What does the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action mean for California?

The Supreme Court has ruled against affirmative action, banning colleges and universities from considering race in student admissions.

The decision comes after two elite universities — Harvard and the University of North Carolina — were challenged by Students for Fair Admissions, an anti-affirmative action nonprofit that claimed the institutions discriminated against Asian American and White students in their admission decisions.

Those ripple effects will extend across the country, requiring all colleges to disband use of race-conscious admission practices. In California, it’s a slightly different story: Affirmative action has been banned in the state’s public colleges for decades, since Proposition 209 struck down the practice for public employment, contracting and education in 1996.

Despite that, the Supreme Court decision will still be felt across the Golden State. Private universities — which serve the same number of students as the University of California — will now need to follow suit in cutting affirmative action. It will also affect students who leave the state for higher education, as before the decision, California was one of just nine states to have banned race-conscious admissions at its public institutions.

“Undergraduate admissions are the entry-point to training our future leaders — our teachers, lawyers and doctors,” said Maria Ledesma, a professor and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at San José State University. “This is going to leave a longstanding impact.”

Affirmative action was intended to remedy historical discrimination and boost diversity. Just over 60% of Americans felt the Supreme Court should not block colleges from considering race or ethnicity in their admission decisions, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. But a larger majority polled said factors like grades and standardized tests were more important to consider.

While advocates say affirmative action is needed to close enrollment and equity gaps among minority groups, critics say these programs result in reverse discrimination, and a policy that overlooks applicants’ academic merit in favor of race.

“Admissions should be based on merit, and I think that’s the best way forward because that’s what America was built on,” said Utkarsh Jain, the spokesperson of the UC Berkeley College Republicans. “If not, people working hard are being disenfranchised and disadvantaged when they’re applying to college.”

The 6-3 decision in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard case was largely expected with all six members of the court’s conservative bloc affirming. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the Harvard vote. Late last month, the Common App — the platform used by students to apply to college every year — gave universities the option to hide race and ethnicity from a student’s application. The move appeared to be a pre-emptive one, aimed to protect institutions from any legal blowback of the Supreme Court decision.

Despite that, in the months leading up to the decision, private and public universities signed amicus briefs in support of affirmative action, including Stanford, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California. The latter highlights how the University of California fared after Prop 209 was passed. Over the past 25 years, the brief said “freshmen enrollees from underrepresented minority groups dropped precipitously at UC, and dropped by 50% or more at UC’s most selective campuses.”

“Since then, UC has implemented numerous and wide-ranging race-neutral measures designed to increase diversity of all sorts, including racial diversity,” the brief continues. “Yet despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.”

But Wenyuan Wu, the executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, an anti-affirmative action nonprofit, said the argument is more nuanced.

“Common sense indicates that if you have someone who is not prepared…giving them preferential treatment so that person gets a spot in a college they would have otherwise not qualified for is not going to solve the pipeline issue,” she said. “We’re not a state where under-represented minority groups are suffering as a result of a lack of race-based affirmative action. The track record does not say so.”

Wu also added that the data actually shows an uptick of minority students at University of California campuses since Prop 209 was passed. And it’s true: while Black and Hispanic students made up 33% of those admitted to all University of California schools in 2022, the same group accounted for just 19% in 1995, a year before Prop 209 was rolled out.