Escrito por: Gabriel León 🇻🇪
The University of Maryland entrance sign on Baltimore Ave on Sept.24, 2024. (Ashly Cifuentes)
Last summer, a landmark decision was made by the United States Supreme Court regarding college admissions. Affirmative action was effectively deemed unconstitutional. This meant that college admissions officers could no longer factor race into the decision of giving admission to an applicant.
Being a Latino myself, I can only wonder how this will impact future Latinos and other racial minorities in college admissions. It was commonly believed that affirmative action helped underrepresented minorities get into college because historically.
However, there was this internal debate of fairness. People often ask if it is “fair for a Latino student with the same qualifications as their white peer to be admitted to college just because of their racial identity?” Many believe that affirmative action is fair because of the historical disadvantage minorities have faced getting into college. Particularly, Latinos and other minoritized groups have not had the same opportunities as the white students they are going up against.
This debate of who should be admitted was left for the Supreme Court to decide. Ultimately, the Supreme Court decided to remove affirmative action. This decision has been seen as a massive blow to efforts to increase minorities in college.
It has been suggested that colleges will now perhaps consider income and regional backgrounds when it comes to admissions. This is something colleges will have to consider when the volume of applications just keeps rising.
Perhaps a glimpse of how this will impact the U.S. as a whole, we can look at what happened at the University of Michigan in 2006, when the state deemed that colleges could not use race in admissions.
According to cnbc, after the decision was made their number of African American students enrolled in colleges was cut by nearly half.
This is not to say that students cannot write about race in their application anymore. There are new guidelines for applicants regarding the use of race; it must be relevant to an experience that was important to their development as a person.
Queens University at Charlotte’s vice-president of strategic enrollment and communication, Adrienne Oddi, spoke on the topic. She said “For students who are ready, willing, [and] interested in engaging in topics around race and ethnicity and how important their individual, racial, and ethnic identity is to them, we can receive that info but we can’t advocate,” meaning that Oddi along with many college admissions officers around the country are simply forced to not be able to see applicants in a way that is important to them.
In states like California, Michigan, and Texas, their number of Black and Latino students in their amazing flagship universities has been reduced. Because this act has been seen in three different states, it is a possible indicator of what will happen nationwide in the coming years.
Harvard’s Class of 2028 has 4% less black students than their Class of 2027 (18% to 14%). Yale and Princeton’s Classes of 2028 have both seen a 2% drop in Asian American students. At MIT, the number of Black students has dropped while the number of Asian American students has been raised.
Tufts and Washington University of St. Louis have seen a 4% and 3% drop respectively in the number of Black students in their Classes of 2028 in comparison to their classes of 2027. Demographics regarding the class of 2028 are currently not available yet to the general public.
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There have been some obvious dips in admissions from African American and Latino students in states that banned affirmative action before it was banned nationwide and in private universities after the nationwide ban.
With this ruling being so recent it is tough to tell how this will impact college admissions in the long run. I am intrigued to see how college admissions and demographics will change in the coming years because of this landmark decision.
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