The UNC Board of Governor’s Committee on University Governance voted unanimously — and without discussion — on Wednesday to repeal and replace the UNC System’s current diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy.

The Board’s proposed policy, among other things, would eliminate system-wide DEI metrics and goals across the UNC System, along with the requirement for schools to appoint a senior-level DEI officer.

The policy will go before the full Board of Governors on its consent agenda in May. It is effective upon its adoption, the draft document says.

“The University of North Carolina reaffirms its longstanding commitment to the equality of opportunity in education and employment as a core value,” . “As such, the University continues to ensure that diverse persons of any background, from North Carolina and beyond, are invited, included, and treated equally.”

The UNC System is made up of 17 institutions — 16 public universities and a public boarding high school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics — that serve nearly 250,000 students each year. This decision could have ripple effects on other institutions of education from K-12 to community colleges as well as issues from the preparation of educators to the

The new policy would require that each institution certify by Sept. 1 that it “fully complies with the University’s commitment to institutional neutrality and nondiscrimination.” That reporting deadline includes each school eliminating or updating its current DEI positions.

The new policy proposal also states that “diversity means the ways in which individuals vary, including, but not limited to, backgrounds, beliefs, viewpoints, abilities, cultures, and traditions that distinguish one individual from another.”

Members of the UNC System Board of Governors, who , oversee the entire system. Republicans have maintained control of the state legislature for the last decade, and there is on the Board of Governors.

The Board of Governors then  to the individual universities’ boards of trustees as well as chancellors and presidents. You can view a list of the Board’s 24 voting members .

WRAL reported House Speaker Tim Moore, , said last week that lawmakers would allow universities to tackle the issue first. Moore is not running for re-election for his state seat in 2024.

Already, last June, North Carolina Republicans passed , “an act to amend the State Human Resources Act to prohibit compelled speech when an individual seeks state government or community college employment.”

That ban on “compelled speech” in hiring and admissions decisions has since impacted diversity efforts in faculty hiring and evaluation,

You can view the new policy proposal, “Equality Within the University of North Carolina,”

You can also view the UNC’s System’s current policy, , which was adopted in 2019.

What does the new policy say?

The includes 10 sections.

First, the policy states its purpose.

Next, the policy outlines the system’s nondiscrimination in employment practices and educational programs and activities. The policy states that the system “shall continue to comply with federal and state law prohibiting discrimination and harassment of members of protected classes.”

Here’s a quick look at the other sections:

• Ensuring Equality of All Persons & Viewpoints: This section further extends the nondiscrimination requirements for state government workplaces outlined in state statute (G.S. 126 14.6) to university-led student orientations, training, or activities.
• Commitment to the Freedom of Speech & Expression: “…the University of North Carolina shall continue its proud tradition of pursuing and embracing the most vigorous, open, and thoughtful exchange of ideas.”
• Maintaining Academic Freedom: The policy says the system “shall take no action that would limit the right of academic freedom in its faculty’s pursuit of teaching, research, and service, subject only to the institutional tenure policies.”
• Commitment to Student Success & Employee Well-being: “Campuses shall continue to implement programming or services designed to have a positive effect on the academic performance, retention, or graduation of students from different backgrounds, provided that programming complies with the institutional neutrality specified in Section VII of this policy and/or other state and federal requirements.”
• Maintaining Institutional Neutrality: “…No employing subdivision or employment position within the University shall be organized, be operated, speak on behalf of the University, or contract with third parties to provide training or consulting services regarding: matters of contemporary political debate or social action.”

The policy’s Sept. 1 report requirement also requires campus leaders to submit “a report on reductions in force and spending, along with changes to job titles and position descriptions, undertaken as a result of implementing this policy and how those savings achieved from these actions can be redirected to initiatives related to student success and wellbeing.”

Finally, the policy says student-led organizations “may use university facilities and receive student activity funding notwithstanding any speech or expressive activity by such organizations that would otherwise violate” the policy’s section on maintaining institutional neutrality.

What was repealed?

, in place since 2019, “sets forth procedures related to the oversight of D&I activities and related reporting to monitor the effectiveness of these efforts.”

Here is a look at the major requirements laid out in that policy:

• The designation of a senior officer at the UNC System Office to serve as DEI liaison to UNC System campuses.
• The appointment of a senior-level DEI officer at each constituent institution. This officer will assist the chancellor in DEI policy development, oversee DEI work, and advise on trainings and outreach, among other things.
• The establishment of of a UNC System Diversity and Inclusion Council to develop system-wide DEI goals and metrics and share best practices.
• The dissemination of DEI information to students and employees.

Read the full policy .

Efforts to reform UNC governance

, the Governor’s Commission on Public University Governance announced its recommendations for strengthening the UNC System, including the creation of a Center of Higher Education Governance, a larger system governance board, and changes to term lengths for board members, among other things.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper announced the commission , citing signs of undue political influence and bureaucratic meddling among university governance in the state.

The 15-member bipartisan , co-chaired by former UNC System leaders Tom Ross and Margaret Spellings, spent the following eight months studying board governance and appointment methods. From February to April, the commission also hosted six public listening sessions across the state to gather stakeholder input on improving public university governance.

“The Commission’s recommendations are motivated primarily by the principle that the governing boards of the UNC System and its institutions should reflect, represent and be accountable to the people they serve,” the report says. “While our state is rich in all types of diversity, that diversity and that strength is not reflected in our governance today in the manner contemplated by existing state law.”

is a link to the final report of recommendations. You can read the recommendations on page i-iv.

On Wednesday, Cooper with Ross speaking out against the Board’s move to abolish DEI positions and initiatives across the system.

“Our diversity should be used to highlight our state’s strengths, not our political divisions,” Cooper said. “Republican legislative and university leaders who attack diversity at our public universities are failing in their duty to protect students while threatening our ability to recruit top scientists, researchers and innovators who power our economy.”

Ross said the bipartisan commission “found that a lack of diversity among university leadership and governance boards is both a disservice to students across the UNC System and leads to the controversy and volatility that we are seeing threaten our public universities.”

“Our universities should encourage diversity on their campuses and governance boards and have leaders, administrators, faculty and staff that reflect the extraordinary diversity of our amazing state,” Ross said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A controversial report on the “return on investment” of a UNC System education is on its way to the North Carolina General Assembly, which required the system to study the issue two years ago.

Key findings from the , discussed Wednesday by the UNC System Board of Governors:

North Carolinians who receive bachelor’s degrees through the UNC system were found to earn a median of $572,000 more than those without, a “return on investment” for students of about $500,000. Those with bachelor’s degrees earned a median of about $1.2 million over their lifetimes.Those who earn graduate-level degrees saw a median “return on investment” of $938,000 compared those with bachelor’s degrees, earning a median of about $2.1 million over their lifetimes.

To come to those numbers, the private research firm worked with the consulting firm �����Ի� to study more than 700 undergraduate and 575 graduate programs in the 16-campus university system along with decades of earnings data for graduates still living in the state.

Using that data, the researchers compared “the expected lifetime earnings of UNC graduates against the expected lifetime earnings of those without a college degree for undergraduate programs or with a bachelor’s degree for graduate programs, as measured by the American Community Survey, in the state,” according to the report.

“The way to essentially interpret it is, the instant you graduate from that program, it’s like I wrote you a check for $500,000,” said , in a committee meeting with members of the UNC System Board of Governors Wednesday.

Of course, Fritz said, some degrees are more lucrative than others.

The report found 94 percent of the system’s undergraduate programs and 91 percent of its graduate programs resulted in a positive return on student investment.

The highest return was in science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) fields, the report found. Degrees in Biotechnology were found to be the most lucrative, with a median lifetime return of more than $3.2 million.

Among graduate students, the study found medical science programs provided the highest return on investment, with a median lifetime return of over $5.2 million.

