This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 30th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court has effectively ended racial preferences and higher education admissions, but that's not the end of litigation in this area.

Anastasia Bowden, director of the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies details the two cases that led the court to bring an end to

affirmative action in college admissions.

Well, in typical Chief Justice Roberts fashion, he overruled those prior cases called Bakke and Grutter without

explicitly overruling them.

It's pretty clear that racial preferences in her education are dead, even though that's not actually what the Chief Justice

said. He said that the universities were not abiding by the safeguards that ensured that

colleges were abiding by the Equal Protection Clause.

So for example, the previous Supreme Court decisions had said that you can use race as a plus factor, but not a quota.

And it said that you could use race so long as you

weren't relying on stereotypes and that you could use race so long as there was an

end date in the future and Chief Justice Roberts said, none of those qualities apply here.

It's not just a plus factor, it's an outright quota.

It relies on stereotypes because the colleges are assuming just by virtue of being of a different race that these people

are bringing something different to the table so it's making a stereotype based on being of a different

race and basically there's no end in sight. This is outright racial bouncing that's going to

continue perpetually. But it's hard to see how a college could ever abide by any of that criteria in the future given that you know this type of stuff is

inherently stereotypical and and it will always you know be be a outright balance and so

essentially I think the the upshot is that

racial preferences in higher education are no more.

...