As the number of challenges to minority-based scholarships and affirmative action programs increases, many of the nation’s colleges and universities are revamping or substantially decreasing various policies that will diminish previous initiatives to recruit minority students.
In November, Michigan became the third state in the nation to abolish affirmative action programs, joining California and Washington. Under the ruling, the process by which public colleges and universities admit ethnically diverse students – including African Americans – will be forever altered.
In a statement to the media earlier this year, Victor Bolden, general counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, said, “The real problem is that these attacks may undermine fundamental equality with respect to African-American students’ ability to attend institutions of higher education. What you’re seeing is a more intense attack – a rather relentless one.”
Much of the debate and subsequent dilution of the scholarship and minority recruitment efforts by institutions of higher education stems from a landmark case nearly 30 years ago.
In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a case brought by rejected University of California Medical School applicant Allan Bakke. Bakke, who is Caucasian, sued the school, contending that minority students with lower test scores were admitted to the medical college. The Supreme Court upheld the decision not to admit Bakke; however, the high court shot down the pervasive use of quotas in the university’s admission policy.
According to statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research, after affirmative action was banned in California in 1996, the admission rates of Black freshmen applications to the state’s largest university – UCLA – decreased by nearly half between 1995 and 1997. Also, in 1996, a lawsuit filed against the University of Maryland forced administrators to combine a scholarship that was originally intended for African-American students with another scholarship that made the funds available to all students.
However, some experts contend it may still be too early to accurately tell if minority enrollment across the country have significantly decreased since some previously minority-only scholarships have now become universal.
In 2003, in response to white applicants across the country that vehemently challenged all race-based admission policies and practices, the Supreme Court eventually ruled that minority applicants could indeed be given some preferential treatment in admissions.
