Consider This from NPR - Diversity After Affirmative Action

Episode Date: November 5, 2022

Over the last four decades, affirmative action has helped transform diversity on college campuses in the United States. But soon, affirmative action in higher education may come to an end. This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments challenging affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Many Court observers believe that the current 6-3 conservative supermajority will rule that higher education can no longer consider race as a factor in admitting students. If affirmative action is overturned, what tools can colleges and universities use to make their campuses more diverse? For answers, we look to California. In 1996 the state banned the use of affirmative action in public universities. Mitchell Chang is Associate Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of California, Los Angeles. He spoke with NPR's Adrian Florido.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

At the Supreme Court, a cultural crossroads. Despite 40 years of legal precedent supporting consideration of race in college admissions... The court has a conservative supermajority with a 6-3 advantage and has shown a willingness to upend precedent. The cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina could end affirmative action as we know it at public and private schools across this country. Colleges and universities have long considered race as a factor in admissions. Their goal? To redress the history of racism, oppression, and segregation that for a long time kept non-white students out of university classrooms. But another goal is to recruit diverse student bodies for the benefit of all students, including white ones. Over the last

four decades, affirmative action has transformed college campuses in the United States. But soon, affirmative action in higher education may come to an end. This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments challenging affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The court's conservative supermajority has signaled it'll rule that colleges can no longer consider race when deciding which students to admit. The Constitution and our civil rights laws forbid the consideration of race in higher education. That's legal activist Edward Bloom. He has fought against affirmative action for decades. His group, Students for Fair Admissions, is the plaintiff

in this week's cases. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled to uphold affirmative action, but David Kaplan, the former editor for Newsweek, told NPR the court's conservative majority now feels emboldened. It's judicial activism on steroids. Kaplan and other Supreme Court observers think it's not a matter of if the court will throw out its own precedent, but just how far the court's conservatives will go. Any notion of what we used to think was conservatism or humility or modesty on the part of the court is long gone. On the issue of race in particular. As supporters of affirmative action brace for the court's decision expected next spring,

one big question is how it'll affect black and brown students. Consider this. If public colleges and universities can no longer consider race, what tools will they be left with to recruit racially diverse student bodies? One place to look for answers is California, which banned affirmative action in 1996. The spiritual culture of Berkeley and UCLA died out. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Adrian Fladivo.

It's Saturday, November 5th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. When a parent sends a kid to college,

they don't necessarily send them there to have fun or feel good or anything like that. They send them there to learn physics or chemistry or whatever they're studying. So tell me what the educational benefits are. That's Justice Clarence Thomas during this week's oral arguments. James Taylor, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, says the educational benefits are obvious. The spiritual culture that comes out of that interaction between all that diversity, it changes people. And when college campuses become less diverse, he says, well, look at what happened at Berkeley, where he used to teach,

when California's affirmative action ban decimated the school's ability to recruit Black and Latino students. When Berkeley got rid of Black and brown people, the campus became dumber and there just wasn't the same dynamic in the classroom. He says it's key to creating well-rounded students. The white kid, the Asian kid needs the black kid next to her in order for the white kid and the Asian kid to be fully educated. He says that no matter what happens at the Supreme Court, all colleges should work hard to show that they care about having racially diverse student bodies. I think schools have to do things beyond playing the affirmative action legal game. I think they have to create welcoming environments that say we don't care about affirmative action.

Absent or present, you are welcome here and we want you and we're going to support you. Not doing that, he says, has consequences. After all this time, after 25 years of not having a permanent vaccine, California has seen that it hurts. It hurts more not having brown people and black people in the room. Coming up. Our experience tells us that the universities, especially public ones like UCLA, have broader public missions that inform how we go about selecting students for admission. That's Mitchell Chang. He's the Associate Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of California, Los Angeles. As we said earlier, California banned affirmative action in 1996.

Proposition 209 said public colleges and universities could not use race as a factor in admissions. I asked Mitchell Chang about the impact of this affirmative action ban on student bodies at universities across the state, including his. Oh, at UCLA, we saw a significant drop in African-Americans and Latino students. In fact, the drop was around 50 percent. And it took us over a decade to recover from that, and nearly two decades to get the numbers back to what they were for African-American students. It took almost two decades.

How did UCLA end up getting those numbers back up, or at least closer to what they were before Prop 209? So basically, we had to revamp how we approach emissions. On the one side, we handled the reviews of applicants very differently than we did before Proposition 209. We looked beyond grades and test scores and took into account the applicants as a whole, or what we often refer to as took a more holistic approach. The other side had to do with leveling up our outreach programs and engagement with underserved communities. And I think those efforts made a significant difference, but it took a great deal of time. At the end of the day, though, you've got an admissions office which is looking at

applications on paper, and you can't consider race. It sounds like your admissions officers have to use a lot of proxies for race. How effective is that in achieving diversity when you could have just been looking at race directly? Is it as effective? Well, simply put, no. And this is why it took as long as it did. And we are now prioritizing colorblind approaches, which we have experienced as being much less effective. And yet UCLA and other public colleges in California are pretty diverse. And so that seems to lend itself to the argument that affirmative action opponents make, which is you don't need to consider race directly because, look, you've been able to achieve diversity in other ways. Yeah, but look what happened immediately after we stopped considering race. The numbers dropped significantly.

And we lost almost a generation of students and excluded them from accessing a level of higher education that prepares them to become leaders in our state. What do you think the UC system's experience tells us about what the future might hold for the rest of the country? Our experience tells us that the best way to address the persistent racial disparities based on centuries of racial discrimination is to directly account for race. And if institutions of higher education aren't able to use that as an option to enroll a racially diverse student body and maximize the potential benefits of racial diversity for their students, race-neutral alternatives will take a lot of time, a lot of effort to get their student bodies back to where they were prior to the consideration of race-conscious admissions practices.

If you couldn't consider race directly, what could you look at in deciding which students to admit? Well, one of the most widely used race-neutral approaches were often referred to as percent plans. And that is, we take the top 9% of high school graduates in California, and we guarantee them a spot in the UCs. considering the local context and ensuring that for those high schools that send fewer students to the UCs, that we would guarantee those students that graduate in the top of their class, a guaranteed spot at a place like UCLA. The other proxy is eliminating test scores, achievement test scores. For decades, we have seen disparities in test scores across across race, and much of it has to do with the vestiges of historical racism in our country. So eliminating the consideration of test scores is another proxy that can help us achieve the kind of diversity that we would like. And another one is to consider family income or students' parental education level. That's another proxy. But each one of these so-called race-neutral proxies are not as effective as taking race directly into account.

That was Mitchell Chang. He's Associate Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at UCLA. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adrian Fledivo.