Race Based Admissions

Will fewer Americans support race based admissions in the future?

A new “Gallup” poll on the topic of race based admissions has found that just about two thirds of Americans prefer color-blind admission to the current system in place at colleges across America. As reported by “Deseret News” in an article by Jamshid Ghazi Askar entitled “Poll: Two-thirds of Americans prefer color-blind admission,” “‘(Sixty-seven percent) of Americans believe college applicants should be admitted solely based on merit, even if that results in few minorities being admitted, while 28 percent believe an applicant’s racial and ethnic background should be taken into account to promote diversity on college campuses,’ Gallup reported in new polling released Wednesday.”

What do you think about these figures? Does it surprise you that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe admission should be based solely on merit, even if it means fewer minorities will then earn spots at America’s top colleges? Does it surprise you that only 28% of Americans think race should be a factor in college admissions decisions? Or did you think that this figure would be even lower? Lastly, how do you see these race based admissions figures changing in the years ahead?

As you know either from watching/reading the news or from reading our college admissions blog, race in college admissions is as hot of a topic as ever with the Supreme Court recently ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that race can remain a factor in admissions but the onus is on the universities to demonstrate that race is being used as a factor essentially narrowly tailored to promote institutional diversity. In other words, the onus is on universities to prove that they considered what has been dubbed “race-neutral alternatives” before using race as a factor in admissions decisions.