The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | The Supreme Court Is Considering Two College Admissions Cases. Here's What You Need to Know.

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a number of cases this term, including two cases pertaining to affirmative action in college admissions.  The justices of the nation's highest court heard arguments for about five hours on Oct. 31 in the cases Students for Fair Admissions vs. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions vs. University of North Carolina. "So, what these cases involve is, basically at the heart, is racial discrimination. What Harvard and UNC have done, at least it's alleged by the plaintiffs, is that they have used their admission system to specifically keep down the numbers of Asian Americans who are being admitted into those two institutions," Lance Izumi, a senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, told The Daily Signal. "And so, in the case of Harvard, for example, they have used race as a factor, has been allowed under previous Supreme Court rulings, but have used it in a way that basically sets a quota on the number of Asians who are being admitted into Harvard," said Izumi, who is also the author of Obama's Education Takeover. Izumi added:  So, for example, if you took an Asian American applicant who had a 25% chance of getting into Harvard, if you changed his race to Hispanic American, that same person with the same characteristics would have a 77% chance of getting into Harvard.And if you change that Asian American to [an] African American, again with the same characteristics, that person would then have a 95% chance of getting into Harvard.Izumi joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to further discuss the Supreme Court cases, the impact of these cases, record-low ACT scores, and what he hopes the next Congress will accomplish on education policy.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, December 7th. I'm Samantha Sherris. There are many cases before the Supreme Court this term. A few weeks ago, the nation's highest court heard oral arguments for nearly five hours for two cases, students for fair admissions versus president and fellows of Harvard College, and students for fair admissions versus University of North Carolina. Joining us on today's podcast to discuss these cases and more is Lance Azumi, the Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute

and author of Obama's Education Takeover. We'll get to my conversation with Lance right after this. The Heritage Foundation takes to field on offense with their young leaders program. I'm Evelyn Homily from Hillsdale College. I'm Harrison Stewart from the University of Virginia. I'm a journalism intern with the Daily Signal. I'm a digital productions intern in communications. For spring, summer, and fall semesters,

the Heritage Foundation hosts undergraduate and postgraduate and postgraduate interns right here in the nation's capital to train our country's future conservative leaders. As a daily signal intern, I've had the opportunity to cover exciting events here in D.C. And work in a fast-paced environment with some of the conservative movement's best journalists. In YLP, interns are on the cutting edge of the conservative movement, attending exclusive briefings from heritage experts, members of Congress, and movement leaders fighting for the fate of our country.

It's been exciting connecting with big names in the political world and better understanding our nation's greatest threats. If you want to go on offense with other passionate, dedicated conservatives, go to heritage.org slash intern to learn more about the Young Leaders Program. Lance Azumi, a senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, an author of Obama's Education Takeover, is joining the podcast today. Lance, thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you very much. It's a great honor and pleasure to be on this podcast with you. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to talk. you today about the Supreme Court cases. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for nearly

five hours for two cases, students for fair admissions versus president and fellows of Harvard College, and students for fair admissions versus University of North Carolina. Lance, first and foremost, can you tell us a little bit about these cases? So what these cases involve is basically at the heart is racial discrimination. What Harvard and UNC have done, at least it's alleged by the plaintiffs is that they have used their admission system to specifically keep down the numbers of Asian Americans who are being admitted into those two institutions. And so in the case of Harvard, for example, they have used race as a factor, has been allowed under previous Supreme Court ruins, but have used it in a way that basically sets a quota on the previous Supreme Court ruins, but have used it in a way that basically sets a quota on the court. the number of Asians who are being admitted into Harvard. So, for example, if you took the same, if you took an Asian American applicant who had a 25% chance of getting into Harvard, if you

changed his race to Hispanic American, you would, that same person with the same characteristics would have a 77% chance of getting into Harvard. And if you change that Asian American to African-American, again, with the same characteristics, that person would then have a 95% chance of getting into Harvard. And so what Harvard has done is taken this issue of race and made it from just a minor factor in a panoply of different factors in admitting students into Harvard University and made it basically the factor, you know, in terms of deciding who gets to be. come in and who doesn't come in. And Harvard's own research, for example, shows that if they were just admitting students

