Dive Brief:
- About two-thirds of adults, 68%, said the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end race-conscious admission practices is “mostly a good thing,” according to a new Gallup poll. But greater divides emerge when responses are disaggregated by race.
- Black adults are split on the court ruling, with 52% calling it mostly good and 48% saying it's mostly bad. Roughly half, 52%, said the ban on race-conscious admissions will hurt Black students' ability to attend college, while 27% of Black respondents said it would help. A little over one-fifth of Black adults, 22%, said it wouldn’t make a difference.
- Conversely, the majority of Asian, Hispanic and White respondents said the ban would either help prospective students of their race or ethnicity attend college or have no effect.
Dive Insight:
The Supreme Court overturned decades of legal precedent when it ruled against race-conscious admissions in June.
Though only a small share of selective colleges considered race in admissions before the ruling, higher education researchers predicted such colleges would struggle to create diverse student bodies if they couldn’t take race into account.
And the full force of the court's ruling has yet to be seen. Prospective students are now applying for the 2024-25 academic year, making them the first group in decades to do so without the possibility of race-conscious admissions, Gallup said.
"Although the ruling receives fairly wide public support, predictions about the specific impact of the decision draw mixed responses across racial lines, underlining the uncertainty experienced by universities and students alike as they prepare for the next school year," Justin McCarthy, journalist and analyst at Gallup, wrote in a post Tuesday..
Almost three-quarters of prospective college students who are Asian, 73%, said the Supreme Court's ruling affected which institutions they were considering. In contrast, 48% of Black students, 43% of Hispanic students and 39% of White students said the same.
