Artwork: Hannah Lui
At 10:44 AM on June 29th, 2023, the Supreme Court overturned race-conscious college admissions in the United States. It marked the end of over fifty years of legal precedent, at once removing the Kennedy-Johnson policy aimed at addressing the centuries-long economic exploitation faced by people of color in the United States.
Race-conscious admissions were part of a wave of new laws during the civil rights era in the 60’s that helped end legal discrimination, and marked the beginning of attempts to close the racial wealth gap. The policy allowed minority students, who came from predominantly under-funded public schools and disparate socio-economic conditions, a fighting chance to help pull their communities out of poverty by attending elite institutions that were not originally built for them. These admissions policies – dubbed affirmative action – were transformative for student diversity, as it not only helped create accessibility to prestigious schools, but it allowed for Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous people to have a voice in copious amounts of university-funded research – research that influences laws, policies, and our understanding of society and history. Yet after its implementation, race-conscious admissions was met for decades with vitriol, as it was conveniently framed by its opponents as providing “unfair advantages” to students of color in the college admissions process. But this perspective completely disregards the nuance of the issue that race-conscious admissions tries to address.
An unfair advantage is being able to retake the SAT as many times as you need until you get the score you want, simply because you can afford to do it. An unfair advantage is the luxury of taking AP classes because your school has the funds to provide them. An unfair advantage is being able to take endless extracurriculars because you aren’t responsible for providing extra income for your family. (Yet the system doesn’t recognize these economical advantages as unfair.)
Most students accepted through race-conscious admissions practices have had to face similar socio-economic struggles, while still performing excellently in the context of their academic environment and the sparse resources they have at their disposal. Affirmative action isn’t just colleges allowing unqualified students of color to walk through their doors as they please. Affirmative action, racially, is universities looking at their applicants from a holistic perspective, and deliberately seeking greater representation in predominantly White institutions. Something that the Supreme Court, by stopping academic institutions from considering race, has ended permanently in the United States.
But the type of affirmative action with the most impact in elite universities has always been, and still is, legacy students. There has always been a quota of students prioritized in the admissions process, (as revealed by records from the Department of Education during the SCOTUS trial, showing that legacy students are 6 times more likely to get into Harvard) simply because they are a key part of the multi-billion dollar endowments supporting elite universities. In its decision, the Supreme Court, while striking down race-conscious admissions, allowed for the continuation of legacy admissions, which accounts for almost 25% of admitted students (over double the acceptance of the former).
The movement to end affirmative action, which was predominantly led by White Americans, had been gaining traction for several decades, but it wasn’t until the 2010s that they were able to find an audience as a means to reach their goal: Asian Americans. By the end of the civil rights era, many minority groups championed affirmative action, from Black, Latinx, and Asian American communities, to Indigenous and Arab communities. But during the last decade, East Asian Americans became the face of the anti-race conscious admissions movement, as it allowed for wealthier and White anti-affirmative action activists to claim that this issue was cross-racial. The problem with this is that affirmative action also benefits Asian Americans. The AAPI community is not a monolith, and should not be treated as such. Race-conscious admissions have for the last fifty years helped bring in a more diverse student body that have included underrepresented AAPI groups, such as Vietnamese, Filipino, and Palestinian students (and other various racial and ethnic groups in the AAPI diaspora).
Certain demographics of the AAPI community such as South Asian, Korean, and Japanese Americans have not benefited from race-conscious admission, simply because they fall under the wealthiest income bracket in the United States. This is not to say that they don’t face socio-political discrimination, but it allows us to recognize how they also benefit from economic privilege through the college admissions process. Even when East Asian American students face rejection from these universities, it isn’t because of race-conscious admissions (which accounts for less than 10% of admitted students). It’s because of the uncomfortable fact that wealthier demographics within the AAPI diaspora have had the economic resources to create extremely competitive applications that have led them to be over-represented in these institutions. In contrast, lower-income demographics who identify as AAPI are underrepresented, and are more in need of race-conscious affirmative action. Because this is not just a racial issue, but a class one as well.
The recent Supreme Court ruling has incited a larger cultural re-examination of the college admissions process, but there is one critical element that has widely been ignored: the prep-school to elite university pipeline. Attending a prep school can be life-changing, and has widely been described as the entrance ticket to the college of your dreams. As top-notch academics with average prices ranging from $16,000 to over $50,000, they’re often the gateway for wealthy students looking for a way into the Ivies. But prep schools have also been a key tool to cultivate diversity – some of the best prep schools in the nation, such as Andover Academy, have made it their mission to enroll students from lower-income and diverse backgrounds, welcoming them in with full scholarships. While we should praise the rapid diversification within these prep-schools over the last two decades, the issue still lies with the disparate advantages that students who attend these prep schools have over those who attend public schools. Only 14% of high school students in the United States attend a preparatory boarding school, and yet they make up over 35% of the admitted students at Harvard University, with similar percentages at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Duke, and the rest of the Ivies. Students at these schools, in addition to getting a world-class education, have other drastic advantages, like college counselors with connections to elite colleges, or access to exclusive networking opportunities with college admissions officers.
The Supreme Court decision has led to deeply positive and negative reactions within the AAPI diaspora, but one thing is clear: getting rid of race-conscious decisions will not result in an increase in acceptance of Asian Americans. The pipeline of legacy and prep-school students to elite colleges will remain very much intact, creating an overwhelmingly high-income student body. The decision unravels one of the very few efforts made by the United States to recognize and repair the damage made from centuries-long systemic discrimination, and will only exacerbate the class system in the United States.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hear Our Voices Magazine.