UC Admissions

A report from Inside Higher Ed indicates that the feds plan to challenge higher ed admissions practices. UC has argued that because of Prop 209, UC already complies with the Supreme Court's recent decision ending affirmative action. But there are some vulnerabilities in that argument. The first is that the Regents campaigned to repeal 209 only a few years ago. The second is that when they dropped use of the SAT and ACT for admissions, they ignored a report from the Academic Senate that said that the way UC used the tests in admissions decisions actually contributed to diversity. All of this makes for a messy, ambiguous, and contradictory record. 

...In March the Department of Justice launched investigations into admissions practices at Stanford University and three University of California campuses, accusing them of defying the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action in June 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Exactly what the Trump administration believes is going on behind closed doors in highly selective college admissions offices remains unclear. The University of California system has been prohibited from considering race in admissions since the state outlawed the practice in 1996, and both Harvard and Columbia have publicly documented changes to their admissions policies post-SFFA, including barring admissions officers from accessing the applicant pool’s demographic data.

Regardless, given the DOJ investigations and demands of Columbia and Harvard—not to mention potential demands at newly targeted institutions like Princeton, Northwestern and Brown—the federal government appears set to launch a crusade against admissions offices...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2025/04/14/admissions-offices-brace-federal-scrutiny.

All of this will play out in the courts. It seems unlikely that the Regents will want to make a Columbia-type deal. But UC might want to reconsider its SAT/ACT decisions before that process occurs.