The study found graduates of 42 of 235 undergraduate programs and 83 of 244 graduate programs earned a median lifetime return on investment of more than $1 million. Many of these high-return programs are aligned to critical workforce needs in the state.

But the study doesn’t just emphasize which programs lead to the highest earnings for students or concentrate on creating “the next wave of millionaires,” Fritz said.

Upward economic mobility for graduates across programs and disciplines is significant, he said, with 89.6% of graduates whose families were in the lowest income group at the time of enrollment moving up at least one “income band” as their careers progress.

“For low-income students (defined here as students with an income of less than $17,900 at time of enrollment), 89.6% experienced some economic mobility — meaning they moved up at least one income band from where they started over a 20-year period,” the report reads “[Forty-two percent] of all low-income students rose four income bands leading to a yearly income of $91,300 or greater after 20 years while 65.4% of low income students rose at least 3 bands to an income of more than $51,800 per year.”

“This data demonstrates that by removing barriers to access, the State of North Carolina and the UNC System have ensured that students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds have a high likelihood of upward economic mobility if they complete a degree,” the report reads.

Limitations and political friction

While important in demonstrating the value of higher education at a period when more American are skeptical about it, the study’s authors acknowledge it has limitations.

An important blind spot in the study: students who earn degrees in the UNC System but move to other states to pursue their careers, making their wage data unavailable through the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

“One of my early questions was about the school of the arts,” said UNC System President Peter Hans Wednesday. “Most of their graduates immediately go to New York and Los Angeles and such.”

Graduates in journalism and media related fields often leave for major media markets outside the state as well and high performing graduates in political science and the social sciences may also decamp to Washington D.C. or to political careers in other states.

In Wednesday’s committee discussion of the return-on-investment report, members of the board of governors and UNC System President Peter Hans suggested it took as long as it did to produce — more than 18 months — because of resistance from the state Department of Commerce.

The system and its outside firms needed to partner with the department to get wage data. The system would also like the department to approve a partnership that would help them access wage data at the federal level, board members said Wednesday.

Those criticisms came as a surprise to the Department of Commerce.

“Having worked closely with UNC to deliver (in August 2022, 15 months ago) 26 years of confidential wage data – dating back to 1996 and representing more than 47.5 million data records and more than $543 Billion in wages, we’re surprised by today’s comments,” said David Rhodes, communications director for the department.

“No one from the UNC System has raised such concerns with us directly since we’ve been working with them,” Rhodes said.

“The wage data is derived from information submitted by employers as part of their unemployment insurance tax accounts,” Rhodes said. “As such, the data set contains highly sensitive personal identifiable information, so called PII, so as you can appreciate the upmost care must be taken to ensure all parties entrusted with such data have the equipment and procedures in place to keep it secure, a process that is complex and can take some time.”

“Even so, our team produced the requested data in a timely manner,” Rhodes said.

Commerce Secretary Machelle Baker Sanders is a Democrat appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper while members of the UNC System Board of Governors are political appointees of the General Assembly’s Republican majority.

Political tensions over the return-on-investment report have been apparent since before the legislature mandated and funded it two years ago in the state budget. Questions about how it may be used and whether those decisions will be made with politically have only grown louder.

A controversial undertaking

Members of the board of governors emphasized Wednesday that the study is just the beginning. More information is needed, they said, before decisions are made about investing in some programs more than others or, as administrators, faculty and students across the system fear, eliminating some programs entirely because they are found to provide a lower return on investment.

But tensions are high across the system, as illustrated by UNC-Greensboro, where the UNC Board of Governors met Wednesday and Thursday of this week.

As , thousands of faculty, students and alumni at the school have signed a petition opposing a review of academic programs at the university that could result in the elimination of some programs.

Protests were held on campus last month and again this week, as the board of governors met on campus.

An independent audit of the university’s finances, funded by the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, found that though UNCG has struggled with enrollment and funding challenges in the last few years, it is on firm financial footing and doesn’t need to cut programs.

Chancellor Frank Gilliam has criticized that audit and its conclusions, saying the university has to align its programs with student and workforce demands.

More business focused language regarding academia – discussions of students as customers, of “return on investment” and upper level administrators as “CEOs” – has gone from conservative think-tank literature to Republican-led legislatures down to the campus level.

One of the firms used to produce  the system level return on investment report and in the academic program review now underway at UNCG is rpk GROUP. That firm was involved in a similar study at West Virginia University, where earlier this year university leaders .

Gilliam has waved off comparisons between West Virginia and what’s happening at UNCG, but in a board of governors committee meeting Wednesday he spoke to the philosophical tie between the return-on-investment report, his own university’s academic program review, and the pushback to both.

“We have made the argument, and we are coming under some fire for it, that we really need this data to do an analysis of how much it costs us to produce a student credit hour,” Gilliam said. “And does that line up strategically with where we’re trying to take the institution. Does it line up, let me say it more bluntly, with student demand? Student demands are high in certain areas. They’ve changed over time. And they’re less high in other areas.”

Gilliam said he was worried public perception will be that if the return-on-investment study shows almost all UNC system programs provide a good return on investment, there is no need for program reviews like the one now underway at UNCG.

“We’re doing well in North Carolina but there are going to be headwinds,” Gilliam said. “I’ve been doing this almost 40 years. The environment is changing at a sea change level. It’s not just little changes. And they’re not going anywhere. So I’ve argued we need to sharpen our focus. It’s not about cutting programs. It’s about meeting student demands and labor market demands.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

Martin, editor-in-chief of the student paper The Daily Tar Heel, mapped her escape route in case an active shooter broke through the library’s glass walls. 

By midnight, Martin was finally alone, safe but at a loss for how to visualize the crisis for the paper’s front page.

Scrolling through unanswered texts and classmates’ online posts, she found her answer. 

“That’s when I realized that that is what our front page had to be,” Martin told The 74, “because those text messages — the sentiment of ‘are you safe’ was something that was shared by everyone who experienced this, but also by anyone who has been in an active shooter situation across the nation and across the world.” 

Within 72 hours, she and her Tar Heel colleagues were thrust into the national spotlight as their front page coverage from the campus shooting , reaching President Joe Biden’s desk and amassing nearly 8 million views on X, formerly known as Twitter. During what would’ve been an open house to attract new staffers, editors instead shared their stories on NBC, CNN, MSNBC and PBS.

In what may be the darkest stream of consciousness to catalog the emotions of a generation constantly plagued by gun violence, the cover strings together text messages between students and their loved ones as chaos unfolded: “Are you safe? I wish these never happened. Someone is already shot. Run if you can. I love you.” 

As the font gets smaller and smaller, reality sets in: the pain, outrage and fear is endless. 

“We wanted to tell the story of three hours and ten minutes. Of just being scared, not knowing how many people may be on campus, not knowing how many people may have died, or been injured,” the Tar Heel’s print managing editor Caitlyn Yaede told The 74. 

im still reeling from the events of yesterday. my heart goes out to the family and friends of the victim, as well as the entire chapel hill community. i never thought i would experience something like this and wanted to share my conversation with my mom and dad as the events unfolded.

The Daily Tar Heel is both a student-run nonprofit publication, independent of university funding, and the only print publication for Orange County, read by locals for generations.

Editors intentionally highlighted messages that would do justice to the full spectrum of emotions, choosing not to censor expletives. News organizations around the country have preserved the graphic’s language in its entirety, too. 

“We had people whose response was expletives, ‘What the F is happening?’ And there are people who say, ‘I love you, I love you so much, call me.’ No matter how you express that stress and overwhelming concern, that’s shared humanity. I think that the width of that and the breadth of that and the range of that is really captured in that cover,” Yaede said. 

Their work struck a chord: Locally, Wednesday’s papers ran out by 1 p.m. Faculty, staff, students and community members came by the newsroom on Franklin Street in the heart of Chapel Hill to ask for more copies. 

