WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court should continue to allow the narrow use of race in college admissions because it achieves diversity in ways that race-neutral policies cannot, a group of social science researchers argued Thursday during a briefing on the soon-to-be heard Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case.
“Some say you could do this by relying on social class … . We tried that,” said Dr. Gary Orfield, Professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning at UCLA and co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
The shortcoming of class-based affirmative action, Orfield said, is that it fails to account for the fact that children from middle-class Black and Latino families still end up attending inferior K-12 public schools in poorer neighborhoods more than Whites from similar backgrounds and thus have a distinctly different pre-college experience.
“You would not be able to reach the fact that middle-class Black and Latino families experience many disadvantages despite being advantaged and living in diverse neighborhoods,” Orfield said.
When California used class-based affirmative action, he said, it ended up benefiting students who had recent immigrant parents with high education levels but low incomes. Such students, he said, could not have needed affirmative action because it would be impossible to show they were discriminated against due to their newness in the United States.
Orfield was one of several scholars who spoke at the briefing that the American Educational Research Association held Thursday regarding a brief the organization filed in the UT Austin case.
Among other things, the brief lists what social science research shows about the benefits of diversity and argues that race-conscious admission policies remain necessary as opposed to race-neutral alternatives that fall short of achieving the kind of diversity needed to produce educational benefits documented in the research, such as better understanding across racial groups.
