Universities nationwide have used race as a factor when determining which students to admit because they claim to have a compelling interest to create a “critical mass” of diverse students to make up their student body. However, individual students often argue that such policies are discriminatory.

For example, during the time of the 2016 Fisher v. University of Texas case, roughly half of the students at the University of Texas (UT) were white and the remaining half were minority and international students. UT practiced a Top Ten Percent (TTP) policy where any student in the top ten percent of their class automatically was accepted to the university; over 80% of the student body at UT was accepted this way. Given the de facto racial segregation of the school districts throughout Texas, the TTP policy diversified the overall student body makeup at UT. The remaining 20% of students were then admitted based on test scores, grades, and a Personal Achievement Index (PAI), with some of the factors of the PAI consisting of written essays, leadership experience, and race. Ms. Fisher was in the top twelve percent of her class and believes she did not get accepted to UT because of the race component of the PAI.

While UT’s policy was found lawful by the Supreme Court under the Equal Protection Clause in 2016, similar to the precedent set by other earlier cases (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978; Grutter v. Bollinger, 2013), 2023 marked a change for the Court. In two cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in student admissions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

While the Supreme Court has now all but eliminated affirmative action in college admissions, the debate still continues among politicians and the public. After engaging in this C-SPAN Classroom Deliberation, your students will be able to answer the question: Should race be a factor in admissions processes at publicly funded universities?

Objectives and Outcomes

• Students will understand and be able to use vocabulary related to the 14th Amendment, affirmative action, and the equal protection clause, as well as Supreme Court history related to these topics, and related topics such as segregation, discrimination, and the history of race-based admissions processes at U.S. colleges and universities.
  
  
• Students will be able to summarize and evaluate competing positions on whether public universities should use race as a factor or not when deciding which applicants to accept to their undergraduate and graduate programs.
  
  
• Students will practice and embody the traits of democratic citizenry by participating in a deliberation about what the answer to the question is.