Supreme Court confronts race in admissions

Michigan cases could have far-reaching effects — even at Pepperdine.
By Laurie Babinski
Art Editor

Jennifer Gratz, 25, is the daughter of a police officer who dreamed of using a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan’s flagship campus to become a forensic pathologist.

Patrick Hamacher, 23, was a high school varsity athlete who sang in the choir. He sought a prestigious undergraduate degree from the Top-25 ranked Ann Arbor campus so that he could pursue a career in medicine or public administration.

The third, Barbara Grutter, 49, was a 40-something mother of two when she applied to the prestigious Top 10 law school at the University of Michigan with hopes of becoming a lawyer specializing in health care issues.

These three now find themselves at the center of a nationwide controversy surrounding affirmative action’s place in education. Soon, the Supreme Court will decide if the University of Michigan’s race-conscious admissions policy is constitutional, a decision that could affect not only public colleges and universities, but very possibly private institutions like Pepperdine as well.

THREE APPLICANTS, THREE REJECTIONS

In 2002, the University of Michigan received more than 25,000 applications for its undergraduate program and offered admission to just over 12,000 – almost half. The law school tallied more than 4,000 applications and admitted nearly 1,200 of those who applied.

Though the number of applications has risen slightly since the 1990s when they applied, the three expected nothing less than an acceptance from one of the top institutions for public higher education in the country.

Gratz graduated in the top 15 of her senior class, and scored in the 83rd percentile on her ACT college entrance exam. A mostly A and B student, Hamacher scored above the 90th percentile on the ACT. And on the Law School Admissions Test, Grutter’s score put her in the 86th percentile.

But instead of acceptances, the three were declined admission to their first-choice school.

Gratz recalled the day she received her rejection letter to a New York Times reporter: “It was immediate that the racial issue came to mind,” she said. “I knew students that had been accepted to the University of Michigan. I knew some of those students were minority students. I knew some of those kids had lesser credentials than I did — lesser grades, lesser test scores, lesser activities.”

With suspicion that race had played a significant factor in their rejections, the three, all white, answered an open call in 1997 from several Republican state legislators and a public interest law firm seeking volunteers to challenge the university’s admissions policies.

What they are seeking is the university’s admission that, if not for being white, they would have been admitted.

TWO LAWSUITS

Six years and two lawsuits later —one against the undergraduate school, the other against the law school —the case has made its way to the highest court in the land.

With thousands of protesters on both sides marching outside and thousands more waiting in line on a cold Washington, D.C., morning, longing for a seat in the courtroom, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday confronting the issue of affirmative action’s role in higher education for the first time since outlawing quotas 25 years ago in the landmark 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

In Bakke, a 35-year old white medical school applicant to the University of California, Davis was twice denied admission.

The school reserved 16 places in each entering class of 100 for minorities as part of an affirmative action program. The school said the policy was an attempt to redress the lack of minorities in the medical profession, according to the complaint. Allan Bakke’s college GPA and test scores exceeded those of any of the minority students admitted in the two years Bakke’s applications were rejected. Bakke argued that he was excluded from admission solely on the basis of race.

In an awkward precedent for later cases, there was no majority opinion in the case. In the fractured ruling, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., who joined in both decisions written by the court, cast the deciding vote ordering the medical school to admit Bakke. However, Powell’s awkward decision to denounce quotas but advocate the use of race as one of several admissions criteria left admissions offices across the United States unsure of the role race could now play in the enrollment process.

By accepting review of the Michigan cases, the Supreme Court finally decided to clarify the precedent.

The undergraduate suit alleges that the university’s undergraduate admissions program, which gives an automatic 20 points on a 150-point scale to applicants who are black, Hispanic, or American Indian, is akin to the quota mentality that Powell denounced in Bakke. The law school suit alleges the same, although the highly selective law school does not use a formula.

The Center for Individual Rights, backed by President George W. Bush, the Department of Justice, and scores of other organizations which represented nearly three-fourths of the more than 100 friend-of-the-court briefs filed, argues that adding points to an applicant’s total because they are a minority is akin to setting aside seats, an action that Bakke denounced.

“The 20 point bonus, which is one full grade point, nearly twice the benefit of a perfect SAT score, and six times better than an outstanding essay, that bonus is actually unnecessary with the way the plan actually works, because every qualified candidate who gets the bonus gets into the University. It might just as well be an admissions ticket,” Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson argued for the government Tuesday as a friend of the court in support of the two undergraduate students.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ADMISSIONS CRITERIA

At the University of Michigan, minority undergraduate applicants to the College of Literature, Science and the Arts receive a 20-point bonus on the basis of race out of a 150-point system, which takes into consideration other criteria, including academics. Scholarship athletes, for example, get 20 points. Race is covered in a category labeled “Miscellaneous.”

