Curtailing Affirmative Action Is a Blow Against a Rising Generation (2023)

With today’s decision curtailing affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court has landed another powerful blow for older white America in its struggle against the kaleidoscopically diverse and more populous younger generations for control of the nation’s direction.

The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates. Against that backdrop, the decision could widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors. That seems a formula guaranteed to heighten social tension.

“Education is the system that has the most powerful effect on reproducing race, class, and gender differences across generations,” Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. Banning affirmative action will mean that “the people who govern us, the elites in American society, will increasingly not look like America.”

In the broadest sense, the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power. In that way, the ruling is a judicial extensionof the proliferating red-state lawsmeant to constrain the potential influence of younger generations through measures making it more difficult to vote, banning books, and censoring how teachers talk about race and gender inequities.

All of these conflicts reflect the mounting tension betweenwhat I’ve called the brown and the gray: the racially and culturally diverse younger generations who are becoming the cornerstone of the Democratic political coalition, and the mostly white older generations who provide the foundation of Republican electoral strength.

“The attack on affirmative action is part of the larger, conservative extremist attack on young people and future generations of Americans who are more progressive, open-minded, racially and ethnically diverse, and inclusive than the waning demographic of the electorate,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, told me in an email.

Affirmative action in education, employment, and government contracting has always been an imperfect tool to promote racial equality. It has prompted ambivalence even among many of its beneficiaries, who have been confronted with questions about whether they “deserved” their place in classrooms or on worksites. Skeptics see it as a violation of traditional notions of merit and fairness. Opposition to affirmative action in education has been most intense among white and Asian American voters,but it has also faced resistance in pollsfrom substantial numbers of Latinos and a measurable minority of African Americans. Even in liberal-leaning California, a ballot initiative to ban consideration of race in college admissions passed easily in 1996. A measure to repeal the ban failed by an even larger margin in 2020.

But, for all its limitations, affirmative action has proved crucial for maintaining any alignment between the diversifying youth population and the student body at the most elite educational institutions. Even with affirmative action, experts note, the racial makeup of the most selective schools has not kept pace. “There has been no serious attempt to achieve diversity commensurate with the high-school class in America,” Carnevale said. “That’s just not the game that we play.”

Growing diversity in the nation’s youth population is, as Carnevale put it, a “runaway train.” Whereas about three-fourths of Baby Boomers and older generations are white, kids of color comprise about 45 percent of Millennials, almost exactly half of Generation Z, and an absolute majority of the youngest Americans born since 2012 (generally considered the cutoff for Gen Z),according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro.

In 2014, for the first time, kids of color constituted a majority of public-school K–12 students. The National Center for Educational Statisticsestimatesthat kids of color became a majority of all high-school graduates for the first time last year; the center projects that by the end of this decade, minority kids will comprise about 57 percent of all high-school graduates. As recently as around 2000, about seven of every 10 graduates still were white.

This profound transformation is inevitably reshaping the entering class of college students. Kids of color have grown from about a fourth of the entering class for colleges and universities nationwide in 1995 to nearly two-fifths in 2009 to almost half today. But, as Carnevale notes, even with many institutions using some form of affirmative action, white kids remain overrepresented, and Black and Latino kids in particular remain substantially underrepresented at the most exclusive institutions.

In 2021, Black and Latino students combined accounted for only a little over a fifth of the entering class at the public and private colleges rated the most selective byBarron’smagazine, according to new data from the Georgetown Center provided exclusively toThe Atlantic. Asian American students accounted for about another one in eight of their students. White students, though now down to only about half of all incoming students, still filled about three-fifths of the seats in the entering class of the most elite institutions, the center found.

The Black and Latino share of the entering class steadily rises in the institutions that are less selective. They accounted for about a third of the incoming class at the public and private schools in the middle tier of selectivity, and almost 45 percent of the entering class at the least-selective “open access” schools.

Taken together, these patterns leave big majorities of Black, Latino, and Native American first-year students attending the least-selective schools—about three-fifths of Black students, and two-thirds of Latino and Native American students. By contrast, well below half of all white and Asian American students attend these schools.

This distribution matters in part because the most elite institutionsspend more than three times as much per studentas the open-access schools and generate much better outcomes on such key measures as college completion, graduate-school attainment, and lifetime earnings. And despite the claim that affirmative action “mismatches” kids of color into demanding institutions where they can’t succeed, Carnevale says the evidence is unmistakable that the greater investment of elite schools is especially beneficial in improving results for kids from low-income backgrounds. “The lower income you are, the more you gain from a selective college,” Carnevale told me. “In fact, the gains for minorities and low-income kids far exceed those for the usual white kids who go to a selective college.”

