Affirmative Action at Public Universities
New York Times
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In 2016 the Supreme Court decided in a 4-3 decision that the University of Texas at Austin’s
policy to use race as a factor in their holistic review was constitutional. This decision came after
years of court battles starting in 2008 when Abigail Fisher was denied acceptance to the
University. She accused the university of violating the Constitution’s equal protection clause by
giving an advantage to students of African-American and Hispanic descent. In 2013 the Supreme
Court found in a 7-1 decision that universities employing affirmative action must meet a “strict
scrutiny” test which meant that the university had to be “narrowly tailored”. This made it so
courts had to confirm that affirmative action was necessary and that there was no real alternative
that could have created a diverse student body. This case was then sent back to the lower court
for a retrial based on the new test of strict scrutiny.
The Supreme Court later reviewed the case again and upheld the lower court’s decision with a
4-3 vote that the University’s policy was constitutional because it was designed as an additional
factor in admissions rather than a sole variable. This elicited a strong reaction from the losing
side, especially Justice Alito who wrote a 51 page dissenting opinion against the decision writing
that, “Even though U.T. has never provided any coherent explanation for its asserted need to
discriminate on the basis of race, and even though U.T.’s position relies on a series of
unsupported and noxious racial assumptions,” Majority opinion writer, Justice Kennedy, wrote
that the holistic review, “had a meaningful, if still limited, effect on the diversity of the
university’s freshman class.”
My opinion on the topic of affirmative action is that it is harmful to other students that are not
members of “disadvantaged” groups. This issue was the subject of a study from Princeton
University which used applications from 124,374 prospective students to link SAT scores and
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20Dec%202004.pdf
4https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webOpportunity%20Cost%20of%20Admission%20Preferences%20E
spenshade%20Chung%20June%202005.pdf