Survey finds half of Americans disapprove of affirmative action

A survey has found that 50 percent of U.S. adults say they disapprove of colleges and universities taking students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds into consideration when making admissions decisions.

The survey, conducted by Pew Research Center and released Thursday, comes ahead of Supreme Court decisions on race-conscious admissions in higher education, often referred to as affirmative action. 

The decisions, expected this month, will be based on two cases: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina. The court’s ruling could reverse 40 years of precedent.

Affirmative action is a term that broadly refers to policies that favor individuals belonging to groups that have been subjected to previous discrimination. At colleges and universities, the practice has been used to diversify enrollment, often in schools that historically turned away minority students.  

But Pew’s survey found that support for the practice differs drastically between racial groups as well as political party identification. 

Nearly half of Black Americans surveyed said they approve of higher education institutions taking students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds into consideration when making admissions decisions.

Forty-seven percent of Black adults support taking a student’s race and ethnic background into consideration for admission, compared to 29 percent who disapprove of the policy. Nearly a quarter of Black adults (24 percent) were unsure. 

Hispanic Americans, however, were torn. Thirty-nine percent support affirmative action, and 39 percent disapprove.

White and Asian Americans were most likely to disapprove of affirmative action: 57 percent of white adults disapproved, as did 52 percent of Asian adults. 

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, about three-quarters of adults disapprove of race-conscious admission in higher education, with 48 percent saying they “strongly disapprove” of such practices. 

Democrats, on the other hand, are much more likely to support affirmative action. Fifty-four percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults said they approve of the policy. 

Liberal Democrats believe in supporting race and ethnicity as a factor in college admissions as a way of increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of a school. Americans as a whole are nearly equally divided on the idea, according to the survey, with 27 percent of adults saying that students’ experiences are better, and 26 percent saying their experiences are worse. 

But SFFA argued in its filings that policies like affirmative action discriminate against white students. It argues that using “race in admissions to pursue student-body diversity — is plainly wrong.”

Supporters of affirmative action, such as the NAACP, have expressed concern that overturning the practice will disproportionately affect Black and other minority students from enrolling in selective colleges and universities. 

The NAACP argued SFFA is attempting to instill a “revisionist interpretation” of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case that ended racial segregation in public schools. 

Despite the Brown ruling, unequal treatment of Black students in education persists, particularly between kindergarten and high school, and race-conscious admissions take that inequity into consideration, the NAACP said. 

Nine states have already prohibited the consideration of race in public university admissions: California, Florida, Washington, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Oklahoma.