The Harvard Crimson November 17, 2022 By Rahem D. Hamid and Nia L. Orakwue, Crimson Staff Writers
Following oral arguments last month, the Supreme Court is set to deliver a decision in the anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina next summer.
Race-conscious college admissions is likely on the chopping block of the court’s conservative majority and some experts expect universities to have begun planning for a post-affirmative action world.
Students for Fair Admissions is led by activist Edward J. Blum, who has a long history of opposing race-conscious policies. The group first sued Harvard in 2014, alleging that the College’s race-conscious admissions program violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevents institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating “on the grounds of race, color, or national origin.”
Following two lower-court rulings in Harvard’s favor, SFFA petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case, which it did in January.
Experts have long expected it to overturn the precedent it affirmed in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger.
Richard H. Sander ’78, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he expects the court’s ruling to overturn Grutter on grounds of Title VI or the 14th Amendment or get thrown back to the lower courts.
Despite the uncertainty about how exactly the justices will rule, Sander said he thinks there will be an increase in academic discourse about possible race-neutral alternatives to achieve racial diversity in higher education while the schools await the court’s ruling.
When the Supreme Court last debated affirmative action – after Blum sued the University of Texas at Austin for using race in admissions in 2014 – Sander said higher education officials had begun planning for a decision that declares race-based admissions unconstitutional.
“There was a lot of engagement by university leaders and other people in education about post-affirmative action strategies,” he said. “I went to a couple of conferences in 2014, where there were a dozen academics or thinkers like myself, and then a couple of dozen university presidents. And the topic was basically, ‘what next?’”
“I think those sorts of discussions are starting up again,” he added.
In the event that the court does overturn its precedent, Sander said, the exact changes to college admissions policies on specific issues – like writing about race in college essays – will be decided by the lower courts and schools.
Steven R. Goodman, an educational consultant and admissions strategist, forecasted declines in the number of Black and Latinx students on college campuses if the court rules in favor of SFFA. He specifically cited California as an example – which banned the use of race in admissions for its public universities in 1996.
“I think we’ll see drops,” Goodman said. “Will they be as significant as the drops in California? No, but there’ll be significant drops.”
Harvard College spokesperson Rachael Dane declined to comment on any ongoing preparations in the event of a ruling against the University.
Toll said although enrollment has started to climb since the pandemic, “Zoom fatigue” has reduced engagement in live, remote programming. But he said virtual live information sessions were still a very “effective” method to connect with students and communicate with parents because it supplements in-person Inside GW sessions.
The University paused Inside GW, an eight-day tour and information session program for admitted students and their families when the pandemic hit before resuming it last April.
“Virtual programming will remain a part of the admissions process moving forward, but we will continue to experiment with formats and types of programming to best meet the needs of each cohort of future students,” Toll said.
Jason Zara, the faculty director of undergraduate admissions, said he has led “Discover Engineering and Computer Science at SEAS” since fall 2020, a virtual information session about the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences where prospective students can participate in a Q&A session.
“As time has gone on, there are fewer participants that turn their cameras and microphones on,” Zara said in an email. “More questions come in through the chat. I think people have gotten camera exhaustion.”
He said SEAS will continue to host virtual events as the school expands in-person tours.
“I don’t think virtual information sessions replace an in-person visit to campus, and many students follow up by visiting campus,” Zara said.
Experts said online recruitment efforts have made higher education more accessible to prospective international students who may struggle traveling abroad to tour a college campus. They said colleges and universities can curate virtual information sessions to students based on their program or degree of interest and make programming schedules more flexible through pre-recorded content.
John Thelin, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, said admissions staff have always hesitated to organize virtual recruitment events in fear of disrupting their “historic” and “established” institutional image with modern technology.
He said even after higher education institutions developed their virtual recruitment technology, the quality of recruitment content tends to suffer due to lag and poor design from adults who don’t have as much technological experience.
“Nothing is more boring than tired, weary technology that is not well done,” Thelin said in an email. “Students and applicants probably are far more sophisticated consumers about technology and images than are the adults who design and use them.”
He said audiences’ patience with malfunction runs thin with college admission sessions, and these events might become repetitive of college websites.
“It becomes a predictable backdrop, but not really central to hard decisions by good applicants and good institutions,” Thelin said.
Steve Goodman – an educational consultant and admission strategist at Top Colleges, an admissions consulting agency – said virtual platforms are effective for generating applications, but the percentage of students who enroll based on virtual recruitment efforts is still unclear.
“There’s the issue of whether the ‘good student’ who GW really wants is the student actually matriculating,” Goodman said. “Is that student applying? And is that student ultimately accepted and going to matriculate at GW? The question is in this post-pandemic period whether or not those tools will be sufficient to yield the students specifically that GW wants.”
He said the production cost of in-person tours could also dissuade officials from expanding in-person recruitment programming. He said that unlike online tours, in-person programming requires paid student tour guides and admissions staff, facility rental space and gifted University merchandise for visitors.
“I suspect that there will be a combination of the virtual and in-person because ultimately students and families are going to feel much more comfortable knowing that they’ve actually interacted with somebody at the University before they decide to matriculate,” Goodman said.