Harder to quantify, but perhaps even more profound, is the potential impact on the nation’s leadership class of further reducing the number of nonwhite students at the most prestigious colleges and universities. Joe Biden is the only president since 1988 who did not receive either an undergraduate or a graduate degree from an Ivy League school; all but one of the Supreme Court Justices (Amy Coney Barrett) graduated from law school at Harvard or Yale. “If opportunity is concentrated among certain racial groups and not equally open to others, that will necessarily create a caste system that is not sustainable in a functioning democracy,” Nelson, at the Legal Defense Fund, said.

Victor Shi, a UCLA student and strategy director at Voters of Tomorrow, a liberal-leaning group that tries to engage Gen Z in politics, says his contemporaries are already aware of how little their diversity is reflected in the nation’s public and private leadership. “That’s one of the biggest systemic issues: Are there enough people up there who represent people of color?” Shi told me. “Getting rid of affirmative action reemphasizes this outlook among Gen Z that our systems are broken.”

In a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the three Democratic-appointed Justices emphasized the likelihood that the majority’s ruling will dangerously widen the gap between a society that is changing rapidly and a leadership class that could remain disproportionately White. “The Court ignores the dangerous consequences of an America where its leadership does not reflect the diversity of the People,” Sotomayor wrote. “At its core, today’s decision exacerbates segregation and diminishes the inclusivity of our Nation’s institutions in service of superficial neutrality that promotes indifference to inequality and ignores the reality of race.

The experience in states that have ended affirmative action leaves little doubt that the Court’s decision will in fact further diminish the number of Black and Latino kids on elite campuses. In separate legal briefs, the state universities inCaliforniaandMichigan—two states where voters have banned affirmative action in higher education—recounted the extensive efforts they have had to make to preserve diversity without it.

These measures have included greatly increased outreach to inner-city schools, new scholarship programs for minority kids, deemphasizing standardized test scores, guaranteeing admission to some percentage of students with the best grades in every school, and providing more advantage in admission decisions to those who come from low-income backgrounds. Despite all these initiatives, the schools explained, they could not maintain racial diversity commensurate with the overall youth population. As the University of California concluded in its brief, “There remain stark differences between the demographics of UC’s enrolled student population … and California public high school graduates.” Michele Siqueiros, the president of the Campaign for College Affordability, a group that advocates for low-income and minority students in higher education, told me that with the Court barring affirmative action, the nation risks reverting “to the kind of segregation … that ensured that only white wealthy men could go to college in this country.” To avoid that fate, she says, advocates will need to more forcefully challenge every way the system tilts against low-income and minority applicants—perhaps most important among them legacy admissions that favor the children of alumni (who tend to be mostly white at selective schools).

Plenty of admissions practices like these undermine the idea that affirmative action represents a unique departure from the principle of impartial “merit,” Carnevale pointed out: “If you did college admissions [solely] by academic talent, half the people in the elite schools would have to leave.” Absent such a fundamental reassessment of admissions, the GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices have now made much more likely a future in which the most elite educational institutions remain mostly white (or even grow whiter) as society becomes more diverse. By all indications, that is a future likely to be welcomed bythe electoral coalitionthat placed those justices on the Court.

Across a wide range of issues—including ending the constitutional right to abortion, privileging claims of religious liberty over LGBTQ rights, restricting government regulation of firearms, and blocking federal efforts to confront climate change—the GOP-appointed majority is systematically ruling in ways that reflect the priorities of a predominantly white and Christian electoral coalition. The Court majority has rejected some of the most extreme and fringe legal theories popular in that coalition, particularly the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine” and challenges to the 2020 election outcome. But such decisions remain the exception. In its ruling against affirmative action, the Court majority has reifiedthe bedrock beliefof most Republican voters that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. Through these decisions and others, the Court has become a powerful weapon for a Republican coalition that is defining itself, especially in the Donald Trump era, in open oppositionto the demographic and cultural changesreshaping American life in the 21st century.

These rulings from this majority not only collide with the dominant views among Gen Z, but in many cases threatenthe intrinsic identityof a generation that is more racially diverse,more likely to identify as LGBTQ, andless likely to belong to any organized religionthan any in American history.

Americans born since 1980already represent a majority of the U.S. population, and by 2028 they almost certainly will becomethe biggest single bloc of the nation’s voters. Yet, with the two oldest of the conservative Justices only in their mid-70s, this Supreme Court majority could rule against Gen Z’s preferences for another decade or more. The choice to end affirmative action precisely as the nation’s youth population reaches unprecedented levels of diversity shows just how fiercely the gray may fight to avoid ceding power to the brown.