The Supreme Court Refuses to Clean Up its Own Mess in Academic Admissions
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court chose to keep quiet about race-conscious admissions in schools. The court denied a petition for a writ of certiorari in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. The case — in which an association of parents challenged the admissions policy of an elite public high school — will end with the Fourth Circuit’s decision in favor of the school board. The case is settled. There’s only one problem: the Supreme Court is refusing to solve a problem of its own creation.
It has been less than a year since the Supreme Court upended the dynamics of academic admissions when it issued its opinion in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In that case, the Supreme Court held that the admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which included consideration of each applicant’s race, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The court wrote that the school’s admissions system disadvantaged students of some races and relied on impermissible racial stereotyping of applicants.
After Students for Fair Admissions, colleges may no longer consider race as a factor in admissions. If schools wish to create a socially, ethnically, and racially diverse class that reflects the country their students will soon enter, they must find a way to do so without using an applicant’s race as a factor in their decision-making.
Schools will nevertheless continue their pursuit to form classes that are diverse in terms of academic interests, hometowns, socio-economic status, gender, and race. The Supreme Court can’t change that. The route that schools will take to accomplish those goals, however, must change.
The Supreme Court knows that diversity is a goal of colleges and universities. In Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion, he includes a suggestion to schools about how they might navigate his ruling: “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
Race matters. It matters to young people in America as they navigate the application cycle to colleges and universities. That leaves a lingering question. If racial identity is important to young people, instrumental to creating a multicultural learning environment, and even acknowledged by the Supreme Court as potentially relevant in evaluating students’ application, then how exactly can schools approach race when evaluating candidates? The Supreme Court doesn’t want to say.
The court rejected an appealing opportunity. Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board is about the admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology: a prestigious public school in Virginia. Admission to the high school requires students to pass rigorous tests and maintain a high grade point average. Imagine all the pressure of admission to elite universities, conveniently pre-packaged for middle school applicants.
In 2020, the elite high school changed its admissions process. Its “holistic evaluation” now considers a broader range of criteria than in previous years, including “Experience Factors” that include an applicant’s attendance at a middle school that has been historically underrepresented in the high school’s admissions process, applicants’ eligibility for free and reduced-price meals, and status as a special education student. On their face, the factors appear limited to geographic and economic diversity. In the year after the changes were made, however, the proportion of Asian-American students in the high school fell by approximately 54%. The Coalition for TJ, comprised of current and prospective parents of Asian-American students, filed a lawsuit against the school board alleging discrimination.
At first, the Coalition for TJ prevailed. The district court found that the changes to the admissions evaluations — although not explicitly race-based — were motivated by the school board’s desire to bolster racial diversity and had a disparate impact on Asian-American Students. In the court’s words, the changes were “infected with talk of racial balancing from [their] inception.” Summary judgement was granted against the school board.
The Fourth Circuit reversed. Their opinion explains that the revised policy does not have a disparate impact on Asian-American applicants, despite their decline in the proportion of the student body, because such applicants have the highest “success rate” of any racial group: Asian American students comprise less than half of the school’s applicants but receive more than half of its admissions offers. The Fourth Circuit was unconvinced that the school board was motivated by a desire to achieve a particular racial make-up of its class or to exclude Asian American students. The changes were designed to “improve the overall socioeconomic and geographic diversity” of the school.
The racial diversity of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology did change. In the year prior to the admissions policy, Black students comprised less than 2% of the student body. Afterwards, that proportion increased to 10%. This school’s racial composition — and its geographic and socioeconomic compositions — are no longer a far cry from the demographics of its home state. And it was accomplished within the boundaries of the Equal Protection Clause.
Schools around the country are watching. Many expected the Supreme Court to take up Coalition for TJ on appeal and answer the question that every academic institution is asking: what can a constitutional approach to holistic admissions look like? Harvard’s policy failed. Would this high school’s policy fail, too? For now, it hasn’t. The problem is that we don’t know why.
It only takes four justices. If four members of the Supreme Court had voted to take this case, we would have learned more about what public academic institutions can and can’t do when they strive to make representative classes. Instead, they refused.
We know that the policy in Coalition for TJ isn’t a glaring violation of the Supreme Court’s holding in Students for Fair Admissions. If it was, the writ of certiorari would have been accepted.
We also know that some members of the court believe exactly the opposite. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented from the denial of certiorari. They scoffed at the Fourth Circuit’s argument that Asian Americans’ continued representation at the school in greater proportion than their representation in the applicant pool is sufficient to defeat a claim of discrimination. They suggest that such reasoning permits discrimination up to a mathematical threshold. That reasoning, they warn, is a “virus that may spread if not promptly eliminated.”
Schools will be left guessing as students continue to take standardized tests, write personal essays, and eagerly file their applications. Coalition for TJ may have provided a shining example of an admissions policy for schools seeking to improve the diversity of their student body. Or, perhaps, the Supreme Court is simply waiting for a cleaner opportunity to clarify the conundrum it created last year. For now, all we have is silence.
