Supreme Court hears Texas affirmative action challenge

U.S. Supreme Court justices dissected and debated the University of Texas at Austin’s unusual admissions procedures on Wednesday, questioning whether Texas’ flagship campus should keep using race as a factor when evaluating some of its applicants. It reviewed the case back in 2013 but essentially said “lol not my problem” and sent it to a lower court, where in 2014 the court ruled in favor of the University.

December 2000 – The judge in the Gratz v. Bollinger case rules that the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions policy does not violate the standards set by the Supreme Court. That would run counter to so many other background factors that are still allowed to be considered including the place an applicant lives, their test scores, and extracurricular activities – to exclude race from this equation is absolutely unacceptable.

Scalia arrived at this view of the case: “I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer”.

The demographics of the university’s current freshman class is 22 percent Hispanic and 4.5 percent African-American, with white students comprising less than half the school’s freshmen. A world-class trumpeter with mediocre grades, or a National Merit semifinalist who happened to attend a very high-achieving high school, could be shut out.

The Top Ten percent plan can go only so far, Garre says, because the Texas public school system remains largely segregated, with overwhelmingly Hispanic schools in the San Antonio and Rio Grande valleys and predominantly African-American schools in Houston and Dallas.

Sigal Alon has studied class-based affirmative action as an associate professor at Tel Aviv University and author of the book “Race, Class, and Affirmative Action”.

That ruling avoided addressing the sharp divisions on the court over affirmative action – divisions on full display Wednesday and that Kennedy appeared open to avoiding yet again. She claims that she was discriminated against for her race, citing as evidence that identical candidates who were not white were accepted into the school.

The University of Texas at Austin says students learn better when there’s diversity on campus and within racial groups.

Affirmative action refers to policies under which minorities historically subject to discrimination are given certain preferences in order to enhance the racial diversity of a university’s student population.

But that didn’t really matter.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is one of the strongest supporters of affirmative action on the bench.

Why Fisher is a threat to affirmative action Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty Images John Roberts opposes affirmative action.

The UT-Austin case has garnered national attention, and there were dozens of protestors outside the court on Wednesday.

His comments align him with Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only black member.

The liberals worked to poke holes in the argument that Texas can not put race on the list of holistic factors. Now, once again, the Supreme Court will review the constitutionality of the UT plan for itself. He also dismissed surveys created to ask students how they felt as “sophomoric”. Researchers looked at the effect race had on admissions and saw a 23 percentage point drop in the chance of admission for minority students in states with bans, compared with a 1 percentage point drop in other states, relative to nonminority students. “Students are admitted from lower performing schools because of the segregation that exists in the state, and these students benefit from the opportunity”. The reason for a diverse student body, according to the case, is to enrich the educational experience for everyone.

The court is expected to reverse the Fifth Circuit’s decision that backed UT’s policy, a move that could affect other schools and decrease diversity at large public colleges. “We are just arguing the same case, it’s as if nothing has changed”, he said.

Since first taking up the issue, the Supreme Court has become more conservative and less friendly to affirmative action policies.

Justice Elena Kagan, due to her involvement in the case while in the Obama administration, is not participating in the arguments or decision of the case.