While the nation has been exposed to frantic messages sent during shootings — notably those from and — the cover’s unique design landed like a gut punch. 

For the first 10 hours, “nothing felt right,” Martin said. Editors deliberated and discarded other versions of the front page: a quote spread, or full blank page with key words like 3 hours, 10 minutes, 1 dead — which may have understated the death of associate professor Zijie Yan. 

Once they’d agreed on the string of texts, over 36 editors collaborated to gather content, collecting anonymous screenshots from peers. Yaede and Martin weeded through them to find common themes, an order, and begin transcribing. 

“If there was a moment when I was going to break down, it was reading those,” Martin said. Some of the messages came from close friends. “I can hear their voice.” 

The order and jumbled nature of the texts was also intentional, “even if it may have not been the most straightforward approach in terms of readability,” said multimedia managing editor Carson Elm-Picard. The block mimicked the experience of those on campus sitting in silent, panicked rooms receiving message after message. 

Elm-Picard helped fine tune the design throughout Tuesday, changing what would’ve been a black background with light blue highlights to the final white background with black and red highlights.

“The association with Tar Blue is something that our students normally think of as a good thing. We’re proud of it. It’s like our color,” Elm-Picard said. “I saw that and I just thought that this event, this isn’t something we really want to associate with that.”

Trying to heal together

The Tar Heel’s coverage spanned well beyond the graphic cover. This week’s stories included how the , and training that left many in the dark, and . 

While the coverage has been necessary, it’s also been traumatic and draining for everyone involved. Going viral was the last thing staff expected.

“It’s hard to say any of this feels good. Because it doesn’t,” said Elm-Picard, who grew up near Columbine High School in Colorado and is all too familiar with gun violence. He knows the site of the Aurora shooting; many of his friends attend school near the site of the Boulder grocery market shooting. 

“Our whole entire generation, it’s not really that foreign to us, but it’s different when it’s where you live and where you feel comfortable,” he added.

In the Daily Tar Heel newsroom, staffers share meals, check in with each other and have been encouraged to take time off when needed. Student journalist alumni have reached out with support in droves. 

“To be honest, it’s been a horrible two days for everyone in the newsroom,” Martin said. “To see such a huge response from our community and also people across the nation has helped us keep going on.”

The parsing is part of a package of materials responding to the June in admissions. The education and justice departments — which argued in favor of maintaining racial preferences in admissions — said summer enrichment camps for students from groups underrepresented in college are also allowed, as well as “pathway” programs that guarantee high school graduates a spot in the freshman class. Awarding slots in those programs based on race, however, would “trigger … strict scrutiny” from courts in light of the ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

“This moment demands a sense of urgency,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “This moment demands the same courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice we saw from leaders at the height of the civil rights movement.”

The release of the resources — a and a question-and-answer — is the second formal action the administration has taken on admissions since the decision. Last month, the Education Department held a day-long summit on ways colleges and K-12 schools can continue to legally foster diversity. And in a few weeks, Cardona said, the department will issue a report on strategies colleges already use. 

Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking Democrat on the House education committee, welcomed the guidance, but wants the department to investigate racial disparities in K-12 schools in areas like discipline, and college practices like legacy admissions that have historically favored white students. Following the court’s decision, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston nonprofit, over such policies. 

“This is important because race-conscious admissions policies were able to provide a counterbalance to factors — such as inequitable K-12 schools, racially biased admissions tests, and developmental and legacy admissions — that have discriminatory impact against students of color,” Scott said in a statement. 

He argued that some Republican leaders have misinterpreted the court’s decision, pointing to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s , for example, that racial preferences in scholarships and employment would violate the law. 

Biden officials did not specifically discuss scholarships Monday, but the document suggests institutions review policies — such as application fees, standardized testing requirements, early decision deadlines and prerequisite courses, like calculus — that could prevent Black, Hispanic and low-income students from applying to a selective institution.

Universities can still collect race and ethnicity data to plan which geographic areas to target for recruitment, for example, or where to participate in college fairs, the Biden administration said, so long as the resulting information doesn’t influence admissions decisions

Universities don’t have to “unsee” the racial makeup of their applicants, a senior department official said on the call. Students may continue to discuss race in their admissions essays, and guidance counselors can discuss a student’s battles with discrimination in a letter of recommendation. 

“Although this decision changes the landscape for admissions and higher education, it should not be used as an excuse to turn away from long-standing efforts to make those institutions more inclusive,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. 

Richard Kahlenberg, a school integration expert who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions and is a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said some higher education institutions have taken the court’s ruling seriously and are pursuing “authentic race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity.” Those “perfectly legal” strategies include increasing financial aid for low-income students and adopting plans like those in that accept a percentage of top students from every high school.

But he said he’s also hearing that some universities are taking the “much riskier route” of basing admissions decisions on what students say about race in their personal essays.

“If universities magically get similar racial numbers without announcing new race-neutral alternatives or showing an increase in socioeconomic diversity,” he said, “I think they’re putting a litigation target on their backs.”

One likely effect is obvious. “There is going to be some closing of doors,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “It’s going to be a landscape in which it’s harder to secure access in most competitive schools.” 

But further down the line, a ruling against schools that factor race in admissions could affect a host of other academic mainstays, from scholarships to the centrality of tests like the SAT and ACT.

The ruling might not end diversity efforts outright. Granting preferential admission to low-income students, children of single parents or those from communities where students often don’t go to college could achieve similar results, experts say, without courting legal trouble. 

“ don’t want race used in admissions, but Americans do want selective institutions to be racially diverse,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and an expert on integration. He thinks the court’s decision could reflect that paradox. “They don’t want to be seen as simply dismissive of the aspiration of racial diversity.”

The court is expected to issue decisions in two lawsuits — brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — later this month. The plaintiff in both cases argues that the weight universities place on race in admissions violates anti-discrimination laws and puts Asian American students at a disadvantage. 

‘Next generation’

While the cases don’t deal directly with K-12 schools, the high court’s decision could elevate the importance of a recent lower court ruling rejecting a legal challenge to diversity efforts at an elite Virginia high school. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., removed a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats at the school for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case, called the revised admissions criteria discriminatory against Asian American students. 

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that view. “The policy challenged here is not just race-neutral: It is race blind,” Fourth Circuit of Appeals Judge Toby Heytens wrote in the

The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said board members’ desire to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students at the school motivated the new policy. They plan to ask the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit. 

Kahlenberg, who testified on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions about race-neutral alternatives, called the TJ case a “next generation issue.”

If the Supreme Court rules that universities can no longer ask applicants to identify their race, they might see the Fairfax case as a chance to “spell out in further detail the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable,” he said. “I think the answer will be that the TJ program is perfectly fine.” 

‘Formative experiences’

The college admissions industry, meanwhile, has been preparing for the end of affirmative action for months. Beginning in August, for example, colleges can hide a student’s race if it’s included in the , a uniform application for undergraduate admissions accepted at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide.  

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Counselors earlier this year to review all of their policies and practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to examine any area, such as mission statements and recruitment efforts, where race is a factor — “no matter how minor” — to determine if changes are needed.

Organizations that focus on high school graduation and college enrollment say they plan to continue to identify students who would be the first in their families to attend college, regardless of race. 

“In some ways for us, it will be business as usual — to serve underserved students. That’s been really the heart of our work long before this became a hot-button issue,” said Pam Johnson Davis, director of fellow support for OneGoal, a nonprofit that works in eight states to increase graduation and college enrollment rates. Eighty-six percent of the students served by the organization are Black or Hispanic. She supports 400 “fellows” in the Chicago area who are already in college or another postsecondary program.

If students are barred from bringing up their race even in their admissions essays — a hypothetical scenario that came up during Supreme Court — teachers at OneGoal schools would still encourage students to write about barriers they overcame to pursue education, Davis said.

