There’s much at stake with a SCOTUS decision on affirmative action. In October, the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against the constitutionality of affirmative action in higher education. The case began when students alleged that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill have discriminated on the basis of race, particularly against Asian-American students, saying that they were less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Latinx applicants.
The original 1978 affirmative action case heard by the Supreme Court, Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, determined that the use of quotas for redressing racial imbalances in higher education was unconstitutional. But, it also ruled that universities had a right to use race as a factor in their admissions processes, stating that there is nothing unconstitutional about trying to create more diverse student bodies in higher education.
Professor Wong, who teaches Asian American studies at the University of Maryland, describes affirmative action in the context of higher education as “the consideration of race as one of many, many factors in the admissions process.” Without affirmative action policies in place, it’s been proven that universities struggle to maintain meaningful levels of diversity. Take California, for example— since the California State University system was stopped from recruiting students based on race and offering recruited student scholarships to relieve financial burdens, the share of Black and Native American students has fallen. For UC, the proportion of Latinos who were high school graduates was 52%. However, those enrolled in the freshman class for 2019 were only 29%. Meanwhile, Asians were overrepresented at UC— nearly triple their share of high school graduates. And white students remained slightly below their share of graduates.
Despite this, it seems that the right-leaning justices appear willing to overrule established precedents throughout the nation and pronounce race-conscious admissions unconstitutionally. With affirmative action at the risk of being removed, a fundamental opportunity gap for students of color is at risk of being created, which will affect many things, including access to aid.
To test the U.S. News and World Report’s private college tuition claim, we randomly selected colleges using a random college generator to avoid purposive sampling and mitigate biases. Then, we used each college’s website to find their tuition for the most up-to-date information. In conducting the hypothesis test, we failed to meet all conditions because the number of colleges used was less than 30. This could have caused some potential errors in our data. Therefore, we could have run into a Type 1 Error, as we might have rejected the null incorrectly— the U.S. News and World Report’s average private college tuition claim of $38, 185 might have been correct. However, based on our confidence interval, college tuition is much higher.
To find if there was an association between race and the amount of aid offered to undergraduate students, a data set from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was used, which is a reliable source. Based on the data, we found that race is not independent of the amount of aid offered to undergraduate students in loans and grants, so we rejected the null hypothesis. Here, we could have run into a Type 1 Error by incorrectly rejecting the null— race could actually be independent of the amount of college aid offered.
However, from our chi-square test conclusion, we can consider its significance in the context of affirmative action. Part of affirmative action might include making sure that minority students and others who have not had the equal opportunity get what they need and are not limited because of circumstances out of their control, such as financial standing. This might explain why there is such a significant correlation between race and aid, based on our high 𝛸2 value, as certain racial groups tend to have more access than others.
If race-conscious admissions are eliminated this could have a detrimental impact on access to college aid. Hence, when judges are deciding whether affirmative action should be ruled unconstitutional, they should consider access to aid and how much worse off diversity at colleges would be if people are discouraged to apply to any colleges at all with the prospect of massive college debt. And they should consider how this might create a ripple effect through other institutions and industries well beyond college admissions. It’s clear that affirmative action creates tangible opportunities for millions of Americans at school, and if the court repudiates affirmative action in college admissions, race-conscious policies in other areas, including employment, could be challenged next.