on academic qualifications and Asian Americans have the highest academic index amongst all applicants at Harvard, then that's test scores and grade point average, that if you're just admitting students on academic qualifications, Asian Americans would represent about 43, 45, percent of the student entering class. And historically, that number has been only about 20 percent. So it's been a huge factor in determining who doesn't get into Harvard. And in Harvard's case, it's Asian Americans. And it's the same with at the University of North Carolina. The University of North Carolina, you look at historic gray point averages and you find out that Asian Americans with the same grade point average as other minorities such as African Americans have an infinitesimally

smaller chance of getting into Harvard as other minority groups. And so it ends up being racial discrimination and, again, a cap on the number of Asians who can get into the University of North Carolina. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about affirmative action because with every article that I'm reading with every, you know, when I look more into these cases, affirmative action comes up. Can you walk us through a little bit of the history of affirmative action? And if the Supreme Court were to, you know, rule in favor of students for fair admissions, what would be the immediate and long-term impacts? The history of affirmative action, it really kind of starts off, you know, it's in higher education, you know, where we're having these cases. And the case, and the case

at the Supreme Court level start off with the Baki decision several decades ago, which involved a student who sued the University of California for admissions into medical school. In that case, Supreme Court actually allowed the plaintiff to get into medical school, but still allowed affirmative action, basically. And what has happened since then is that you've had cases such as the Gruder case, which was in the early 2000s, which really is the kind of the key case here, where the justices kind of wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They basically said that if you're going to use race in college admissions,

you have to use what's called a strict scrutiny test in order to show a compelling government interest in allowing that use of race. But then what they did is that they basically then deferred to the school in question, the University of Michigan Law School, and to say that, well, we're deferring to your judgment as to your justification of race to admit these students. So you can't have it both ways, really, if you think about that. If you're the Supreme Court and you're saying that in order to pass the race test that you have to meet a compelling government interest, well, that judgment about whether you meet a compelling government interest is really up to the courts to decide. It's not up to the agency involved who is actually doing the discrimination to then get deference from the courts to say, we're going to leave it up to your judgment. And so what the courts have done is that they have deferred to these institutions of higher education saying that as long as basically you say that you need to use race in order to improve diversity on your campuses, that that would be enough. And the trouble is that diversity is an amorphous category, right?

I mean, what exactly is diversity? and, you know, how do you measure its impact? I mean, schools can always say that they are using race in order to improve diversity on their campus and to improve the education environment and the educational experience of students. But what sort of evidence is there that that actually happens? In fact, most of the schools cannot show any kind of empirical evidence. In fact, that came up at the hearing that on the... this current case involving Harvard and UNC at the Supreme Court hearing where justices

questioned the defendants about how they could quantify that sort of impact, and they really couldn't, because there is actually no real evidence to how to quantify that. And so, therefore, I think that right now, if you look at where the court is going, certainly in terms of the questioning that the majority of the justices had for, both the plaintiffs and the defendants in the Harvard and UNC case, that, you know, it looks as if the Supreme Court is going to, hopefully, in my opinion, hopefully overturn their previous cases and rule that, as Justice, the Chief Justice Roberts said, that discrimination is basically discrimination.

Yeah, that was actually my next question. If there were any signs pointing to the justice's ruling in favor of students for fair admissions. It seems like, just based on what I've been reading and what you just said, it appears that way. Obviously, we'll have to wait and see for the final ruling. You know, we were just talking about sort of these impacts that could potentially come from a decision in favor of students for fair admissions. The CNN article writes that, you know, a decision, you know, in favor of students for fair admissions could diminish the number of African American and Hispanic students in higher education. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, you know, I think that what it might do is that it might diminish the number of students that, let's say, may end up at Harvard or UNC or some of these elite selective schools. But that doesn't mean that you're going to have a necessarily a reduction in the proportion of, African-Americans and Hispanic students in higher education in general. I think that there's also a lot of research done by Professor Richard Sander over at UCLA Law School, which shows that, you know, when you have issues of mismatch where, you know, students who are qualifying to get into some of these elite institutions from underrepresented minority groups who may not have the academic qualifications that other students may have there, that you end up having a higher drop-up rate from there