Facing discrimination, raising younger siblings, translating for parents who don’t speak English — “these are really formative experiences in students’ lives,” she said. “Their stories will be shaped by their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Stephen Barker, a spokesman for the organization, added that opportunities for Black and Hispanic high school students to earn college credit could become more important for colleges and universities if the court strikes down affirmative action in admissions. 

“Institutions need to double down on those partnerships [with districts] if they want to keep that diversity going in a race-neutral way,” he said.

But he said it’s hard to predict what importance universities might place on other aspects of a student’s application, including GPAs, honors classes, and SAT and Advanced Placement exam scores if race no longer factors into the equation.

The potential end of affirmative action in admissions a growing movement away from requiring the SAT or ACT for admission, with some researchers and advocates for educational equity arguing the tests are biased against Black and Hispanic students and . According to FairTest, an advocacy group, are now test-optional or don’t even accept the exams.

But others say that criticism of the tests is misguided and that they still serve as a good predictor of how well students will perform in college. Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, said are “deeply vetted” to remove content that might disadvantage minority students. GPAs, he added, are less controversial, but large remain.

He doesn’t think the test-optional trend is only about removing barriers for Black and Hispanic applicants. Admissions officers may have other motivations, he said.

“Either [universities]think that the exams aren’t so important or … they, for financial reasons, desire an excuse for admitting more affluent students with less academic preparation,” he said.

With or without admissions exams, the end of race-conscious admissions would put more pressure on K-12 counselors serving Black and Hispanic students, Kahlenberg said.

“For years, the [private] prep school kids have had the upper hand. There are fewer students per counselor and they can put time into writing impressive letters [of recommendation],” he said. “Here’s an opportunity for public school counselors to paint a picture of students who have done remarkably well despite the barriers.”

The revelations came from the latest release of the , an ongoing data collection effort led by the National Center for Education Statistics. And while the results don’t include data on the number or rate of behavioral problems observed by school staff, they illustrate the methods that educators are embracing to address those problems and their sense of their own effectiveness. 

Especially during a period when many teachers say they are dealing with more violence and disorder among their pupils than in the pre-COVID era — of a Virginia teacher by her six-year-old student stands out as the latest and most extreme example — the findings will likely influence discussions on school discipline at local, state, and federal levels. 

Thurston Domina, a professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina, said that he believed that behavioral struggles have “become more acute in the last few years” both as kids have returned to full-time, in-person instruction and as schools have come to grapple with the effects of controversial disciplinary strategies like student suspensions.

“These data suggest two things: First, that schools are facing substantial behavioral challenges, and second, that they don’t feel confident about the strategies they have to address them,” Domina wrote in an email.

The School Pulse Panel solicits survey responses from school officials (primarily principals) around the country, periodically circulating findings to paint a picture of COVID’s impact on K–12 schools. Thursday’s update presented responses gathered from over 1,000 public schools last November, each relating to school safety, attitudes toward security personnel, and the post-COVID classroom environment. 

Those school responses are of particular interest in that they can be directly compared with answers to similar questions from another authoritative NCES report from before the pandemic: the , which also quizzed school leaders on the disciplinary climate of their institutions and the strategies they employed to improve it. 

Notably, 50 percent or more of all respondents to the panel survey said that they were limited in either major or minor ways by a wide array of hindrances. Nearly three-quarters of participants said they were constrained by a lack of “alternative placements or programs” for disruptive students, while majorities said the same of inadequate funding (61 percent), lack of parental support (60 percent), insufficient teacher training in classroom management (60 percent), and likelihood of complaints from parents (50 percent).

Less numerous, but perhaps more disturbing, were the minorities who said they were held back by lack of support from teachers themselves (40 percent), or by teachers’ own fears of retaliation from students (32 percent). 

In most cases, these factors were cited significantly more than they were in the report from five years ago. For example, while just 6 percent and 33 percent of 2017–18 respondents said that they were limited (in either a major or minor way) by lack of teacher training in classroom management, 12 percent and 48 percent said the same thing last November. 

The apparent desire for increased training stands out particularly given that it was one of the only behavioral and safety strategies listed in the survey that is not offered more frequently by schools than it was five years ago. By contrast, significantly higher percentages of schools now report engaging in “positive behavioral intervention strategies” (93 percent), crisis intervention (84 percent), recognizing self-harm or suicidal tendencies (84 percent), and recognizing bullying (84 percent). 

In a development that reflects the national and local efforts to reduce the use of what some detractors call “exclusionary” disciplinary policies, a significantly lower percentage of schools reported using out-of-school suspensions than did in 2017–18 (69 percent versus 74 percent). The widespread move to curtail the practice has come as federal authorities, including Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, have explicitly urged schools to keep kids in class as much as possible.

Matthew Steinberg, a professor of education at George Mason University who has conducted on the effects of school discipline reforms, noted that Thursday’s release didn’t clearly show that behavioral conditions were deteriorating inside American schools. Still, he added, the documented decrease in exclusionary discipline and the lack of new guidance suggests that schools aren’t “providing the necessary supports for teachers and educators to address student behavioral issues in the classroom.”

“The question is whether or not student behavior and misconduct have gotten worse in the wake of COVID, independent of whether suspension is used as a disciplinary consequence,” Steinberg said. A reduction in suspensions might result in the presence of more students exhibiting COVID-related behavioral problems, he added — which might, in turn, “adversely affect the environment within classrooms, with potentially important implications for student learning.” 

If the tenor of the sometimes pointed exchanges are any indication, the outcome may hinge on how long universities expect to employ race-conscious admissions before such practices are no longer needed.

In arguments that lasted close to five hours, the court heard a pair of high-profile cases brought by a pro-Asian organization against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

During the UNC case, which was heard first, attorneys representing the university argued that students are not admitted based on checking a racial box; rather, they look “holistically” at multiple factors, said Ryan Park, solicitor general of North Carolina, who insisted that race plays a “minimal” role in UNC’s decisions. 

“If it’s irrelevant, then you shouldn’t care whether it’s ruled out,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was only on the bench for the UNC arguments, repeatedly homed in on the notion that the universities only employed race as one criteria among many. 

“The university is not requiring anybody to give their race. When you give your race, you’re not getting any special points. It’s being treated just on par with other factors in the system,” Jackson said. “No one’s automatically getting in.”

At a time when racial issues are at the forefront of educational debates and school politics, the historic cases reflect how polarizing attempts to address past discrimination have become. The court’s lengthy gauntlet Monday is also an indication of the far-reaching implications of its decisions in the two cases, which are expected in June.

Advocates for affirmative action argue it’s important for colleges and universities to consider race as one factor in their efforts to create a diverse student body, especially since K-12 schools for Black and Hispanic students. But the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions — with strong backing from Republicans and conservative organizations — say such policies are a form of illegal racial discrimination that put Asian students at a disadvantage. 

The student group wants the court to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 ruling that upheld race-based admissions at the University of Michigan Law School. They argue that allowing such policies to continue violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to any institution receiving federal funds, and the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which applies to UNC as a public university. 

“Grutter assumed that race would only be a plus. But race is a minus for Asians, a group that continues to face immense racial discrimination in this country,” said Cam Norris, representing the group in its lawsuit against Harvard. Asian students, he said, “should be getting into Harvard more than whites, but they don’t because Harvard gives them significantly lower personal ratings.”

He said that Harvard is not socioeconomically diverse and that removing race-conscious admissions would actually increase opportunities for Black students. But Seth Waxman, representing Harvard, disagreed with Norris’s statement that 80% of students at the university come from wealthier families. The university, he said, has increased financial aid as a way to reduce its reliance on racial preferences. 

In the Harvard arguments, the conservative justices focused on a preliminary “personal rating” the university’s 40 admissions counselors apply to applicants as a form of “triage” to help sift through over 60,000 applications for just 1,600 spots at the elite university. Waxman showed the justices a chart that he said proves the role of race was so small, it was almost zero.

