After the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action last year, many people in higher education worried that it would be only the first in a series of decisions that reduced diversity at selective schools. In particular, university administrators and professors thought the court might soon ban admissions policies that gave applicants credit for overcoming poverty. Such class-based policies disproportionately help Black, Hispanic and Native students.
For now, though, these worries appear to be misplaced. And the future of admissions at selective colleges and high schools has suddenly become clearer.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain.
The Texas model
The situation has become clearer because the Supreme Court last week declined to hear a lawsuit against a public magnet school in Northern Virginia — Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J.
Until recently, T.J. admitted students based on a mix of grades, test scores, student essays and teacher recommendations. This process led to a student body that looked very different from the area it served.
About 5 percent of T.J. students were Black or Hispanic, even though the surrounding area is about 37 percent Black or Hispanic. The school also enrolled few low-income students of every race, as Richard Kahlenberg of Georgetown University has noted. Only 2 percent of Asian students at T.J. came from low-income families, compared with 20 percent of Asian students in the surrounding area.
In 2021, though, T.J. switched to a new admissions policy. It was modeled after a bipartisan plan that Texas created in 1997, under Gov. George W. Bush. In T.J.’s version, the school filled most of its freshman class by accepting the top 1.5 percent of students at every public middle school in the area.