and because of this mismatch in terms of their preparation. And so, therefore, I think that this decision, if it goes according to what I think it's going to go and that they're going to overturn the previous Supreme Court decisions on race and on race preferences and placing this emphasis on just this amorphous term of diversity, if that whole set of previous decisions is overturned and the Supreme Court rules in favor of the defendant

students for fair admission, I think that what you're going to have is not necessarily a diminishment in the number of a percentage of students from underrepresented groups in higher education, but probably a better match for them at institutions where they're better prepared to succeed. And I think that one of the things that is really important is that, you know, and this is a point I always make about these

affirmative action in race preference cases in higher education, is that the real problem here is that we're trying to fix this issue of having students of different ethnic and racial groups in higher education, basically at the back end of the process, at the admissions into these institutions when really what you should be doing is focusing on enlarging the pool of more qualified applicants to attend these schools, you know, any institution of higher education, especially these elite selective institutions. And that requires that there be real reforms at the K-12 level to improve the percentages of underrepresented minorities who would qualify, you know, in straight up competition with other ethnic groups.

Now, on the topic of colleges, I want to shift a little bit to test scores and this recent data that came out from the ECT. Now, according to a press relief from ACT, which is a nonprofit organization that administers the college readiness exam, the national average ACT composite score for the high school class of 2022 was 19.8, the lowest average score in more than three decades. What do you think contributed to these record-low test scores and what's the solution for reversing course? Well, I think that these test score data from college entrance examinations like the ACT, I mean, they're in line with the collapse in test scores in K-12. And so if you look at the

K-12 results from the National Assessment for Education Progress, it also came out just recently. And you find that there was a record drop in scores in math and reading. In fact, the drop in mathematics in fourth and eighth grade was the greatest in history of that examination. And so I think that what you saw is a number of different things. First of all, the whole COVID disaster in education, both in K-12 and in higher education, is obvious that the decision of most states to close schools, depending on the state, for different durations. In my own home state in California, schools were closed for very, very long time, much longer than many other parts of the country. And so the inability of the regular public schools to engage in effective instruction during the school closures through remote distance learning. The teachers were untrained. The standards just evaporated.

And so that students were often in school or having school for only several hours a day instead of a full school day. And so you saw this cumulative buildup to the point where we have these horrendous test scores. In fact, during the pandemic itself, what different studies found is that you had huge learning losses and depending on the demographic group, anywhere from five to six to amongst, let's say, low-income students, seven months' worth of learning loss during the pandemic. And so if you have that amount of learning loss, what's going to happen? what's going to show up in these test scores. And so both in the fourth and eighth grade,

NAEP examination test scores and reading in mathematics, there was a collapse, the ACT, the same thing. You know, when students are leaving high school, where they haven't been in school for, you know, a couple years and now are having to take an entrance examination, there's a collapse in learning that's evidenced by these scores. And so I think that, first of all, of all, the COVID situation had a huge impact.

Secondly, I think as a subset of that, is this collapse of standards within the schools. And so if we talk to students, like I just interviewed a student here in California who's currently in high school, but I asked him, what was his experience like, you know, the last several years? And he was saying that how the academic rigor at his school, had just basically evaporated, and so that you could take tests multiple times, you could turn in homework late,

final projects, final projects were made optional, all kinds of different requirements that were in place prior were now made optional. So it really ended up disincentivizing students to study hard and to keep up because now, hey, you know, if I don't turn in my homework, nothing happens to me. If I fail to test, so what? Because I can always take it, you know, five other times. And also, too, what happened is that the passing grade on many exams were lowered too so that you could pass your exams, you know, at 60, 50 percent instead of 70 or 80 percent.

