than tripled, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 percent to 54 percent, the lowest share in years.

In changing the admissions process, school officials “expressed their desire to remake T.J. admissions because they were dissatisfied with the racial composition of the school,” Judge Claude M. Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia wrote in his decision. “A means to accomplish their goal of achieving racial balance,” he wrote, “was to decrease enrollment of the only racial group ‘overrepresented’ at T.J. — Asian Americans. The board employed proxies that disproportionately burden Asian American students.” ...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/us/thomas-jefferson-school-admissions.html.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/01/that-harvard-case.html.