“So there is only a little racial discrimination,” Chief Justice John Roberts quipped.

In the Grutter decision, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested that 25 years in the future — 2028 — the use of racial preferences would no longer be necessary. The conservative justices repeatedly pressed the Harvard and UNC attorneys to give an “endpoint.” 

Representing the Biden administration, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the “arc of progress” has been slower than O’Connor envisioned and that universities should be diligent in using alternatives to race in their admission decisions.

Reacting to Monday’s arguments, Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, called the responses to the justices’ questions on this issue disappointing.

The lack of an endpoint “will allow the conservatives to say that schools have no intention of ever ending it, in violation of Grutter,” he said.

Both Waxman for Harvard and Park for UNC said that race-neutral alternatives have been insufficient in creating a diverse student body. Removing the option to consider race would reduce the percentage of Black students admitted to Harvard from 14% to 10%, Waxman said.

The justices — even conservatives Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett — raised the possibility of using race only in the context of a student’s life experiences.

“What if an applicant wrote an essay about how integral their racial identity was to them as a source of pride and the cultural attributes of their racial heritage were very important?” Barrett asked. “Would that be OK?”

But Thomas expressed some skepticism that diversity offered a value in and of itself. “I’ve heard the word diversity quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means,” he said.

‘The bigger question’

This line of questioning suggests the court might not be as quick to end all racial preferences in admissions as many assumed, said Art Coleman, managing partner of EducationCounsel, a consulting firm.

“There is a majority of the court that is uncomfortable at some level with the notion of the consideration of race in admissions,” he said. “But I think the bigger question is what they do about that.”

While some observers have questioned whether the court would ultimately end even race-neutral, voluntary integration programs in K-12, Coleman said he doesn’t see the justices leaning that way. Instead, the legal question for the court is whether a student gets some “material benefit,” like admission or a scholarship, because of their race. That, he said, could have implications for “college counselors who are guiding students to and through the admissions process.” 

The liberal justices pushed attorneys for the plaintiffs to explain whether eliminating racial preferences in college admissions would result in a lack of racial diversity across society as a whole. Prelogar, representing the U.S. government, said during the UNC hearing that it is “critically important” to have diversity in the military, and then added during the Harvard arguments that removing race-conscious measures would have “destabilizing ramifications in just about every important industry in America.”

The two hearings offered a history lesson on the nation’s unfinished work to redress its racist past. Speaking on behalf of UNC, David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said Black students can be discouraged from applying to the university when they see Confederate statues on campus or witness demonstrations by white supremacy groups. 

The plaintiffs argued that the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ending desegregation in K-12, should have applied to race-conscious admissions in college. That prompted a strong response from Prelogar.

“There is a world of difference between the situation this court confronted in Brown, the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that was designed to exclude African Americans based on notions of racial inferiority,” she said. The court recognized, she said, that such discrimination affected children’s “hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

While it is focused on higher education, the court’s ruling in those cases is bound to filter down to K-12 schools.

“Despite the best efforts of school districts … to create more diverse schools, racial segregation has increased over the last two decades. As a result, educational inequities persist,” according to filed by the Council of the Great City Schools in defense of admissions policies at Harvard University and the University North Carolina.

At least 18 million students attend K-12 schools where more than three-quarters of the enrollment is of a single race, a recent report showed, and 14% of students attend schools where at least 9 out 10 of students are of the same race.

Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiffs in the case, are challenging admissions criteria at those universities they claim discriminate against Asian students. Admissions, they say, should be based on merit.

They want the court to overturn a in Grutter v. Bollinger that upheld race-based admissions at the University of MIchigan Law School. In that ruling, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor foresaw a nation in which “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The Biden administration, , and advocates for Black and Hispanic students argue that affirmative action is even more essential today because schools are still segregated and the promise of integration under Brown v. Board of Education “remains unfulfilled.”

Supporters of affirmative action expect the court’s six conservative justices to side with the plaintiffs. While this will be the first time Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hears an education case, she’s one of just three liberal justices. And she’ll only sit on the bench for the UNC arguments, having recused herself from the Harvard case because she served on the school’s Board of Overseers until this past June. 

“I think it is highly likely that the court takes a position that disallows the use of race whatsoever in higher education admissions,” said Stefan Lallinger, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Such a ruling, he said, could put “a final nail in the coffin of efforts by colleges and universities around the country to directly ensure that all of their students benefit from a racially diverse student body.”

Most experts see two routes for the court to take in this case. First, it could follow the precedent set for K-12 schools in a 2007 case against Seattle Public Schools and the Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky. 

In , the court ruled that school districts couldn’t explicitly use race in their efforts to create more diverse schools. But separately, former Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that districts still had a “compelling interest” to pursue racial integration. Since then, districts have moved toward based on family income. 

Noting the court’s recent decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, many predict that the six conservative justices won’t be bound by precedent. 

“It should be noted that the only reason the court salvaged any use of race in the [Parents Involved] case was the moderation of Justice Anthony Kennedy,” Lallinger said. 

That’s why he thinks it’s possible the court could take a second approach and rule as unconstitutional all race-conscious efforts to achieve diversity.

“The current court does not have an Anthony Kennedy,” Lallinger said. 

‘Pressure to discriminate’

In the wake of the Parents United opinion, many conservatives continue to hold that some of the admissions policies K-12 schools use for competitive schools are discriminatory.

In the Fairfax County, Virginia, schools, for example, the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation is representing plaintiffs who sued the district over changes to acceptance criteria at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The district dropped a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Board members expressed hope that the changes would increase representation of Black and Hispanic students at the school, which the plaintiffs argued was illegal “racial balancing.”

“We’re all entitled to each be judged on our own individual characteristics, not on the basis of our membership in a group,” said Wen Fa, a senior attorney at the law firm, which is also challenging similar admission policies in New York City, Boston and Montgomery County, Maryland.

In supporting Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit Parents Defending Education wrote that the 2003 decision in Grutter v Bollinger has “spawned increasing racial discrimination” that has spread to the K-12 system.

“As long as Grutter remains the law, K-12 schools will face an inexorable pressure to discriminate based on skin color,” the brief said.

But even those challenging the university policies point to integration efforts based on family income as the direction for higher education, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher who wrote on the issue. He served as an for the plaintiffs when the case was in a lower court, and he doesn’t think the justices have hinted that they would rule out all efforts to achieve diversity.

“Not a single Supreme Court justice has indicated that they entertain that extreme position,” he said. 

He pointed to Clarence Thomas’s in 1991, in which the justice defended programs that give preference to students who overcome obstacles. 

“The kids could come from any background of disadvantage,” Thomas said. “The kid could be a white kid from Appalachia, could be a Cajun from Louisiana, or could be a Black kid or Hispanic kid from the inner cities or from the barrios, but I defended that sort of a program then and I would defend it today.”

But the court has grown far more conservative since Thomas joined. Most experts don’t expect different outcomes from the two cases, but note that Jackson is likely to raise questions in the UNC case that might not surface in the Harvard hearing.

There’s one clear difference between the two. Harvard is a private university and therefore subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to any institution receiving federal funds. But UNC is a public university and is guided by the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

Kahlenberg said that by taking both cases, the court can issue rulings based on both laws. 

Impact on recruiting

Education advocates in North Carolina are already assessing the possible impact if the court ends affirmative action. Black and Hispanic students in the state may have fewer opportunities to attend the flagship university, according to researchers at the Hunt Institute, an education think tank.   

Just look at California, where voters banned affirmative action in 1996, wrote Madeline Smith and Erica Vevurka, directors of higher education and K-12, respectively, at the institute.

“The ban [on] affirmative action made it more difficult for the state’s public institutions of higher education to explicitly recruit students of color,” they wrote. “It also restricted the access that students of color had to information around financial aid options.”

