As expected, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious criteria for admissions into universities. Now it’s up to Louisiana to ensure it actually gets done in the state.
The Court issued a ruling in two cases today that using race as a general classification to make admissions decisions violated the Constitution. It granted more leeway to military institutions and said that colleges still can consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” but that evaluation of experiences must occur “as an individual – not on the basis of race.”
Given Louisiana’s structure to higher education, in effect only a few state schools are affected that much. Community colleges are open admission, and the two lowest levels, regional and HBCU, have such low entrance requirements that (20 on the ACT or SAT equivalent, which is barely above the average nationally although Louisiana’s average was just 18.1, of which a large proportion of those below the 19.8 national mean won’t ever pursue tertiary study) that enrollment proportions by race in the aggregate probably won’t differ by much with those in the population, even though ACT data also show that only five percent of black and 11 percent of Hispanic test-takers are by its definition “college ready” according to their scores, while 29 percent of whites and 51 percent of Asians are.
That’s additionally because admissions policies for the four kinds of senior institutions allow exceptions to these standards, of eight percent for regional and HBCU schools. Here, motivated admissions officers who wish to insert race into the calculation have an opportunity to do so, if they can demonstrate fidelity to the Court’s mandate that credit only go to experiences that can be associated with race.
With the next tier of universities, statewide, there might be more of an impact, because of the higher minimum ACT score of 23 (there’s also a grade point average requirement for admission to senior institutions that’s also higher, but in this era of grade inflation the GPA minimums hardly mean anything), as well as the exception proportion falling to six percent. Where a significant change should be observed is with Louisiana State University, as the Baton Rouge campus requires an ACT score of 25 with just a four percent exception.
Expect resistance to that, not the least of which because LSU has been flouting these Board of Regents standards for five years when it first introduced “holistic” admissions. It no longer requires submission of a standardized test score although students may do so, and the latest fall, 2022 data show about 30 percent of enrolled first-time fulltime freshmen didn’t even score as high as 24 on the ACT. (As another indicator of grade inflation, the average GPA of these admittees was 3.77/4.00.)
This violation occurs because the standards’ creator, the Board of Regents, won’t make the LSU Board of Supervisors follow these. And with both completely filled with Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards appointees sympathetic with LSU System Pres. William Tate IV’s administration quietly inserting race into the admissions procedure, that wouldn’t look to change for some time to come despite the Court’s ruling. Instead, expect all sorts of gamesmanship to increase use of proxy indicators for race, based on non-quantitative and highly subjective criteria, in admissions.
If so, that leaves matters in the hand of the new governor and Legislature next year. A top legislative priority must be to place in law that higher education institutions must follow Regents’ rules on this matter, with annual audits by the Legislative Auditor. Violators should forfeit all their state funding.
Elected officials, as well as Louisianans, can’t trust higher education mandarins to give up their belief that neo-racist discriminatory use of race in admission decisions shouldn’t shape the process. Making them adhere to Regents standards minimizes this abuse of the Constitution. Legislators have to ensure this beginning with 2025 admissions lest this mockery persists.