Affirmative Action and the Future of Education Reform

With the Common App deadline quickly approaching, high school seniors across the US are preparing their college applications. The process of selecting the next freshman class is underway. Top of mind for the higher education community is how the Supreme Court’s recent ban on race-conscious affirmative action will affect admissions decisions for the 2024–25 academic year. Will fewer students from historically marginalized racial groups apply to the nation’s highly selective colleges and universities? Will elite colleges focus on class-conscious affirmative action as a means of generating diversity? Will these colleges somehow manage to maintain existing levels of racial diversity?

A New Higher Education Landscape

While race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions was never a panacea for systemic racial inequality in the US, it signaled good intentions. It also provided a boost to racial diversity in our elite colleges, and thereby in our elite social, economic, military, and governmental institutions. In practice, it was a small but significant attempt to begin correcting disparities in upward economic mobility between racial groups. Without it, we are facing a new and uncharted admissions landscape.

We will get some clues about the shape of this new landscape when early admissions data are available, and we will know its contours for sure when enrollment data arrive over the next few years. Even then, the fallout of the court’s decision will continue, likely manifesting in declining racial diversity on elite campuses. Race-conscious affirmative action was a Band-Aid over the deep injury of systemic racism, and ripping it away exposes the open wound. The plain fact that selective colleges are elitist will become all the more obvious — and elitism is a bad look in our politics, on the left and on the right.

Political reactions to the decision are already underway, with the politics of resentment against elites taking hold in legislatures across the country. Attacks on legacy and donor admissions are gaining momentum. Part of the chatter involves taxing endowments and using the money to support scholarships for economically disadvantaged students. The idea that colleges should fill a minimum percentage of seats with Pell-eligible students in order to receive federal funds has also been around for a while, and will almost certainly make a comeback.

Taking the Court’s Temperature

The drama in the courts will surely continue, given that it is still unclear which alternatives to race-conscious admissions the Supreme Court will allow. On the one hand, the court seems open to the use of class-based criteria and personal histories. At the same time, the court’s decision clearly warned that racial criteria in admissions that are prohibited directly will not be tolerated if used indirectly.

The test case that will take the court’s temperature on class-based admissions involves Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson High School changed its admission process in 2020 in order to diversify its student body by both race and class, and was subsequently sued on the grounds of discrimination against Asian/Asian American students. If the court affirms the high school’s approach to considering neighborhood and socioeconomic status in admissions, the door will also be left ajar for class-based strategies that increase access to elite colleges for students from racial minority backgrounds.

Even if class-based admissions are permissible, recruiting low-income students is expensive. While Harvard and Yale may have deep pockets, not all selective colleges are as rich. Of course, some colleges can pull from their endowments, but that presents problems as well. Alumni view drawing down the endowment as stealing, and board members don’t want a shrinking endowment on their watch. With the board and the alumni upset, presidents can be fired for fooling with endowments. However, the president and the board can use a capital campaign to raise funding for a net increase in enrollments of lower-income students, which may help boost representation among lower-income minority students.

Going Back to Basics

Ultimately, however, addressing inequality at the college admissions stage is short-term thinking. Race and class problems in higher education begin in the pre-K–12 system. Race-conscious admissions policies were an attempt to level an uneven playing field without addressing the root causes of inequality, and the need to go back to basics and focus on pre-K–12 reform seems obvious. But improving the entire educational pipeline is a long-haul proposition. It has no immediate payoff and requires remarkable long-term political commitments, including federal and state interventions in the local control of schools — a political nightmare for those leading the way.

All that being said, we may have finally reached the point where systemic reform is recognized as the only way forward. The words of A Nation at Risk, published in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, still ring true today:

“What is at risk is the promise first made on this continent: All, regardless of race or class or economic status, are entitled to a fair chance.…. to secure gainful employment and to manage their own lives, thereby serving not only their own interests but also the progress of society itself.”

An “All One System” Approach

The ban on race-conscious affirmative action at the college level should shift our focus once and for all from college access and success to an “all one system” approach to education and career success that breaks down the silos between preschool, K–12 education, postsecondary education and training, and good jobs.

This is hardly a new idea. Since the mid-seventies, all these programs have been included in function 500 of the federal budget — covering programs related to education, training, employment, and social services — because of the crucial interactions among them. Recently, President Biden’s Build Back Better plan initially included many elements of a silo-busting strategy, from free preschool to free community college. At the state level, Governor Newsom in California has latched onto much the same strategy with his Cradle-to-Career System.

One of the benefits of looking toward K–12 education is that, while the Supreme Court ruled decisively in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) that the US Constitution provides absolutely no right to education, many state constitutions do guarantee some version of educational adequacy. Lawyers have been successfully suing the states on educational adequacy grounds for decades, establishing reform tactics that go beyond legislatures.

Political and policy leaders as well as the leadership in the education reform community have already arrived at a new vision that treats education and labor markets as one system. But now we will to need make real improvements across a series of transitions:

• from universal preschool
• to federal increases in spending for Title 1 schools, conditional on matching state increases
• to supportive wrap-around services, mental health services, and career counseling services in high schools
• to work-based learning (WBL) beginning in high schools
• to dual enrollment and early college
• to Career and Technical Education (CTE)
• to short-term job training Pell Grants, the newest stepping stone to jobs and degrees in the postsecondary system
• to free community college
• to the community college bachelor’s degree and the traditional bachelor’s degree in four-year institutions
• to good jobs that, by our definition, pay a minimum of $43,000 and a median of $74,000 by age 45, and a minimum of $55,000 with a median of $91,000 between the ages of 45 and 65
• and, finally, to the equitable intergenerational transfer of educational and economic empowerment by race, class, and gender.

Dr. Carnevale is the director and research professor at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. CEW is a research and policy institute within Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy that studies the links among education, career qualifications, and workforce demands.

Thanks to Kathryn Peltier Campbell, Katherine Hazelrigg, and Maryam Noor for editorial feedback; Fan Zhang for graphic design; and Johnna Guillerman and Maryam Noor for publication support.

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