In the affirmative-action debate, all eyes are on the Supreme Court, which will soon make two high-stakes rulings on the subject. Meantime, a 2-1 decision from a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel offers a sideshow worth watching.
Demonstrating these facts would trigger the "Strict scrutiny" that applies when the government relies on racial classifications, under which the school would have to prove that the policy was narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest.
Despite TJ's Asian share falling dramatically after the policy change, the court contends that the policy has no disparate impact against Asians because Asian students are still overrepresented at TJ relative to their share of the applicant pool.
The panel's dissenting judge, for example, noted "a resolution [the Board] adopted saying as much, the racial data it requested and considered in the process, the means it selected, and the candor of individual Board members' internal discussions."
As I detail in a forthcoming Manhattan Institute brief, colleges tend to pursue "Race-neutral" policies to achieve racial diversity when they're not allowed to consider race directly.
The key statistical issue in the TJ case-whether it's legal for a school to kneecap an overrepresented racial group so long as the group doesn't become underrepresented-will clearly need to be resolved at the college level, as well.
Taken together, they will lay out the limits both on the explicit use of race and on clever workarounds to engineer racial outcomes by "Race-neutral" means.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/engineering-racial-outcomes
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