GEOGRAPHY
10 points: Michigan resident
6 points: Underrepresented Michigan county
2 points: Underrepresented state

ALUMNI
4 points: “Legacy” (parents, step-parents)
1 point: Other (grandparents, siblings, spouses)

ESSAY
1 point: Outstanding essay (since 1999, 3 points)

PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENT
5 points: National
3 points: Regional
1 point: State

LEADERSHIP & SERVICE
5 points: National
3 points: Regional
1 point: State

MISCELLANEOUS
20 points: Socio-economic disadvantage
20 points: Underrepresented racial-ethnic minority identification or education
5 points: Men in nursing
20 points: Scholarship athlete
20 points: Provost’s discretion

A maximum of 40 points and only one option is assigned per category

The school, backed by another herd of organizations including numerous colleges and law schools, argues that the 20-point boost adds to the overall academic environment of the school by promoting diversity.

“The university’s entering students … have rarely had experiences across racial or ethnic lines,” attorney John Payton said on behalf of the university. “That’s true for our white students. It’s true for our minority students. They’ve not lived together. They’ve not played together. They’ve certainly not gone to school together.”

“The result is often that these students come to college not knowing about individuals of different races and ethnicities,” Peyton continued. “And often not even being aware of the full extent of their lack of knowledge … Their education is much more than the classroom. It’s in the dorm, it’s in the dining halls, it’s in the coffee houses. It’s in the daytime, it’s in the nighttime. It’s all the time.”

The law school suit argues that, although there was no point system, race was a detrimental factor to Grutter’s admission.

During the oral argument Tuesday, Maureen Mahoney, an attorney for Michigan, said the law allows schools to use “programs to achieve diversity because of the important interest it serves for students of all color.”

Mahoney said that, instead of hard targets or quotas to achieve diversity, the university employs what it calls a “critical mass” involving many factors, including race, when measuring its applicants.

In their questioning, several justices made the point that the high court has allowed limited use of race as a criterion in other contexts.

Justice Clarence Thomas specifically asked whether such policies have allowed minorities to make advances and contribute to the overall environment of the schools, the two most notable goals of affirmative action.

The question the nine justices have to answer is simple: To what extent should race play a factor in admissions to both undergraduate and graduate schools?

The answer, however, will be far more complex. In examining whether colleges and universities may legally consider race when admitting students, the court must decide not only to what degree race may be take into consideration – a spectrum that could run anywhere from endorsing rigid quotas to requiring a color-blind admissions process — but to which schools their decision would apply.

INNUMERABLE AND UNDETERMINABLE EFFECTS

But the university, indeed, will have its decision made for it come July when the Supreme Court issues its opinions.

So what effect will the court’s decision have on schools like Pepperdine, where race undoubtedly plays a role in admissions? While the Michigan cases directly address only admissions at public, tax-supported institutions, the court’s rationale is expected to impact private colleges and universities as well.

“So this case is much larger than public universities. It’s all colleges and universities, and it’s the entire realm of employment if you’re right,” Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told the plaintiff’s attorney in the law school case.

For example, if the court ruled that the use of race-conscious decisions was acceptable, but that Michigan’s system was akin to a quota and thus unacceptable, private schools that are able to screen applicants on a case-by-case basis and that don’t rely on such a point system would not have to alter their admissions methods.

According to Paul Long, dean of Admission and Enrollment Management, Seaver College uses a race-conscious policy, where an admissions committee reviews each application individually for an overall sense of the person, an assessment that includes race.

However, if the court ruled that affirmative action — anything other than race-neutral admissions — is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause, the ruling would have even broader implications. All private colleges are covered by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination at any institution that receives federal funding, including federal financial aid and research grants.

The Supreme Court has said in the past that the 14th Amendment and Title VI go hand in hand, meaning that if a policy is unconstitutional, then it also violates Title VI.

Such a decision would force all institutions — including Pepperdine — to conform to race-neutral admissions tactics.

“If the federal government dictated a ‘race-neutral’ admission policy as a condition of participation in federal programs, we would have to look closely at our admission practices, of course,” Long said. “The degree to which our policies might have to be modified would depend upon the definition of ‘race-neutral admission.’”

As the admission season winds down and colleges and universities prepare for the class of 2007, all the schools can do is sit and wait.