Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College

Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (6–3) on June 29, 2023, that the admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC), which incorporated the limited consideration of the race of applicants as a means of maintaining a racially diverse student body, violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from denying to any person the “equal protection of the laws.” The Court’s decision was widely understood to mark the effective end of all race-based affirmative action programs in college and university admissions in the United States.

Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College presented the question of whether the Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger (see Bollinger decisions), which permitted the limited consideration of race in the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School, should be overturned. The Grutter Court, in a majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, had found the law school’s policy to be acceptable—that is, consistent with the equal protection clause and not in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination by institutions that receive federal funding—on the grounds that it did not grant an automatic advantage to applicants belonging to a particular race but instead used race in a “narrowly tailored” and “holistic” manner for the legitimate purpose of promoting a racially diverse student body. In January 2022 the Court agreed to review Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and consolidated it with a similar case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, which presented the same question. In July, after the Court’s newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, recused herself from the case involving Harvard (because she had served on the university’s board of overseers), the Court announced that it would hear the cases separately, thus permitting Jackson to participate in the case involving the University of North Carolina.

The plaintiff in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., argued that the Grutter Court’s ruling was “grievously wrong” and should be overturned because it permitted intentional racial discrimination in college and university admissions. The plaintiff also asked the Court to find that the admissions policy of Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and that the policy of the University of North Carolina violated both Title VI and the equal protection clause..

In its majority (6–3) opinion, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the Supreme Court held that the admissions policies of both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the equal protection clause. Both schools, the Court argued, had failed to observe a set of restrictions on the permissible consideration of race that the Grutter decision had found to be necessary for consistency with the equal protection clause: namely, that the programs not operate on the basis of stereotyped assumptions regarding the viewpoints of minority applicants; that they not use race as a negative factor in the assessment of applicants who were not members of a preferred racial group; and that they not continue indefinitely but come to a predetermined end.

According to the Court’s majority, although an applicant’s race cannot be treated as itself a positive or negative factor in an admissions decision, colleges and universities may consider applicants’ accounts of how race has affected their characters. “Nothing in this opinion,” Roberts wrote, “should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” What would be relevant in such situations is not the fact that applicants had faced challenges stemming from their racial identity but the virtues or skills that applicants developed through those experiences. “A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.”

Roberts’s opinion was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas also filed separate concurring opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Elena Kagan in full and by Justice Jackson as it applied to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina. Jackson also filed a dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, which was joined by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor.