The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the affirmative action program at the University of Texas at Austin, ending a protracted legal battle.
It was not immediately clear how far-reaching the ruling will be because of the specifics of the Texas program at issue.
A Texas law guarantees admission to the university for students in roughly the top ten percent of the graduating class of any Texas high school. To fill the remaining slots, about one fourth of each entering class, the school considers several other factors, including an applicant’s race.
That last step was the program under court challenge, upheld by the justices Thursday.
The school said students learn better when there’s diversity on campus and within racial groups. But a woman who was denied admission, Abigail Fisher, filed a lawsuit claiming the diversity standard was too vague to justify making distinctions based on race.
The Supreme Court gave a limited victory to the university three years ago, agreeing that campus diversity is a worthy goal. But the justices instructed an appeals court to review whether considering an applicant’s race was necessary to achieving it. When that court said it was, Fisher again appealed, leading to Thursday’s decision.
She argued that the Top Ten plan did enough to increase minority enrollment and create a racially diverse campus. In order to justify considering an applicant’s race, she claimed, the university should have a more concrete goal, because racial classifications must pass a rigid legal test.
But the school said The Top Ten percent plan can go only so far, because the Texas public school system remains largely segregated. It sought the flexibility to admit minority students who, though they were not in the top ten percent of their classes, have valuable experiences, such as an African-American student who was a student body president in a mostly white school.
The NAACP argued that eliminating affirmative action “would set in concrete a caste system in which black and Latino UT students likely would be the products of underfunded and underperforming Texas high schools, while white UT students would likely be derived from better funded and better performing high schools.”
Many of the nation’s highly selective universities, from Yale in the East to Stanford in the West, urged the court to uphold affirmative action. So did 45 Fortune 500 companies and 36 former leaders of the US military who said they need leaders from diverse backgrounds.