WHAT NOW? : The Ban on Affirmative Action in Public Universities

We all know that affirmative action has, since its establishment, generated great controversy by establishing a selection process in the public sector that gives preferential treatment to minorities based on gender, race, and origin.  Whether you support affirmative action or oppose, the effects it had had on the representation of minorities in both universities and the workforce is undeniable.  Affirmative action is constantly under fire by opponents of the program who believe it is unconstitutional and discriminatory.  States such as Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska, Texas and Washington, have over time, legally overturned affirmative action by placing a ban on its practice.  My question is, what are the ramifications of this decision.  What are the results in states like California, that have maintained this ban for over a decade, and using this as a model, what can expect to see in newly affirmative action-free states like Arizona?

It was during the Johnson era in the 1960’s that affirmative action first came into practice to assure that minority groups were not discriminated against due to their gender, race, or national origin.  Affirmative action not only provided equal opportunity for all, but also over time encouraged the growth of diversity.

Affirmative action is defined in legal practice as the “process of a business or governmental agency in which it gives special rights of hiring or advancement to ethnic minorities to make up for past discrimination against that minority”.  In theory, affirmative action is being used to both rectify the discrimination of the past which created a socio-economical structure that disadvantages minorities and to increase the socio-economical mobility of these minorities.

However, many states have began moving towards a post affirmative action era, deeming affirmative action a discriminatory practice that is no longer necessary.  So what are the effects of these bans?

The California Case:

In California we have seen that the results of affirmative action have not been a significant decrease in the representation of Black and Hispanic students, rather we see a significant increase in the Admission and enrollment of Asian-American students.  What makes this most surprising, is that Asian-American students make up to 40 percent of admitted freshman in the UC system, they make up under 15 percent of the California high school graduate population.  The statistics for freshman admitted into the University of California are for all schools in the UC system, but what about selectivity.  “Affirmative Action Bans and College Graduation Rates” , a study by Peter Hinrichs of Georgetown University,  showed that Schools such as Berkley and UCLA, the most competitive schools in the UC system, had the greatest decrease in Black and Hispanic students.  So, when we ban affirmative action, are minorities trickling down to less selective schools?

Is this result seen in California a trend?  It could be argued that removing affirmative action resulted in the distribution of the allotted minority spots to the group with the highest high school graduating GPA’s and SAT scores in California, Asian Americans.  However, taking into account that California has the highest Asian population in the United States, at 5.6 million, drawn from a total population of 17.3 million countrywide, this result could simply be attributed to California’s large and continuously growing Asian population.

But what about other states?

States such as Texas, have not shown a significant decrease in the enrollment of minority groups in public institutions, however, that is if we are only examining the hard numbers of admissions and enrollment.  We have to take into account the rapidly growing Hispanic population in Texas, and there after acknowledge that the increase in the number of Hispanic students in the Texas public university system is not representative of the increase of Hispanic persons in Texas’s population.

So we have seen the effects of the ban off affirmative action in states such as California and Texas, who have upheld their ban for nearly two decades.  But what about long term effects?  If the end of affirmative action is in the near future, what does this mean for our distant future?  We can see the immediate results in universities, but how will this affect the work force?  Fifty years from now, will we have reached the goal of proportional representation, or would the end to affirmative action mean a future that looks more like our past?

Yanet Zepeda