Affirmative action Supreme Court decision: New Yahoo News poll sheds light on where Americans stand
Opinions are mixed about race-based criteria for college admissions.
Ahead of a major Supreme Court decision this week on affirmative action policies at American universities, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll found modest support for the use of race and ethnicity in deciding college admissions.
What are the affirmative action cases being decided?
The Supreme Court is set to soon deliver rulings on affirmative action in two separate cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Harvard is a private institution, while UNC is a state school, meaning that the court could rule that race and ethnicity can be taken into account for students applying to one university but not the other. The plaintiff in both cases is the same group, Students for Fair Admissions, or SFFA.
The group argues that Harvard’s admission policy violates Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevents schools that discriminate on the basis of race from receiving federal funding.
In the UNC case, SFFA argues that the school is in violation of both Title IV and the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
It is expected that — in one or both cases — the court may strike down affirmative action policies in favor of a more “color-blind” approach.
What does the poll say?
The survey found 38% support for “affirmative action policies that seek to include more people of a particular gender, race, sexuality, creed or nationality in areas where they are underrepresented, such as education and employment,” along with 35% opposition and 26% who were not sure.
In a February 2022 survey, 38% of respondents to this question favored affirmative action, 30% opposed it and 31% were uncertain.
But the most recent poll — which surveyed 1,626 U.S. adults from June 16 to 20 — also showed 41% support for “‘color blind’ admissions policies” that “would significantly increase the number of Asian students while significantly decreasing the number of Latino and Black students.” Meanwhile, 23% of respondents opposed this and 36% were uncertain.
The number of Black Americans who oppose color-blind policies has risen since the February 2022 poll by Yahoo News/YouGov, from 29% then to 40% now. The number of Black Americans who support color-blind policies, meanwhile, has remained steady, at 29%.
Do we have a sense as to which way the court is leaning?
When the court heard arguments last fall in the two cases, all six of the court’s conservative members asked questions that expressed skepticism about affirmative action policies.
Justice Samuel Alito compared affirmative action to telling a runner in a 100-yard dash that he “gets to start five yards closer to the finish line” than other runners because he is Black or Latino.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — a liberal jurist — countered that “if there was only one basis for giving someone a boost and that basis was race, then I see disadvantage, absolutely, to anyone else who’s not an underrepresented minority who can get that boost.
“But I understood that we have here a program in which there are at least 40 different bases for being able to get a boost and not everybody who is an underrepresented minority gets a boost,” Jackson said. “So it’s really hard to figure out if anyone is being disadvantaged in a system like that.”
The litigants in the case have argued that affirmative action policies discriminate against white and Asian students.
The Supreme Court has upheld affirmative action policies twice since a 1978 decision established the legality of the practice.
But the court has become more conservative in recent years, and affirmative action may be the latest cultural issue where the new 6-3 majority shifts the nation’s laws further to the right.
