How Affirmative Action Died

You know what we’re not going to do today? Argue the merits of affirmative action. Trolls are more than welcome to release their bile on Reddit because I have a 300-word-limit to stick to. We will, however, discuss the effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling that essentially ended college affirmative action in the United States.

A 1995 Labor Department report found that affirmative action allowed 5 million members of “minority groups” and 6 million women to enter the workforce since the 1960s. Nevertheless, in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could no longer factor race or ethnicity into their admission calculations, effectively killing affirmative action. Having ostensibly lost every shred of self-awareness, Justice Clarence Thomas—who benefited from affirmative action programs at Holy Cross and Yale Law School—read his concurring opinion from the bench.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. How did this ruling affect college admissions? Well, (surprise, surprise!) Black, Latino, and other historically underrepresented students once more got the short end of the stick. At MIT, Black, Latino, and Native enrollment fell from 31% to 16% since the ruling. Likewise, Amherst College reported a drop in the incoming Black student population from 11% to 3%. Tuft’s figure fell from 7.3% to 4.7%. The Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t affect the military academies because of their “distinct interests” in a diverse Officer Corps. Apparently, affirmative action is important enough to ensure the country’s national security but literally nothing else.

Donald Trump (the University of Pennsylvania’s first Orange graduate) unsurprisingly called the ruling “a great day for America.” He vowed to continue his first administration’s work in dismantling what little remains of affirmative action. Kamala Harris, who opposed California’s ban on affirmative action, called the ruling “a denial of opportunity” and supported Justice Jackson’s dissenting opinion.

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