Affirmative action - yeh or ney?

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to hear a case on affirmative action. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of affirmative action in the United States, Grutter v. Bollinger came before the Supreme Court in 2003 upholding affirmative action (the right to use race as a factor in the admissions process) at the University of Michigan law school. The reason? Promoting diversity was the main reasoning given and so long as a quota system is not used, the 5-4 decision on the courts said this affirmative action process was ok, not neccessary, but acceptable.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Ginsberg said that she didn't believe affirmative action practices would be necessary in 25 years. And that was the idea of affirmative action (using Brown v. Board of Education as an example) in the first place: to give minorities an equal opportunity.

Cases since have considered if compelling reasons exist to consider race as a fact. In a case involving public schools, the answer was found to be no. Other cases influencing this topic have been pursed in racial discrimination in employment and promotions.

Since these decisions many groups have investigated the differences. An article from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education states:

"At 13 of the 18 [high-ranking] universities that supplied data to JBHE, the black student acceptance rate was higher than the acceptance rate for white students. In some cases the difference was substantial. For instance, at MIT the black student acceptance rate was nearly twice as high as the 15.9% acceptance rate for all applicants. At the University of Notre Dame 55.6% of black students were accepted compared to 30.4% of all applicants. At the University  of Virginia 62.2% of blacks were accepted whereas 38.2% of all applicants received notices of acceptance...Six of the high-ranking universities we surveyed had black acceptance rates that were lower than the overall acceptance rate. At the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles , which were prohibited from taking race into account during the 2004 admission process, the black acceptance rate was significantly below the rate for whites. The black acceptance rate was also lower than the white rate at Washington University , Emory University , and Wake Forest University." (http://www.asianam.org/college_admission_officers.htm - for a complete table of data by school, visit this link).

So what next? The case the Supreme Court agreed to hear yesterday is a case from a student who believes she was denied admission to the University of Texas because she is white. So why does another case coming before the Supreme Court on affirmative action matter? The makeup of the court has changed significantly since 2003 with the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts (2005), Samuel Alito (2005), Sonia Sontomayor (2009), and Kagan (2010).

But today, let's play the court. What do you think about affirmative action in higher education? Is it necessary?