Affirmative Action Policies Evolve, Achieving Their Own Diversity The New York Times, VIVIAN YEEAUG. 5, 2017 Just a year ago, after the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions program by a single swing vote, the question seemed to be edging, at last, toward an answer: Colleges could, the justices ruled, consider race when deciding whom to let through their gates. (…) Besieged in court, routed in eight states, accused of favoring blacks and Latinos at the expense of Asians and whites, affirmative action — a major legacy of the civil rights era — is once again the subject of uncomfortable scrutiny. But even without federal intervention, a look at affirmative action policies in 2017 shows that they have achieved their own kind of diversity, evolving from the explicitly racebased quotas of decades ago into a range of approaches that occasionally, not always, near the melting-pot ideal, often by giving preference to low-income students instead of minorities. (…) Public universities in California and Washington, forbidden by state law from considering race in individual admissions decisions, have attempted to use socioeconomic factors as a substitute, hoping to draw from the overlap of minority and low-income students. Others, like the University of Texas, accept a set percentage of the top students at every state high school. Neither method has fully succeeded in composing student bodies that match the racial makeup of their states. Other colleges with more freedom to curate a student body continue to weigh race as one factor in admissions, which can lead to more diversity. But their decision-making can be so subjective that, in the minds of high school seniors staring down application season, it can border on the occult. It is this opacity that has left few happy: not AsianAmerican students who feel that they are being held to a higher standard, and whose complaint against Harvard has become a focus of the Justice Department’s efforts; not white students who feel similarly penalized; and not those who remain the theoretical face of affirmative action, African-American and Latino applicants who say the assumption that their success depended on their race can shadow them far beyond commencement. “When I told people I was going to Princeton, it was not uncommon for me to hear: ‘Oh, you’re going to Princeton because you are black,’” said Jonathan Haynes, a sophomore from Midland, Mich., where just 2 percent of the population is black. He is among a group of students pushing Princeton, where 9 percent of students are black, to admit more from low-income backgrounds. (…) In states that have rejected affirmative action policies at universities, which include Michigan, Washington and Florida, the new approaches to assembling a diverse student body have tended to give an edge to applicants who have overcome disadvantages like poor neighborhoods, troubled schools and language barriers. But though these methods may have somewhat increased the number of low-income students of all backgrounds, racial diversity remains elusive. At the University of California system, which was forced to drop affirmative action programs after voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996, officials have had to rely on what they call “race-neutral” solutions to strive for a student body that more closely mirrors the state’s population. Students in the top 9 percent of their high school class are guaranteed admission to at least one U.C. campus. Starting in 2011, most of the system adopted what university officials call a “holistic” review, under which admissions officers considered the entirety of the applicant’s circumstances, “reading the application beginning to end before making a judgment,” said Han Mi Yoon-Wu, the undergraduate admissions director for the system. “Nothing is particularly weighted more than anything else.” Although Latinos made up about 52 percent of students graduating from high school in California in 2016, only about one-third of the freshmen who enrolled in one of the 10 U.C. campuses that fall were Latino, a disparity that Ms. YoonWu called “troubling.” The number of black and Latino students enrolling at Los Angeles and Berkeley, the flagship campuses, have declined even more steeply. Blacks made up about 3 percent of all undergraduates at Berkeley last year, with Asians at 39 percent and whites at 26 percent. “There is still a lot of work to be done,” Ms. Yoon-Wu said. For many opponents of affirmative action, the ideal admissions system strips out all factors but achievement. “All that matters, in the type of society that I envision, is that you are at the top and you are there because you have achieved in accordance with the rules that we’ve laid out,” said Mr. Connerly. “Not on the basis of your skin color, not on the basis of where your daddy was born.”

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