In a historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the admissions programs used by the University of North Carolina and Harvard College violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars racial discrimination by government entities.
The Harvard freshman class of 2028 will be admitted fully after the latest Supreme Court decision. Will Harvard declare that the class is <15% African American?
Resolves according to https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics, once available for the class of 2028.
Similar to this claim:
- Harvard still has the same incentives for its racial diversity stats to look good
- Proxies for race are everywhere, some with plausible deniability as signifiers of other kinds of diversity (high school, hometown/neighborhood, income, urban/suburban/rural), some that can't be explicitly talked about but could easily be used anyway (names are the big one)
- Black applicants are now incentivized to signal their race somewhere else on the application (if there isn't currently a National Black Honor Society, there's about to be)
I think this comes down to whether Harvard wants to keep the number at 15, plus a bit of variance because they're not that far from 14.9 even with AA; or whether they care more about avoiding further lawsuits by having their racial representation numbers look more or less the same next year. But I think they can avoid that by doing a small token increase in Asian students.