US Supreme Court upholds decision on Affirmative Action at

On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas again. The court’s decision – which supported the notion that campus diversity can help students break down racial stereotypes and prepare for a diverse workforce – gives colleges great deference to determine their missions and identities, Mr. McDonough said, and thus to decide how to create their student bodies. He went on to urge the University of Texas to continue to evaluate the fairness of its admissions policy as new data becomes available. The Court noted that all of these served as compelling state interests.

Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kennedy’s majority opinion.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissenting opinion, saying that UT had not adequately defined what goal considering race in their admissions decisions served.

The Supreme Court’s ninth justice, Antonin Scalia, died earlier this year. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself because she had worked on the issue as President Barack Obama’s solicitor general.

The nation’s high court has struck down racial quotas, declaring them to be unconstitutional. But the court raised the possibility that the program might eventually be unnecessary – and therefore unconstitutional.

Several states, including Arizona, California, Florida and MI, now forbid the use of race in their university admissions processes. It uses other factors including race to admit the remainder. In that plan, UT Austin had to admit students from Texas who graduated in the top ten percent of their classes.

The first is that students who graduate from a Texas high school in the top 10% of their class are automatically offered a spot at the university. The remainder of the freshman class is admitted under a more holistic review that includes academic achievements, like SAT scores, and race and ethnicity.

When she found out that minority students with lower grades than hers were accepted, she sued the school for discrimination.

There were complex circumstances behind both Supreme Court cases. Instead race is “a factor of a factor of a factor”, Kennedy wrote. “It’s so much more than that”, Bryant said.

The high court ruled in the case of Abigail Fisher, a white Texan who was denied admission to the university’s flagship campus in Austin in 2008. In 2013, the justices heard arguments and compromised with a decision to send the case back to a lower court for more fact-finding, with the expectation that it would return.

The US Supreme Court has voted to allow universities to consider race when selecting student applicants. Alito complained the court should not side with Texas “because it is exhausted of this case”. “No one was sure exactly what was going to happen”, he said. It also promotes understanding and advocacy of affirmative action and other equal opportunity and related compliance laws and regulations to enhance the diversity tenets of access, inclusion and equality in employment, economic and educational opportunities.

“It reaffirms the court’s recognition of diversity in higher education”, said Braveman, who previously was dean of Syracuse University College of Law and taught courses in civil rights and constitutional law. But rather than rule on the program’s constitutionality then, they ordered the appeals court to scrutinize the Texas policy more closely. Except in a handful of states that prohibit race-based affirmative action, Hartle said schools that want to use it are already doing so.

“There’s got to be a better way to do it”, he said Thursday. Justices said the use of a person’s race for college admissions was constitutional and that the consideration was only a small component of the admissions process.

Justice Samuel Alito began his 51-page dissent: “Something unusual has happened since our prior decision in this case”.

In Jonesboro, the policy is the same.

At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, qualified undergraduate applicants aren’t turned away.

Kennedy had never before voted to uphold a race-conscious plan, but he also had been reluctant to say that race may never be used. UT’s formula could become the gold standard for future admissions policies across the country.