So I think that that is one of the things that you're seeing too. And so, you know, when you look at the data out there as to, okay, was it just the closures that reduced these test scores? And you look, for example, at states that kept their schools closed longer than others. And, you know, the record is a little mixed as to whether closures simply by themselves were, the main factor, you have to dig down deeper to see, well, what happened to academics in all of the states to see, you know, why did these students, and are these students performing so poorly in all of these states? Yeah, I wanted to get your thoughts on this recent tweet from the National Education Association. It sparked backlash online. A lot of people replying to the NIA, you know,

kind of questioning the tweet. I saw on Fox, you know, people were talking about it. And the tweet says, quote, educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and to thrive. What are your thoughts on this? Well, if they love their students that much, if the unions love their students that much, they would have been the very first people to try and get their students back into the classroom. And so, but unfortunately, the unions were the main obstacle to returning students to the classroom.

I know here again, in my own home state of California, the teachers unions around our state, state and local, were amongst the most vociferous opponents of returning students to the classroom. And they put up roadblock after roadblock, you know, to prevent students from returning. And so, you know, consequently, what you saw here, in California is, again, the bottom dropping out from under student performance. If you look at California's NAEP scores, and you look at, for example, in 2019, before the pandemic hit, and you look not at low-income kids, but let's look at middle-class kids. If you look at middle-class kids in, let's say, eighth-grade math, for example, 50% of middle-class kids in 2019 were

scoring at the proficient level, which isn't great. That means half of them are not scoring proficient, but then you look to 2002 in eighth grade mathematics for these middle-income students, and you find that it's fallen from 50% before the pandemic to 41% in 2022. And so that's basically almost a 20% drop in proficiency amongst middle-class kids. And so, again, you had this massive collapse of student performance, and the unions knew that. The unions could see that. I mean, all throughout the pandemic,

students were complaining not just about their academics, but about their social-emotional health. You had heard about the mental problems affecting kids because they were isolated and couldn't be with other kids. Their learning was obviously suffering, but you had serious health problems where you had kids, the percentage, of kids being taken to emergency rooms because of mental health issues skyrocketed during the

pandemic. And the unions knew this, and they still not only did nothing, but they put up roadblocks to the way to address these problems by blocking the opening of the schools. Lance, just one final question for you. As we prepare for the next Congress, what are you hoping to see policy-wise relating to education? Well, first of all, I think that you know, we need to see, you know, a number of different things. I mean, first of all, I think we need to see greater accountability in the way the federal government spends its education dollars. I mean, the federal government spends billions and billions of dollars,

and yet there's very little accountability for it. And so, I mean, you have various watchdog groups like the government accountability office who have put out reports saying that there's very little accountability for where the dollars end up. And I think that like when you look at, for example, how the COVID dollars that Washington has sent down to the states and to the school districts, there's very little accountability as to how that money is being used, for example, to address issues of learning loss. I mean, some of that money, a certain percentage of that money is supposed to address learning loss. But again, first of all, is that money being used to address learning loss? And if it is, or at least the states and local districts are attempting to use it to address learning less,

are their efforts successful? And that's the thing that taxpayers oftentimes never get that information. Are all these billions of dollars actually getting bang for the buck from the taxpayers? And almost always we find out it's not, or we find out we have no information. And so we need greater accountability. Secondly, I think that we need to look at increasing the amount of school choice options available for parents because having the government supply all this, quote-unquote solutions has been a disaster because, as you see in these test scores, that government is not the answer

and that parents are much better situated to understand the individual needs of their child. And so, you know, the Congress should look at different ways in which they can either backpack money onto students in order for them to find the type of education services that best meet their needs, or, you know, be able to come up with scholarship programs that make scholarships available to students, again, to find those more individualized ways to address their learning needs. And so, you know, accountability and I think greater school choice, I think we need greater transparency also, too, from the federal government. There's very little understanding by the average person, average taxpayer, as to where their money goes. And the government really doesn't make any real effort to show parents and taxpayers how their monies are being used, certainly, you know, federal dollars. So I think that, you know, we need to look at accountability, transparency, and choice. Well, Lance Azumi, thank you so much for joining us today. Again, Lance is the Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute and author of Obama's Education Takeover. Lance, thanks so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to my interview with Lance Azumi. If you haven't gotten a chance, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast. and help us reach even more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We read and appreciate all of your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Have a great day, and we'll be back with you all tomorrow morning. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

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