It takes true commitment to circumvent the law so publicly.
In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case in favor of merit-based admissions to college in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The fairly common practice of favoring students based on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) was legally abolished. Admissions were supposed to grade everyone on one scale. In some schools, that still isn’t the case.
Just as many Southern states refused to acknowledge Brown v. Board of Education, there are still many holdouts to the latest major Supreme Court ruling concerning educational discrimination.
For example, the Justice and Education Departments recently found that Duke Law School was still engaging in blatantly discriminatory admissions practices. The median LSAT scores of white and Asian applicants are both higher than the median score for admitted black applicants. Black applicants were three and a half times more likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white and Asian applicants were. The university even admitted to it, with a spokesperson saying that Duke is “committed to complying with the law ... in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission.” It’s easy to see that Duke’s “academic mission” doesn’t align with the supreme law of the land.
Berkeley’s law school was also investigated, and its admissions practices were even more discriminatory. Black applicants were six times more likely to be accepted than their similarly scoring white and Asian counterparts were. Nearly every white student at Berkeley had a higher LSAT than half of the school’s black students.
That last statistic is truly mind-boggling, as the creation of it is one of the most objective ways to encourage racism. Every black student at Berkeley will be viewed, consciously or not, as a token and less capable than white students. Not because that’s true in the real world, but because of the conditions set by the school’s admissions.
The school’s dean even revealed the next move even before the Supreme Court ruling: “What colleges and universities will need to do after affirmative action is eliminated is find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution.” They will clearly find any way to circumvent the law because, to them, the ends justify the means.
Duke and Berkeley are two examples among dozens of possible offenders, many of which haven’t yet revealed admissions statistics to the government. Naturally, the Education Department is seeking this data from every institution in America. Seventeen blue states have sued to block the acquisition.
However, a more immediate case will soon come before the Supreme Court. The Association for Education Fairness (AEF) has sued Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Education for admissions discrimination. The school system operates a magnet program that contains competitive advanced programs at the district’s middle schools. The AEF alleges the board has adopted admissions rules that effectively eliminate Asian applicants from contention.
Unless the evidence is false, the court will likely side with the AEF, but it remains clear that schools will break the rules regardless. Therefore, the government must take preventative measures.
On one hand, Congress needs to codify the mandatory disclosure of university statistics. Colleges and universities have only released their own information under federal investigation, and they will not reveal incriminating evidence without force. Americans can only guess which schools are engaging in these practices.
On the other hand, the government should restrict federal funding from offending schools. Most of these schools are state-funded or receive large federal grants. Most major schools, if not all, couldn’t survive without it. The government is why they exist in their current form, and it should know who’s being admitted.
DEI has proven to be a hard bug to kill, because while the solution is simple, some of these schools will fight to the bitter end to keep their manufactured diversity.
