NPR.

Any day now, the Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in a pair of really

big cases.

They involve two schools, Harvard College and University of North Carolina.

And the main question here is whether public and private colleges can consider a student's

race when they're deciding whether to admit them.

The legal analysts are pretty much agreement on this that the court isn't going to come

out and say no.

That considering race and admissions violates the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution,

and if it rules that way, that will abolish affirmative action in college admissions

across the country.

This is the Indicated from Planet Money.

I'm Adrian Mah.

What effects would the Supreme Court's decision have for students, schools, and even our

economy?

But clues, we can actually look at California, where affirmative action has already been

banned in public schools for 25 years.

We'll get into it after the break.

Zach Blemmer is an economist at Yale who studies college admissions.

And just to set the table, I asked him to start off by defining what we mean when we talk

about affirmative action.

So affirmative action is a very general admissions practice in which university admissions offices

...