After 1996, the enrollment of freshman from underrepresented minority groups dropped by at least 50%, according to that the University of California submitted to the Supreme Court in support of Harvard and UNC. 

Even though the state has implemented diversity efforts targeting low-income families and first-generation college students, the university system “struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity,” the brief says. 

Beyond college admissions, some experts say the case has implications for efforts to create a more diverse teacher workforce, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

A ruling for the plaintiffs could “derail the progress” made in grow-your-own programs and teacher residencies that target Black and Hispanic college students, said Jerell Hill, dean of the School of Human Development and Education at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. 

The college participates in an that targets universities serving large numbers of minority students. “It is difficult to measure a court decision that could delay social, economic and educational opportunities for decades,” he said.

Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West said if the court rules for the plaintiffs, there are still strategies to increase diversity in teaching. They include building strong teacher education programs at historically Black colleges and universities and expanding affordable housing for teachers.

“To have diverse professions like teaching, you’ve got to have a pipeline of folks who are coming out of undergrad who are also diverse,” he said. “We know diverse teachers are good for all students.”

, part of a series of studies conducted in the wake of high-profile litigation against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, shows that Hispanic and African American applicants to both colleges enjoy substantial advantages relative to whites and Asian Americans. Their chances of acceptance are drastically higher than they would be in the absence of affirmative action, but with a somewhat counterintuitive addendum: preferential treatment is relatively weaker for minority applicants from poor and working-class backgrounds than it is for their peers from more affluent families.

Those findings, and those of the preceding papers, are built on data that was made publicly available during the discovery phase of two lawsuits — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — that were before the court. Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and the studies’ lead author, has provided expert testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim that the storied institutions have systematically discriminated against Asian applicants. In an interview with The 74, he said he hoped his work would help clarify the public debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

“So much of the debate about affirmative action is happening in this binary where you’re either for it or against it,” Arcidiacono observed. “But there’s a large range of possibilities, from just [using] race as a tiebreaker to fully equal outcomes. So in order to get a sense for whether affirmative action has gone too far or has not gone far enough, you have to understand the role that race plays currently, and you can’t do that without the data.”

Those questions are becoming more concrete by the month. in the case, which will be heard in the 2022-23 term. With plaintiffs asking the nation’s highest court to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in the college application process, and Republicans in Congress that would force colleges to publicize their use of non-academic characteristics in admissions, the stage is being set for a major rollback of affirmative action as it has been practiced for half a century. According to Arcidiacono’s latest study, a significant reversal could shrink the percentage of African American students admitted to Harvard by more than two-thirds.

Georgetown economist Harry Holzer finds those projections plausible. A proponent of race-based affirmative action, he signed (alongside multiple Nobel laureates) defending Harvard’s policies that was filed in a lower-court iteration of the suit. Arcidiacono’s line of research “makes reasonable points,” Holzer said, while arguing that it does not invalidate the use of racial considerations by admissions officers. 

“It doesn’t change my support for affirmative action to see his numbers, though I certainly don’t disagree with the research findings. It shows that when very elite schools practice affirmative action in admissions, which they do, it does effectively raise the admission rate for people of color — especially African Americans — by a lot.” 

Race & class

Arcidiacono and his coauthors dug into admissions records for over 300,000 domestic applicants to the admissions classes of 2014–2019, of which roughly 142,000 applied to Harvard, 57,000 applied to UNC as in-state candidates, and 105,000 applied to the same college from out of state. Applicant-level information included demographic attributes such as race and socioeconomic status, as well as richly detailed academic records covering high school grades, standardized test scores, and individual ratings from admissions officers across a range of academic and non-academic indicators. 

Combining high school GPA, SAT scores, and scores on SAT II subject tests, the research team created academic ratings for each applicant and ranked them by decile (a statistical measurement dividing data into 10 equal parts). The lowest-performing students were grouped into the bottom 10 percent and the strongest performers grouped into the top 10 percent. Most African Americans fell into the bottom 20 percent of all applicants to both Harvard and UNC, but they were admitted at the highest rate for almost every performance decile, followed by Hispanic, white, and Asian applicants.

The acceptance gaps between categories are largest around the middle of the spectrum for academic qualifications, with African Americans applying to Harvard being accepted at a rate double that of Hispanics — and 12 times greater than Asian Americans — at the fifth decile (i.e., between the 41st and 50th percentile of qualifications). For out-of-state applicants to UNC, African Americans at the fifth decile were almost 33 times more likely to be accepted than Asian Americans and 14 times more likely than whites. 

Overall, Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood that an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. For out-of-state applicants to UNC, the force of racial preferences multiplied African Americans from 1.5 percent of admitted students to 15.6 percent, a tenfold increase. Black applicants applying in-state to Chapel Hill gained a smaller advantage from affirmative action, becoming 70 percent likelier to win admission.

Beyond these general calculations, the authors noticed a peculiar interaction between race and class. While white applicants from lower-income families appear to receive an advantage in admissions relative to wealthier whites with similar academic profiles, disadvantaged African Americans and Hispanics do not. Affluent applicants of color therefore receive a comparatively larger boost over affluent white applicants than poor and working-class students of color enjoy over poor and working-class whites. 

Holzer said the substantive arguments in favor of affirmative action — particularly the educational value of maintaining a racially diverse campus — “don’t require that the specific recipient face bias or barriers in the past.” Still, he asserted that low-income students of color deserve “extra credit” not only for their race but also their class background.

“If the bump for just being African American is really large, you could imagine that maybe [admissions officers] think, ‘We’re already taking care of that problem,’” Holzer said. “But for someone like me, who thinks that class really matters a lot, you want to make sure that lower-income students of color get consideration.”

Arcidiacono argued that the large edge claimed by some wealthy students, even if they come from historically excluded groups, risks eroding public faith in the fairness of admissions altogether. Disillusionment already exists not only due to long-running patterns of underrepresentation, he added, but also newer blots such as the Varsity Blues scandal, which saw moneyed parents conniving with college employees and private admissions counselors to game the system.

“This is in the context of a system that completely favors people who come from richer backgrounds,” Arcidiacono said, listing the factors already favoring upper-class applicants: ready access to college counselors, special weight placed on extracurricular activities, and recruitment for sports like sailing and golf.

“To me, one of the arguments for affirmative action would be that you’re trying to build trust in the system for a group that has been traditionally disenfranchised. But the way you do that matters, and it’s not really hitting the poorer African Americans — they’re not the ones benefiting the most.” 

The ‘narrowly tailored’ standard

The Supreme Court will consider Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard this fall, eight years after it was first filed in federal district court. When a decision is finally reached, the case could fundamentally alter the practice of affirmative action in college admissions and, with it, the racial composition of some of the country’s most prestigious schools.

Existing Court precedent was set in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case, in which a plaintiff alleged that preference systems at public graduate schools — in that instance, the University of Michigan Law School — illegally disadvantaged white students on racial grounds. A majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor found instead that “the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions” was constitutionally permissible, while adding that the issue would be ripe for reexamination within 25 years. That deadline has nearly elapsed, and the Harvard litigants seek to reopen the question of whether affirmative action has been “narrowly tailored” to begin with.

The case, along with the corresponding UNC suit, centers on the accusation by a group of Asian American students that Harvard’s policies unfairly disfavored them relative to applicants from every other racial group. Although the admissions candidates with the highest GPAs and test scores are disproportionately Asian American — showed that about one-quarter of Asian high school graduates scored above a 1400 on the SAT, compared with 8 percent of whites, 2 percent of Hispanics, and 1 percent of African Americans — they were consistently graded lower according to Harvard’s personality scores. A released by Arcidiacono and his colleagues suggested that, absent the subjective penalty that Asian applicants face, they would be admitted at a rate 19 percent higher than currently prevails.

