The U.S. Supreme Court wants to know: when will the nation’s colleges and universities no longer need race-conscious admission policies?
Chief Justice John Roberts posed that query last month during oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.
The question is a fair one. The court has long envisioned a day when social equality would end the need to consider race in the college admission process. But as student protests over racial bias continue to flare on campuses across the country, it’s clear that today is not that day.
America’s colleges and universities, both public and private, offer a chance at a better life, socially and economically. Yet access to these springboards for upward mobility remains unequal.
Minority students now outnumber Whites in our K-12 public schools, but racial and ethnic imbalances persist in higher education. While African-Americans and Hispanics make up 33 percent of the college-age population, they account for only 14 percent of undergraduates at the country’s most selective four-year colleges, according to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
One factor driving the disparity? Students of color are more likely to live in poverty, affecting not only their readiness to learn, but also the resources available at their neighborhood schools. The Education Law Center reports that only four U.S. states have school funding systems that can be considered fair based on socioeconomic and demographic considerations.
Those inequities can’t be ignored, and given persistent disparities in our educational system, we cannot blind our institutions of higher learning to these societal realities. College admission officers must be able to craft a class of students who they believe can not only succeed, but contribute to the betterment of the institution, the nation and the global community.
