In 2014, the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions was formed with a single goal: to challenge affirmative action policies.
Nearly a decade later, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down race-conscious admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
What does this mean for the country? California may give a glimpse. The state banned affirmative action at public universities in 1996, causing an immediate drop in enrollment rates for Latino and African American students.
While Latino rates have since recovered, mostly as a result of changes in demographics, Black student enrollment has not. In 1995, 6% of entering freshmen at UC Berkeley were African American. By 2017, those numbers had dropped to less than 3%.
On today’s episode of “The Word with Jackie Rae,” Jose Moreno, associate professor and chair of the Department of Chicano & Latino Studies at Cal State Long Beach, discusses why the Supreme Court ruling could have long-lasting effects.