Thread: Trump Administration to Rescind Obama Guidelines on Race in College Admissions

Trump Administration to Rescind Obama Guidelines on Race in College Admissions

By Michelle Hackman
Updated July 3, 2018 8:40 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is planning to rescind Tuesday a set of Obama-era policies that encourage the use of race in college admissions to promote diverse educational settings, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The move comes as the Justice Department is investigating whether Harvard University is illegally discriminating against Asian-American students by holding them to a higher standard in its admissions process. The administration revived the probe last year after Obama civil rights officials dismissed a similar complaint.

The guidelines, issued jointly by the Obama Justice and Education departments, laid out legal recommendations for schools looking to use race as an admissions factor to boost diversity at their schools.
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Trump administration officials plan to argue that the documents, published in 2011 and 2016, go beyond Supreme Court precedent on the issue and mislead schools to believe that legal forms of affirmative action are simpler to achieve than what the law allows.

Anurima Bargava, who headed civil rights enforcement in schools under Mr. Obama’s Justice Department, disagreed with that assessment, saying the documents simply offered guidelines to schools and colleges looking to continue using affirmative action legally. She said the current administration’s action signals that it doesn’t favor racial diversity.

“The law on this hasn’t changed, and the Supreme Court has twice ruled reaffirming the importance of diversity,” she said. “This is a purely political attack that benefits nobody.”

Administration officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The move comes as a lawsuit is unfolding in federal court against Harvard, in which the Justice Department has previously filed a so-called statement of interest.

The suit, filed in 2014 by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, alleges Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted. It is expected to go to trial in October.

The action to rescind the Obama-era guidelines is likely to escalate a long-running national debate over the role of race in college admissions, an issue the U.S. Supreme Court has revisited on several occasions since the 1970s.

In 2016, the high court reaffirmed the practice in a 4-3 decision, but in his opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy left the door open to future legal challenges by saying universities must continue to review their affirmative-action policies to assess their positive and negative effects.

Mr. Kennedy has since announced his retirement, and advocates on both sides say his successor, to be nominated soon by President Donald Trump, may take a different view on the practice as the Harvard case wends its way through the courts.

Harvard has previously said its admissions process is consistent with the legal precedents set over the past 40 years by the Supreme Court, which have allowed universities to consider race as a factor in admissions to obtain the benefits of a diverse student body.

In court filings published last month as part of its continuing litigation, the university revealed that Asian-American applicants on average had higher academic marks and received higher scores from alumni interviews than other racial groups. But on a “personal” score that admissions officers used to gauge applicants’ character, Asian students scored the lowest.

Write to Michelle Hackman at Michelle.Hackman@wsj.com

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-a...ons-1530619273

Good News: Trump Rescinds Obama’s ‘Affirmative Action’ Guidance

By Roger Clegg
July 3, 2018 1:14 PM

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are both reporting that the Trump administration will be rescinding Obama-era guidance on the use of race and ethnicity in student admissions (higher education) and assignments (K–12).

This is good news. As I explained on NRO as the Obama statements were issued — here and here and here, for example — they misread the law and were bad policy as well.

It’s not that complicated: As a policy matter, skin color and national origin should not play a role in deciding where a student can go to school. The costs of such discrimination overwhelm any claim of “educational benefits” from having a politically correct racial and ethnic mix of students. As a legal matter, while the courts have, alas, left the door ajar for this sort of discrimination, they have also placed significant restraints on it. The federal government should not be encouraging schools to do as much of this as they can get away with, which is what the Obama administration’s guidance did.

Most of the arguments against politically correct racial discrimination have been around for a long time, but I’ll mention briefly the two that have recently, and rightly, attracted greater attention.

First, it is not just white students who are frequently discriminated against, but Asian-American students as well. Indeed, as America becomes increasingly multiracial and multiethnic — and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic — it becomes more and more untenable for our institutions to sort people according to what color skin they have and where their ancestors came from.

Second, the evidence is now overwhelming that, because of the “mismatch” phenomenon, it is not only the students who are discriminated against who are hurt by these policies, but also those who are supposedly receiving racial preferences. That is, if a student is admitted to and attends a school where his or her academic qualifications are significantly below the rest of the student body’s, that student is less likely to graduate and more likely to flunk out or switch majors, and will receive lower grades — all to the student’s detriment.

I should also note a wonderful essay published last week by John McWhorter on why this discrimination should end.

So the Trump administration is wise to set a new course and to jettison the Obama administration’s bad guidance in this area. Here’s hoping that the administration issues new guidance and, in particular, supports the lawsuit that Asian Americans have brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for their admissions discrimination.

No doubt the Left will characterize this shift as somehow racist, but in fact it is not only nondiscriminatory but also the only approach that will not divide our multiethnic and multiracial society. It’s worthy of the nation whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. E pluribus unum.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...ce-right-move/

NOW GET ILLEGAL ALIENS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS!

NO STUDENT VISA...NO SCHOOL!

NO K-12 SCHOOL EITHER!

E-VERIFY AND NO ENROLLMENT FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS...GO HOME!!!

GO TO SCHOOL IN YOUR COUNTRY!

Exactly. And no American should compete in a publicly funded or taxpayer aided school of any kind with any foreign national not in our country on a green card. PERIOD!!!