The findings instantiated a theory that first gained widespread attention a decade ago, when one right-wing commentator that Asian Americans were tacitly being held back by admissions quotas lest they grow to dominate Ivy League campuses. Although Asian high schoolers were routinely among the top-performing students in the United States, their numeric presence on elite campuses peaked around 1990 and remained roughly the same over the next 20 years.

Trends in Asian American college enrollment were the focus of by the Manhattan Institute. Author Robert VerBruggen, a journalist and fellow at the conservative think tank, noted that the unmistakable stagnation in representation — which occurred even as Asians were continually growing as a percentage of all college aspirants — began to lift about about a decade ago. Whether that was connected to the growing focus on apparent discrimination is unclear.

“It’s an interesting question why that’s happened, but it’s certainly consistent with the narrative that everybody started making a stink about it, lawsuits were filed, and schools got a lot more careful about what they were doing,” Verbruggen said.

The release of the schools’ data allowed researchers to investigate trends in admissions beyond purported anti-Asian bias. In a widely covered , Arcidiacono and his co-authors calculated that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard between 2014 and 2019 were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of university faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (i.e., relatives of potential high-dollar donors). Another postulated that the school, which has its efforts to diversify, may African American students who stand virtually no chance of gaining admission. 

“In some sense, there’s this uneasy compromise that works to the detriment of Asian Americans and poor whites,” Arcidiacono said. “You’ve got the racial preferences helping underrepresented minorities get into certain colleges, and you’ve got the legacy and athlete preferences helping rich, disproportionately white kids get into college.”

A Supreme Court ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could leave that system profoundly changed, upsetting the demographic mix that elite schools have worked hard to cultivate. By Arcidiacono’s accounting, the proportion of African Americans admitted to Harvard over the period he studied would have been less than 1 percent if acceptance was offered on the basis of academic qualifications alone; those admitted to UNC in-state or out-of-state would sink to 4.3 percent and less than 2 percent, respectively. At the same time, the percentage of Asian Americans would have risen substantially — to over 50 percent of all admitted students, in Harvard’s case.

While oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t come for months, the recently announced recusal of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a promising sign for the plaintiffs. With the departure of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has lost two members who had previously ruled in favor of race-based affirmative action in postsecondary education.

Whatever the legal outcome, VerBruggen said that Arcidiacono’s work offered considerable value simply by shining a light on the internal admissions processes in two highly competitive universities.

“Schools are so tight-lipped about their affirmative action policies that we don’t have a lot of data on them,” he remarked. “If you want to know what’s going on in a school, you basically have to sue them.”

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. With a vote of 53 to 47, Jackson picked up support from three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah.

According to the White House, Jackson, who will be the first Black woman on the court, watched the vote with President Joe Biden. 

Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, said Wednesday that if confirmed, she would recuse herself from an upcoming case focusing on race-conscious college admissions involving Harvard University. 

Jackson is currently on the Harvard Board of Overseers. Her term runs through June.

“Your and my alma mater, Harvard, is currently being sued for its explicitly and, in my view, egregious policy of discriminating against Asian Americans,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said during Jackson’s second full day of hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If you’re confirmed, do you intend to recuse from this lawsuit?”  

Jackson responded, “That is my plan, senator.”

The , which combines challenges to race-based admissions decisions at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is considered the most significant case involving both race and education in several years. The plaintiffs argue that the admission policies discriminate against Asian applicants. The debate is taking place in K-12 as well with a recent federal judge’s against the Fairfax County Public Schools regarding its so-called “racial balancing” practice at a selective science and technology school. Observers speculate that the court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, would of the plaintiffs. But if Jackson is confirmed, which appears likely, her recusal would create the potential for a 4-4 tie. 

If that’s the case, the “lower court decision would remain intact,” explained Cedric Powell, law professor at the University of Louisville. That means both Harvard and the University of North Carolina could keep in place their current practices of considering underrepresented groups when making admissions decisions. 

Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in both cases, said in response to Jackson’s statement that, “as a litigant, it would be improper for us to comment.”

The case, which is scheduled to be heard in the court’s next term, starting in October, would typically be scheduled for one hour of oral argument. the court could allot one hour for each petition, in which case Jackson could participate in the case against the University of North Carolina. 

Even as a young girl, the shadow of a dark history hung over Orlice Hodges. At seven years old, she remembers her grandmother offering an explanation — chilling in retrospect — of what happened to young women taken away by social workers: they went to Black Mountain to get “fixed.”

“I used to always wonder, what do they mean by ‘fixed?’” the North Carolina native told The 74.

Only as she got older did the awful meaning become clear. “Fixed meant sterilization,” she understood. “They were sterilized.”

Her own aunt, according to what Hodges was told by family members, was one of the 7,600 people sterilized, or medically robbed of the ability to have children, by North Carolina between 1929 and 1974 under the state’s eugenic sterilization law. As a young, Black woman growing up in Winston-Salem in the 1960s and ‘70s, she could not help but know about the program, which sought to “” disabled and so-called “feebleminded” individuals. By the time of her childhood, the effort had become distinctly racial, with more poor Black women forcibly sterilized than any other group.

Countless others, when Hodges was a girl and up until today, remain unaware.

“Why was that never mentioned?” wondered Skylar Sharkey, a rising senior at Middle Creek High School in Apex, North Carolina, upon learning about her state’s history of eugenics for the first time as a high school junior. Thanks to a scheduling glitch this past spring, she landed — by what she now sees as a fortunate accident — in an elective course that covered some of the grimmer moments in her state’s history. It included information she had never had the slightest inkling of.

, she learned, but North Carolina carried out the third-highest number of sterilizations in the nation, after California and Virginia. While most states pulled back from their programs after the atrocities of Nazi Germany laid bare the ethical flaws of eugenics theory, North Carolina accelerated its campaign, conducting . More than , the youngest being a 10-year-old boy, and procedures often occurred against the will of victims and their parents.

In the latter years of the campaign, 60 percent of those sterilized were Black and 99 percent were female, leading a recent Duke University study to conclude that the state worked to through its eugenics program during the late 1950s and ’60s.

That North Carolina’s K-12 schools have almost without exception ignored the state’s past practice of forced sterilization offers a compelling example of the suppression of racially motivated, government-inflicted harm long before the nation began debating critical race theory or states started .

“It really kind of upset me when I found out about it, because I was like, ‘This is something that is such a major part of not only North Carolina history, but U.S. history, and it’s just something that had never been mentioned to me,’” Sharkey told The 74. “Some of these things were so close to home.”

None of her friends had any idea of their state’s history of eugenics, either. She would tell peers about what she was learning, only to receive shocked and horrified reactions. Even her mother’s parents, who lived in North Carolina while the program was active, were unaware.

“[It] left me feeling a little bit like I was being rigged of some information,” said Sharkey. “Like it was being hidden.”

Intentionally or not, North Carolina has largely failed to deliver on efforts to use public education as a tool to reckon with its history of eugenics, despite a nearly two-decades old from a committee convened by former Gov. Michael Easley that called on the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to “include information about the eugenics program in its curriculum on North Carolina history.”

Deanna Townsend-Smith, director of policy and operations for the state Board of Education, told The 74 that she was not aware of the board ever having heard or considered the task force’s recommendation. In an email to The 74, John B. Buxton, senior education advisor to former Gov. Easley, explained that because there was never a legislative requirement for the board to act, “that likely undercut the momentum for including content in the curriculum guidance documents.”

With the benefit of hindsight, June Atkinson, who served as state superintendent from 2005 to 2017, acknowledged that the Department of Public Instruction did not do enough to move the ball forward on teaching the state’s history of eugenics during her tenure.

“I believe we could have done some more about helping teachers incorporate eugenics as part of their curriculum by having more curriculum guides or more resources for them,” she told The 74.

