Until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, segregation, especially in southern colleges, was extremely prevalent. My grandmother, a South Carolina native, was prohibited from attending the University of South Carolina because she wasBlack. She attended South Carolina State University, a Historically Black College (HBCU) instead. Of course, South Carolina State University was severely underfunded due to Jim Crow laws. This meant that simply because of my grandmother’s race, despite being an excellent student, she did not receive the same education as her white counterparts. Similarly, the majority of my family, who also attended HBCUs, was forced to attend due to segregation. To this day, HBCUs remain underfunded compared to Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs).
The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill is being sued by the Students for Fair Admission, a nonprofit membership group of more than 20,000 students and parents. The Students for Fair Admission argue that UNC’s holistic application review that uses race as one of the many factors for admission violates the fourteenth amendment and is therefore unconstitutional. Chapel Hill also considers legacy—the practice of a college giving admissions advantage to alumni children—as one of many factors in its admissions process.
Until Brown vs. Board of Education, UNC Chapel Hill was segregated. This means that my grandmother and fellow Black students were prohibited from attending Chapel Hill. This also means that my father, who was born after segregation, was not a legacy. The only students who would have had legacy status when my father was applying to college were white. Even with the integration of schools in 1954, legacy status and underfunded secondary schools for Black students kept Chapel Hill predominately white.
Now, much of this past segregation is regaining relevance with the recent Supreme Court case on Affirmative Action in college admissions. The purpose of Affirmative Action is to provide equitable access to educational and employment opportunities that were displaced by segregation and prejudice. Those who argue against affirmative action argue that admissions should be solely on “merit” and not race. Merit includes students’ grades, standardized test scores, extracurricular activities, athletics, and community involvement. However, merit is often correlated with the caliber of school a student attends, as well as their family income. Since these are both related to race, it is important to consider race in college admissions.
For instance, let’s look at Indian and Taiwanese people, two demographics in the United States with the highest incomes. Since property taxes fund public schools, Indian and Taiwanese people are more likely to live in an excelling school district. With quality high schools comes more well-funded extracurricular activities and academic support, which increases standardized test scores and merit opportunities. Redlining and de facto segregation make it very rare for a Black neighborhood to have an excelling school district. During the application process, colleges often ask about adversity or setbacks applicants have had to face. Since many setbacks are directly correlated to race, excluding race from college admissions would be unethical.
Affirmative action encourages diversity by considering the setbacks that underrepresented minorities face. Although Asian students are minorities, they are not underrepresented when it comes to the college student population. At Carnegie Mellon University, 33 percent of students are Asian, outnumbering white students. The number of Black students is so low that many charts do not even show a percentage for them. California Institute of Technology is 44 percent Asian and 7 percent Black. Cornell University reports that they are 15 percent Asian, not including the 24 percent of International students, which is also mostly Asian. If universities are trying to increase diversity among their student body, it would not make sense to include Asians in the “Underrepresented Minority” demographic when they are not underrepresented in colleges.
Students for Fair Admission also claim that affirmative action harms their chances of acceptance to top schools. This contention, however, is unsupported, as almost every single top school is a Predominately White Institution. The reason why white students have the upper hand when it comes to the college admissions process is due to the racist societal structures, such as Jim Crow, that their ancestors implemented and that still have lasting consequences to this day. Even when schools were integrated with the Little Rock Nine, Black students faced violence just for attending a school their families paid taxes for.
If you truly think Affirmative Action is discriminatory, why not just ban the practice at colleges that were never racially exclusive nor male-only? That way, the college would be truly race- and gender-neutral and would have never contributed to discrimination. In addition to this, the college would not consider legacy status in the admissions process, as that would favor white students. However, almost no college or university in the United States has a non-discriminatory admissions history, which is why we must maintain Affirmative Action in the college selection process to encourage truly fair admissions.