Race, Elite College Admissions, and the Courts - The Pursuit of Racial Equality in Education

The Supreme Court will have ripped the bandage off the wound, leaving us no choice but to tend to the segregation, inequality, and bias in education and broader society that hinder Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino students’ efforts to compete for seats in the entering classes of selective institutions. [...] Calls to reform higher education to provide more access to people from all racial and economic members of marginalized groups perceive a backgrounds align the interests of Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American people lack of opportunity to advance to positions of Simply doing nothing and with the interests of those white and Asian/Asian American people who have felt shut out. [...] But the briefs submitted by the plaintiffs in the Harvard and UNC lawsuits argue that those institutions have abused such deference in maintaining admissions practices that would not withstand strict scrutiny by the courts, and the lower-court records of briefs and testimony in the cases contain myriad claims and counterclaims about factual assertions related to the need for the practices and thei. [...] Congress and the executive branch have pumped considerable amounts of federal money into the education of disadvantaged children, beginning with the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and increasingly in the form of targeted assistance programs or programs focused on bilingual education or the education of students with disabilities. [...] What it meant, in effect, was that no one should take on the air of an aristocrat and lord it over other men,” and that “no formal barrier or prescribed positions” stood in the way of anyone’s chances of getting ahead.61 Well into the 20th century, however, those notions of equality covered only one subset of the population—white men—especially when it came to access to education and the advanceme.