Americans Don’t Like Affirmative Action- Higher Ed Has To Deal With It

Affirmative action is extremely unpopular in the United States.

A YouGov/Economist poll of 1,498 American adults revealed near-universal opposition to using race in college admissions. The poll asked whether “colleges should or should not be allowed to consider an applicant’s race among other factors” when making admissions decisions. 64% of respondents opposed affirmative action, with 25% in favor and 11% unsure.

The poll also shared insight into how poll responses broke down by demographic. Across virtually every group, a majority of respondents opposed race-based affirmative action, including those who traditionally benefit from the policy. 55% of Hispanic respondents did not believe that colleges should be allowed to use race in college admissions, along with 65% of low-income (<$50,000 HHI) respondents, 60% of respondents aged 18-29, 64% of political independents, and 72% of rural respondents. Even Black adults were opposed by a margin of 47% to 36%.

I’ll repeat that once more for emphasis – a majority of Black and Latino adults oppose using race in college admissions. The ostensible beneficiaries of the practice do not want it to continue.

Affirmative Action is a loser at the ballot box.

This YouGov poll is merely the latest evidence – affirmative action has been consistently unpopular for at least a generation. Since 1996, affirmative action has been voted on nine times at the state level.

It lost eight of those nine votes, including in blue states like California, Washington, and Michigan. The only winner was a 2008 referendum in Colorado, where an affirmative action ban was narrowly voted down, 50.8%-49.2%. In the other eight contests, opposition to affirmative action averaged 56.5% of the vote. Affirmative action has consistently lost at the ballot box, and now it has failed at the Supreme Court as well.

Colleges must find new methods for building diversity on campus

Of course, affirmative action enjoys near universal support within higher education. No one has conducted a systematic poll, but a reasonable estimate would put support for the practice at somewhere between 70% and 80%. Alums, media members, and other key external university stakeholders are also more likely to favor affirmative action than the general public.

But the mismatch between higher ed’s view of the practice and that of the voting public means no rescue is coming. Unlike the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs ruling, Democrats and progressives have little incentive to center the SFFA decisions in political messaging ahead of the 2024 election. The Supreme Court has a robust 6-3 majority of Republican-appointed justices. And the most ideologically flexible of the justices (John Roberts) authored the majority opinion ruling against Harvard and UNC!

The easy temptation for universities is to seize on the opening Roberts provided, in his opinion, and focus more on essays as a means of identifying a student’s race without explicitly asking for it. Many institutions hinted at doing exactly that in their written statements responding to the ruling.

But such a shift carries a substantial risk – the SFFA decision was not an endpoint but merely the beginning. Newly emboldened conservative legal groups will be keeping a watchful eye on admissions outcomes this fall, ready to file another round of lawsuits. This time around, SFFA will be the precedent – and the lower courts that ruled in favor of Harvard during the first round of cases will likely be forced to reverse their positions.

The impetus is on enrollment leaders and admissions officers to chart a new path – to find and deploy a truly race-blind mechanism for building on-campus diversity. In my next column – I will share an outline of that mechanism.