WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s decision to bar consideration of race in college admissions will upend the application process for Minnesota’s public colleges, including the University of Minnesota, as well as the state’s private colleges.
While many students have already been admitted for the fall semester to Minnesota universities and colleges under policies that are now outlawed and those admissions will stand, the state’s schools must change their admissions policies going forward.
That means the University of Minnesota, for instance, is tearing up its current application forms and developing new ones for all new applicants. Other schools in the state – who like the University of Minnesota have been awaiting the court’s decision for many months – are also changing their application procedures.
In joined cases that challenged the admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, schools that considered race in their admissions process, the Supreme Court ruled the universities’ policies violated the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which maintains no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The court split 6-3 along ideological lines, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the conservative majority.
The Supreme Court’s decision means all institutions of higher learning cannot consider the race or ethnicity of an applicant.
The University of Minnesota had used what it calls a “holistic approach” in reviewing applications, a process that included consideration of grades and test scores as well as “secondary characteristics” including whether an applicant is a veteran or a member of a minority and/or disadvantaged group.
“It really is an art,” said Bob McMaster, dean for undergraduate education at the Twin Cities campus, of the way the school had decided which applicants to accept. “One of our goals is diversity.”
The student body at the university’s Twin Cities campus is about 6% Black and 4.7% Latino. McMaster said the university will continue to use recruitment techniques aimed at persuading Black and Latino high school students to apply.
“We know where there are a lot of kids with subsidized (school) lunches,” he said.
The promise to continue outreach was reiterated in a message from Executive Vice President and Provost Rachel Croson that was sent Thursday to faculty, students and staff.
“We will continue our recruiting efforts that have yielded increased diversity in our entering classes. We remain committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice on all our campuses,” Croson said.
Jorge Esparza Hernandez, an admissions officer at Carleton College in Northfield, said his school also takes a “holistic” approach to admissions, weighing an applicant’s life experience and seeking a mix of students who come from urban and urban areas, as well as those with diverse life experiences.
“We want people from all walks of life,” he said.
Unlike Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Carleton College does not directly use race in its admissions policy. But it does give preference to “underrepresented students,” sometimes offering certain applicants free plane tickets to visit the school, Hernandez said.
“That may narrow,” because of the Supreme Court’s decision, he said.
Many Minnesota schools were having their attorneys pore over the high court’s decision on Thursday, including the Mitchell Hamline School of Law.
“We have not had a chance to study the ruling and assess its implications, but Mitchell Hamline intends to continue to follow the law while not retreating from our foundational commitment to expanding access to legal education and the legal profession and admitting a student body that reflects broad diversity,” the school said in a statement signed by President Anthony Niedwiecki and Nicole James Gilchrist, chairman of the Board of Trustees.
And President Biden said diversity is one of the nation’s greatest strengths and that the court’s decision “cannot change what America stands for.” He also said he would ask the Education Department to study “legacy” admissions that favor White and wealthier students.
But it’s likely the Supreme Court’s decision will lead to less diversity in the student bodies of many colleges and universities, especially in the nation’s most prestigious schools.
A study of the makeup of public universities in states that have for years banned affirmative action in admissions showed immediate drop-offs following those bans in enrollment among Black, Hispanic and Native American students.
Unidos USA said that when Proposition 209 barred race-conscious admissions in California in 1996, Latino student admissions at UCLA and Berkeley dropped by half.
“Today, more than half of California’s public high school graduates identified as Hispanic, but just 25% of freshmen at all University of California schools and only 15% of freshmen at UCLA and Berkeley are Latino,” Unidos USA said.
Yet the court’s decision does not mean affirmative action is dead, not even in academia, said Constitutional law expert Kirk McGill of the Hall Estill law firm.
“It is unlikely that any race-based admission program in any university in the United States today is constitutional under this standard – but the door remains open for universities to create narrow and temporary programs if justified by the circumstances of their student body,” McGill said.
To McGill, the Supreme Court has left open the door to affirmative action programs that are not permanent, “but such programs must be narrowly tailored, tied to specific and measurable objectives justifying the use of race, and – most importantly – must be temporary with an explicit end point,” he said.
Still, the Supreme Court’s decision was excoriated by the nation’s civil rights groups.
“This radical decision comes at a time when efforts to advance opportunity in education have been under attack across the country, and the need for such programs remains acute,” the NAACP said.
McCollum fighting mad over GOP defense spending bill
While Congress often tackles defense spending on a bipartisan basis, this year the House Republicans plan to fund the Pentagon has unleashed a rebellion from House Democrats, with Rep. Betty McCollum, D-4th District, on the front lines.
For McCollum, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House defense appropriations subcommittee, there’s a lot not to like in the $826 billion bill that would pay for the costs of running the U.S. military; legislation she called “divisive.”
The bill would cut the budget for civilian workers at the Pentagon by $1.1 billion, a reduction McCollum said would result in increased delays – and costs – in the defense acquisition process. During the Appropriation Committee’s consideration of the bill, McCollum, who chaired the defense subcommittee before the GOP took over the House this year, also said she opposed the bill’s $714 million in cuts to climate resiliency projects and a ban on assessing climate impacts on the military.
But the GOP’s defense bill may have provoked the most scorn from Democrats for its many policy riders, which if made into law would change the military’s procedures and culture. McCollum attacked the bill’s ban on the military’s teaching of critical race theory, which she said “reads more like a ban on teaching American history that some find uncomfortable to learn.”
“As a former history teacher, I find it alarming that this bill seeks to determine what history the military can and cannot teach,” McCollum said.
Other riders in the bill would ban funding for surgical procedures or hormone therapies for gender-affirming care and funding for travel for reproductive healthcare needs, which like the other policy measures, have nothing to do with national security, McCollum said.
The bill would also ban funding for all diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs in the Pentagon. And it would ban more than 50 former military and intelligence agency officials from holding a security clearance.
Why? Because these officials, which include former CIA Directors Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta and John Brennan, signed a letter that raised questions about a 2020 New York Post story concerning emails from the laptop of President Biden’s son Hunter.
“Is it the role of this committee to ban individuals from having security clearances for signing their name to a letter – expressing their opinions as ordained in the Constitution?” McCollum said.
She also warned that Republicans were setting a dangerous precedent.
“If we want to take this committee down a road of punitive action, I have plenty of members of the Trump administration who I think should never hold security clearances again based on their actions surrounding January 6,” she said.
The House is expected to approve the bill next month. But the Senate, still under Democratic control, is likely to produce a much different bill to fund the military. Many of the House GOP riders are expected to be tossed in the effort to reconcile the different bills.
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