Penn students lament SCOTUS decision on race-based admissions: ‘All of our progress is disappearing’

At the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most selective colleges in the nation, students expressed concern Thursday over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate the use of race as a factor in college admissions.

“At Penn, I already feel underrepresented, and I just know this decision is going to lead to less Black students ending up in our incoming classes,” said Yomi Abdi, a Wharton sophomore who is Black. “All of our progress is disappearing.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected to have its greatest impact on universities such as Penn, which admits only single-digit percentages of applicants. In fall 2022, 7.9% of Penn’s 9,889 undergraduates identified as African American or Black, while 10.5% were Latino, and 5.2% two or more races. Meanwhile, 27.5% were Asian and 30.8% white.

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In a statement to the university community, Penn President Liz Magill and Provost John L. Jackson Jr. acknowledged that the ruling will require changes in the university’s admissions process, which for decades has considered race as one factor in the review process.

But in the hours after the decision was released, they did not detail what those changes might look like.

“We are studying the court’s opinion to ensure that we admit students in compliance with the law,” they wrote. “Second, we remain firm in our belief that our academic community is at its best when it is diverse across many dimensions.”

Whitney Soule, Penn’s vice provost and dean of admissions, addressed the decision on the admissions blog.

“What will not change,” she wrote, “is our commitment to creating a diverse community as central to the educational experience at Penn. ... Access to a broad community of learners enriches the college experience for everyone, and better prepares students of all backgrounds to succeed in a global society.”

In the court cases, plaintiffs had accused both Harvard and the University of North Carolina of discriminating against Asian and/or white students through the use of race-conscious admissions policies. The lawsuits were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a conservative activist who has spent years battling affirmative action policies.

Abdi said she “immediately couldn’t focus” at her finance internship when the Supreme Court decision was announced Thursday morning. As opinion editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper — a position that forces her to write often about race on campus — Abdi is acutely aware of how the end of affirmative action could make Penn’s already predominantly white campus whiter.

Abdi is originally from Chicago, which stopped considering race in selective public school admissions in favor of socioeconomic factors in 2009, the year Abdi entered kindergarten.

She felt a chilling effect even on the day she got accepted to Penn in 2020.

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”I was raised in a so-called merit-based system, yet I was constantly in a lot of white environments,” said Abdi, who recalled hearing gossip from classmates who pinned her Wharton acceptance on affirmative action, diminishing her intelligence. “People blamed me to make them feel better about themselves.”

She’s curious to see how the end of affirmative action in its current form changes the conversation around belonging at elite institutions: “People aren’t going to be able to say, ‘Oh, you got in because you’re Black.’”

Emily Hyunh, an incoming Penn senior from Maryland studying health policy, said she wholeheartedly disagrees with the Supreme’s Court decision, recalling how California’s decision to end the practice in the 1990s has made their prestigious public universities less diverse over time.

”Having diverse populations creates safe spaces,” said Hyunh. “As an Asian person attending a predominantly white institution, I know the value of having places where I can speak freely to people who know what it’s like to be Asian here.”

At Penn, although Asian students’ proportion of the undergraduate population is almost equal to that of white students, that hasn’t stopped the community from having its own set of struggles. Students and professors in the Asian American Studies Department had to fight administrative cuts to keep the program afloat while its law school still hasn’t decided whether it will keep employing Amy Wax, a professor with a history of anti-Asian comments.

When Hyunh got accepted to Penn in 2020, she recalled, she received comments that diminished her acceptance on both ends of the spectrum.

“Some people told me I had an advantage getting in because I’m not white,” she said, while others upheld the idea that affirmative action hurt her chances overall.

Huynh believes the biggest misconception the court and affirmative action critics have about the policy is that it harms high-achieving Asian students who have burned themselves out for a chance to attend elite institutions.

”All this does is put Asian people against other minorities, when in reality, we are still minorities,” she said.

Megha Neelapu, another incoming Penn senior and an organizer with Fossil Free Penn who is South Asian, agrees.

”I do think there has been a lot of conservative propaganda ... pushed on our community,” Neelapu said. “Affirmative action actually benefits the most marginalized within the Asian community, like Southeast Asians or Pacific Islanders, and that goes underdiscussed.”

The Center for American Progress and other think tanks have pointed out that several Asian diasporas in the United States, such Cambodian and Hmong communities, benefit from affirmative action because they face a lot of barriers to college access, like a lack of high-quality public schools.

Neelapu said the biggest misconception that underpinned today’s Supreme Court decision is that “we live in a meritocracy.”

”There’s this fundamental assumption that racism and racial inequality don’t exist anymore,” she went on, “and that’s not true.”