While the current state history standards do mention the word “eugenics,” the reference is to the wider American eugenics movement rather than North Carolina’s program — and even that serves as an optional, non-mandatory example. The state’s U.S. history standards were recently given an conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

The 74 reached out to the state’s 10 largest school districts and none indicated that they include their state’s eugenics program in their social studies curricula. One district, Cabarrus County Public Schools, told The 74 that a single school has an elective course that covers the topic. Its unit on eugenics is called “.” Another district, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Public Schools, said that they provide on the topic that teachers may use in class. No other districts said that their schools directly reference the state’s eugenics program in curricular materials.

Basically, “there’s nothing stopping a teacher [from covering the North Carolina eugenics program] … but there’s also nothing requiring it,” Wake County Public Schools Communications Director Lisa Luten explained to The 74.

That’s in contrast with states like Virginia, where specifics on the state’s eugenics program are considered “essential knowledge” in statewide standards, according to information provided by the Virginia Department of Education. Or Oregon, where the Department of Education told The 74 that will include the state’s history of eugenics as an example within a content area that examines structural disadvantages against people with disabilities.

It appears unlikely that North Carolina students will be learning anytime soon about the same disturbing history that, as Sharkey put it, was “going on in my own backyard.” That’s because conservatives across the country are taking aim are restricting “” topics in the classroom through state-level bans on critical race theory, a previously arcane academic topic, and North Carolina’s state Superintendent Catherine Truitt last month forced a sudden revision to a years-long update of the state’s social studies curriculum over concerns that the new version .

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‘An ugly, dark side of our history that needs to be shared’

By other measures, however, North Carolina was a nationwide leader in reckoning with its eugenics past. When a brought to light details of the state’s sterilization program that had previously been hidden in sealed records, the state took swift action. Then-Gov. Easley issued an apology and convened a committee tasked with leading the state’s reparations and healing process.

After more than a decade of persistent advocacy from late state Rep. Larry Womble, and with help from Republican ally Thom Tillis, who became the state’s speaker of the house in 2011, North Carolina in 2014 became the as financial compensation for the injustices they endured. That action paved the way for and to do the same in 2015 and July 2021, respectively.

In its response, the state also called for the creation of an exhibit “to ensure that no one will forget what the State of North Carolina once perpetrated upon its own citizens.” That task fell to Hodges, who heard stories as a child of her late aunt being among those victimized citizens and who was working at the state’s Office for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the time.

When the display was completed, visitors could inspect not only timelines and maps documenting the history, she said, but also copies of official records and the actual medical instruments that doctors used to perform sterilizations. One wall showed pictures of victims along with headsets. “You could pick up a headphone, and listen to the actual survivors in their voice,” recalled Hodges.

Yet after being created in 2007 and traveling to a handful of colleges and universities in the state, the exhibit was soon taken out of commission due to lack of funds in 2009, Hodges said. In 2011, it was put into storage in a vault operated by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, where the department’s public information officer Michele Walker confirmed it is kept to this day. Audio elements of the exhibit are out of date, and the information included is not updated with the state’s compensation of victims, according to State Archivist Sarah Koonts. Certain loaned artifacts were also returned, she said.

Hodges never understood why the exhibit — created to make sure North Carolinians never forgot and then itself forgotten — was stored away rather than updated.

“It’s just sitting in a basement,” she said. “It’s a waste. Because it’s such an ugly, dark side of our history that needs to be shared.”

A ‘complex subject’

Despite North Carolina’s trailblazing campaign to compensate some of the victims of its eugenics program, Charmaine Fuller Cooper, who led the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation through 2012, worries that the lack of public education could jeopardize the state’s progress toward reckoning with its past.

“Education is critical to the effort,” she told The 74. “Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that still too many people are not familiar with.”

“To the victims and families of this regrettable episode in North Carolina’s past, I extend my sincere apologies and want to assure them that we will not forget what they have endured.”
—Former Gov. Michael Easley, April 2003

That squares with what Marion Quirici, a lecturing fellow at Duke University, sees in her disability studies classes, where she takes first-years to the library for primary source sessions on eugenics. While rarely discussed in current-day American classrooms, a belief in eugenics shaped U.S. education through much of the early 20th century, particularly in celebrating I.Q. tests as a way to weed out “feeblemindedness,” and .

“Students from North Carolina in particular always express shock at their own state’s especially egregious role in this history,” Quirici told The 74 in an email. “They’ll say, ‘I’m from here; I can’t believe I never learned this!’”

The stakes are high, says Barbara Pullen-Smith, former founding director of the Office for Minority Health and Health Disparities.

“If our young people don’t understand our history, we are certainly doomed to repeat it,” she told The 74.

In a twist of brutal irony, a figure who once propelled forward the effort to compensate North Carolina sterilization victims now stands in the way of students learning about eugenics and other dark moments of our nation’s history.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who as speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives played a key role in passing the 2012 legislation to disburse funds to sterilization survivors, in June co-sponsored the ‘Saving American History Act’ to . The is a Pulitzer Prize-winning effort from the New York Times Magazine that traces how systemic racism and the legacy of slavery impact America today, including Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, recently after the school originally denied her tenure amid a wealthy conservative donor’s that many supporters viewed as racist.

Regarding how eugenics should be taught in the classroom, Sen. Tillis expressed mixed feelings.

“This is a very important, dark chapter in our nation’s history,” he told The 74. “It’s a complex subject that needs to be taught, but it needs to be taught at an age-appropriate level.”

When asked whether the North Carolina eugenics program’s absence in history standards and curricula presented a problem, he turned down the chance to comment.

Acknowledging his own opposition to the 1619 Project, Sen Tillis recommended instead convening a team of “academics and historians [with] some sort of an ideological balance for the preparation of curriculum so that you give these young people facts upon which they can draw their own conclusions.”

Teaching the ‘fractures’ in American democracy

Educator Matthew Scialdone, who taught Sharkley’s ‘Hard History and Civic Engagement’ elective at Middle Creek High School this spring, worries that the momentum — both local and national — against teaching about race could dissuade some educators from tackling difficult topics like eugenic sterilization.

“Given all of the pushback,” said Scialdone, “[eugenics] would probably be one of those topics that a teacher might back away from and say, ‘You know what, is it really worth stirring up whatever community uproar may come from me talking about this topic?’”

That’s unfortunate, says Dimitry Anselme, executive program director of the nonprofit , which creates online resources to help teachers effectively address the darker points of America’s past. There’s much to learn from difficult moments in history, Anselme says.

“For healthy democracies, you have to see the fractures,” he told The 74. “The fractures can teach us … what to seek to avoid and not repeat.”

The fact that eugenics laws were eventually repealed “actually speaks to what’s beautiful about democracy,” said Anselme.

Scialdone emphasizes to fellow educators that there’s more than enough content available on the North Carolina eugenics program to engage students without worries over bias. The key in his classroom? Primary sources, says the 2015-16 Wake County Public Schools Teacher of the Year.

This spring, he presented students with testimony from survivors and medical records from the state archives that documented the paper trail of one young woman’s sterilization procedure.

“This isn’t somebody else’s interpretation that I’m putting in front of you. This is the real thing,” he told his class.

The impression on his students, many of whom were participating over Zoom, was immediate.

“The chat in that class just stayed scrolling,” remembers Scialdone. “There was a lot of OMGs. There was a lot of ‘wait what?’”

The content drew Sharkey and her classmates in. “I was so beyond engaged in this course,” she remembers.

But Scialdone knows that his class is the exception, not the rule. Teachers’ “default mode,” he knows, is to “teach what they were taught and how they were taught,” which means that North Carolina’s history of eugenics is “not really covered,” he said.

That’s a problem, he believes — for students and the state, alike.

“If I’m the only one doing it,” Scialdone said, “then the moment was lost.”

Educators interested in covering the history of North Carolina’s eugenics program may find curricular resources and

Lead Image: Proceedings of the Eugenics Board special meeting May 19, 1958 (Courtesy of Johanna Schoen / Video by The 74’s Meghan Gallagher)