LA colleges shouldn't use race, sex preferences

Why should Louisiana wait on the U.S. Supreme Court? Ban its public universities and colleges from using race, sex, or national origin in admissions decisions – and go further by extending the same to most financial aid.

SB 128 by Republican state Sen. Jay Morris would accomplish this. Insofar as admissions, it anticipates what the Court likely will do before the quarter is out in a pair of cases before it, although that decision also would apply to private and proprietary schools in the state that receive any kind of federal funding, even indirectly.

It makes sense. Even proponents of the practice of affirmative action, where admittance decisions give extra weight to individuals with certain immutable characteristics as a compensation for past discrimination of the entire broad class of such people, admit at best it has a mixed record in aiding presumably disadvantaged groups, while opponents – which include a solid majority of the American public – point out it actually poses harm to such individuals in that it sets them up for failure by admitting them to more-demanding institutions when their backgrounds on the basis of past achievement suggest they would do better at other, less selective schools.

The decision would have a greater impact than the law on admissions. Only institutions with very selective admissions would be impacted noticeably, and among state schools the only one close to that is Louisiana State University Baton Rouge. Even so, undergraduate admissions wouldn’t see much change, and the only areas of study that might see any significant alterations are in graduate law and medical education at LSU. But for the most part, for state schools either the bill or decisions would change little.

However, while the cases don’t involve financial aid (although conceivably that could become a future extension of the decisions), the law does address that: no longer could the mere fact of an applicant’s race, sex, or national origin increase or reduce chances of receiving assistance. It’s uncertain how much of an impact these characteristics have currently on aid choices.

But a simple policy shift among some or all of the Legislature, governing boards, and institutions might ensure that the amount of aid going to some racial minority group members, for example, would remain largely unaffected. By way of example, need-based rather than academic-based aid rest on one factor, family resources, that is related to race. That is, black and Hispanic families tend to have lower incomes and resources than those of other groups, and so if need-based aid was increased at the expense of, say, scholarships, those people supposedly at a disadvantage disproportionately would benefit from this increase.

And, the bill exempts aid that has strings attached. For example, some bequests to programs that provide aid specifically target blacks, women, or others. While public dollars that go to aid would follow the law’s prohibition on preferential treatment, these others funded from non-public sources administered by an institution or its affiliate would continue to operate as is under the bill.

Needlessly hyperventilating over this alteration, which unless affirmative action is used as a tiebreaker it otherwise penalizes some merely because of their genetics or familial origins, as wreaking havoc over higher education and lives entirely misunderstands the issue and the impact of the change. Louisiana should not merely react to potential constitutional clarification but proactively implement good and just policy that goes beyond that.