We need smart people to create new paths toward justice

The recently radicalized U.S. Supreme Court heard cases that challenged affirmative action for university admission yesterday, and no one will be surprised if the court ends up banning any admissions policies that are race-based. That will be another example of how the court is delighted to overturn numerous precedents in order to serve rabid conservative agendas. 

At some point, we just have to face the fact the the court is as biased and political as the other branches of government, which is as big a potential problem as election-deniers and white nationalists (and maybe connected with them). 

But...

It may be possible to be a bit more clever about admission policies, according to all sorts of "experts." And it's worth noting that a slight majority of racial minorities oppose affirmative action based on race, which should get us thinking about alternatives that stretch beyond current political unrest and taking default positions.

One strategy is to grant "automatic" admittance to students who rank near the top of their class, no matter the high school. This has clear positives, allowing schools that are essentially segregated to send their top students, no matter their standardized test scores, etc., to top universities. This is now being done in Texas, for instance. 

The problem for the Ivy League schools (Harvard is a defendant in the Supreme Court case) is that they are not "state" schools. They draw from everywhere and there are too many high schools to make the Texas plan work. But smart people could probably work out some method to better spread the applicants out than the current mix of "legacies," excellent test takers, and high GPAs at traditionally strong schools. A lot of admitted students to the Ivy League schools are "groomed" from early years, attending private prep schools, so they are overrepresented in those student bodies.

My choice would be the second option widely discussed, namely to weigh socio-economic status more heavily in making admission decisions. Currently, research by the economist Raj Chetty found that Harvard has 15 times as many students from the richest one-fifth of the population as the poorest one-fifth. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, students in the top one-fifth of income are 16 times as plentiful as in the bottom one-fifth.

So the reality is that the true division among students at top universities is (shock!) between rich and poor, like so much in America. The nation would be better served with more diversity in terms of family income and experiences, and a clever admissions department could find ways to work around any Supreme Court affirmative action rulings and still bring in students of color... with the bonus of boosting some of the nation's poorest families and opening doors they now can only dream of.

We have now reached the point where many Americans can't trust the Supreme Court to watch out for the "little guy" anymore (if they ever could), but smart rules and even future legislation can create paths forward. 

My initial reaction to the likely striking down of race-based admissions was that this would cause an immediate radical increase in white and Asian-American students at top schools. And maybe it will. But universities see the benefit of more diversity in their student bodies, and I hope most Americans would agree.

Not the Christian White Nationalists, of course. They are only in it for themselves.