Affirmative Action ends: Athens community weighs in

Hadiza Sarr, a sophomore at the University of Georgia, was scrolling through TikTok last summer when she came across a video that concerned her. Along with many others that she would see, the video detailed the end of affirmative action in college admissions. 

“I was like, ‘This is odd,’ and I started looking more into it. I was really curious to see other people’s reactions to it on social media after I learned the details of the ruling,” Sarr said.

Affirmative action policies use race as a factor in deciding whether an applicant is admitted into a college or university or hired for a job. This approach to college admissions was banned in the United States by two Supreme Court rulings: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, both issued on June 29, 2023.  

Sarr believes that the decision was unfair to minority students. 

“It (affirmative action) was something to help people who are disadvantaged in our society get into college, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Sarr said.

Affirmative action disproportionately benefits Black, Latino and Native American applicants, which proponents say serves as a way to right historical wrongs such as Jim Crow laws and resettlement that the government committed against those groups. Affirmative action advocates argue that historic injustices committed against ethnic minorities have made their communities poorer, so colleges should consider admitting larger numbers of them as a form of restitution. 

“If you look at the history of Black people in this country, this (affirmative action) is the one thing we have and you want to rip it from us,” Sarr said. 

Narrowing the wealth gap between Black, Latino and Native American applicants and white and Asian applicants was a goal of affirmative action. Research from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities shows that attending college is the number one way to increase income potential, with earnings for graduates with a college degree being 84% higher than those with just a high school diploma, on average. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black, Latino and Native American applicants are more likely to be poor than their white and Asian counterparts, and it is less likely that Black, Latino and Native American students have a parent with a college degree. 

“I have friends (at UGA) who came from richer backgrounds, who in high school had SAT tutors and private mentors who helped them with their college applications. It’s like, a Black student at Cedar Shoals could not afford that,” Sarr said.  

In addition to increased representation on campus, colleges that used affirmative action aimed to increase minority representation in the workplace. A 2013 Harvard study found that representation of Black women, Asian women and Latino men in the workplace fell significantly when affirmative action was banned in the state colleges of California, Michigan, Nebraska and Washington in the years before the national ban. 

Senior Jamyria Wise believes that a declining number of minority students being admitted into college will have a detrimental effect on the economic mobility of minority students.

“POC (people of color) who needed affirmative action won’t be graduating college,” Wise said. “So people won’t have a chance to pursue their careers.”

Another reason that affirmative action was utilized is college administrations’ desire to have a diverse student body. In oral arguments before the Supreme Court, defense lawyers for both Harvard and the University of North Carolina argued that diversity was a necessary component of the campus environment, and that keeping affirmative action was the best and easiest way to promote this diversity. 

Campus diversity can have tangible benefits. According to a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, increased campus diversity is shown to improve academic performance among low income students and students of color.  

Cedar Shoals counselor Christina Cotsakis Cordon attended both the University of Georgia and Georgia Southern University. She believes that campus diversity was essential in defining her educational experience. 

“I had classes where I might have been the only white person from a fairly wealthy suburb of Atlanta, and that was helpful to me. It helped me see perspectives that I didn’t get at my high school,” Cotsakis Cordon said.

Cedar Shoals Ethnic Studies teacher Montu Miller believes that the end of affirmative action will harm students of all races, and not just applicants who would have benefited from the practice. 

“I think it will affect not just Black and brown students. I think it also affects the white students because when you have more diversity, you just create more of a real world experience,” Miller said. 

The decision to ban affirmative action comes at a time of marked change for college admissions. Practices like standardized testing have been reexamined, with many colleges no longer requiring students to submit SAT or ACT scores. These and other reforms are aimed at making the college admissions process more equitable. 

Legacy admissions, the practice of giving preference to the children or grandchildren of alumni in admissions, had become a vulnerable target of affirmative action advocates. Proponents argue that the policy unfairly benefits the children of alumni, who are more likely to be white and wealthy. 

“Why do you get a better chance than me because your great, great, great, great grandfather went to Yale?” Sarr said.  

As a high school counselor, Cotsakis Cordon is concerned about the effect that the ruling will have on aspiring matriculants that would have benefited from affirmative action. 

“There’s a fear that some students who think they might have otherwise benefited from race conscious admissions might not apply. There might be a chilling effect,” Cotsakis Cordon said. 

She has encountered another problem as well: student ignorance. No senior that has talked to Cotsakis Cordon about college prospects has brought up the end of affirmative action.  

“I think college admissions in general feel like a mystery to students,” Cotsakis Cordon said. 

There are 3,154 Black students who attend UGA, making them just 7.8% of the student population. White students make up 68%. Being an ethnic minority at a predominantly white institution can be an isolating experience, which Sarr can attest to. 

“I was one Black girl with three Asian students in a group, and they could not trust that I was able to do any task that they gave me. I needed to go get 100 milliliters of water for our experiment, I measured it and then they literally remeasured it in front of me,” Sarr said. “It’s just always having to prove yourself.” 

In 2000, The University System of Georgia (USG), the organization that oversees all Georgia public colleges and universities, lost a lawsuit against 3 white woman who said that USG had discriminated against them by denying them admission. USG declined to appeal the decision which said that they could no longer use affirmative action in college admissions. This effectively ended the practice in Georgia 23 years before most of the nation. 

In order to increase diversity without affirmative action, USG has used some policies aimed to increase the number of minority students. One such policy is Georgia Tech’s process of automatically admitting the top two students of every graduating class in Georgia. This policy and other outreach programs, like the UGA student-run DAZE organization that connects with underrepresented students, can provide a solution for a problem that colleges across the nation suddenly have to address: how to increase minority representation without affirmative action. 

Another possible solution is placing more weight on economic status, and giving poorer applicants a boost in admissions. Colleges have been adverse to this plan, however, most likely because they would shoulder the cost of enrolling low income students by paying for most of their tuition. Another idea proposed by some colleges is an “adversity index” in which students would be given a score – calculated from factors such as economic status and average neighborhood income – based on how difficult their life experience was and that score would be factored into their admissions decision. Whatever universities decide, the onus is on them to make up for the hole left by the loss of affirmative action, according to Cotsakis Cordon. 

“This pushes colleges and universities to start thinking more intentionally about how to get more Black and brown students to want to come to our university, to apply, to feel comfortable here, to know that they have financial support available,” Cotsakis Cordon said. 

Going forward without affirmative action may cause anxiety for students who might have previously benefited from it. Cedar Shoals senior Gustavo Carrillo thinks the ruling adds to the pressure of college admissions.

“College admissions is already stressful but now that it’s less of who you are, you have to stand out against the majority as well as minorities,” Carrillo said.

Cotsakis Cordon offered some reassurance for students who might share this feeling. 

“If you already had a plan to apply to certain universities and to pursue certain programs, do not let this change your college application plan,” Cotsakis Cordon said.