The Supreme Court voted last Tuesday to uphold a Michigan constitutional amendment banning the use of race in college admissions in the case Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. The University’s undergraduate admissions website’s list of admissions criteria does not mention race or ethnicity under “additional factors for admission.”
In the case, the plaintiffs argued the amendment violated equal protection under the law, by barring the state’s minority populations from lobbying for race-conscious admissions. They said other groups, like alumni, routinely receive special treatment, and that it violated equal protection to ban specific types of discrimination, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Schuette v. Coalition is yet another case of the Supreme Court’s procrastination of the broad issue of the legality of race-conscious admission, where the case was resolved without making a determination on affirmative action in general .
The last high-profile Supreme Court case on affirmative action was in 2013, when a University of Texas at Austin admissions policy was called in to question because it had failed to consider significantly race-neutral policies.