On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court significantly limited how colleges can factor race into the admissions process through two court decisions that effectively eliminated affirmative action — a program that was introduced under the Nixon administration in the 1970s — from the college admissions process in the U.S.
At its inception, affirmative action was a tool that colleges and universities used to ensure that students of color and women, historically challenged by unequal access to education, were fairly considered for college admissions.
The Supreme Court, comprising a majority of justices nominated by Republican presidents, including three by former President Donald Trump, ruled that two universities violated federal nondiscrimination laws by factoring in the race of applicants.
The cases at the center of the ruling were Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. Justices voted in favor of the Students, 6–2 and 6–3 respectively, with President Joe Biden’s nominee, Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, recusing herself in the Harvard case.
In addition to the thousands of potential college applicants directly impacted by the rulings are the administrators responsible for student admission efforts across the nation.
Why these rulings matter, the history of affirmative action and its effect on a societal level, were points of discussion during a recent News interview with Kenneth Durgans, associate provost for diversity and inclusion at Kansas City University in Missouri. Durgans has been successful in recruiting a sizable percentage of Black and Brown students interested in pursuing careers in healthcare.
“We [Kansas City University] are a holistic [osteopathic] medical school. We have a dental, Psy.D. and a couple master’s programs as well. One is sort of a pipeline program that actually takes students who need just a little bit of tweaking in their academics,” Durgans said. “Bringing them in, helping them develop so that they can go to professional schools, so that they can get into Ph.D. programs and expand the number of diverse individuals, and particularly people of color in the various STEM professions, our program’s been successful — 90 percent of those students go on to professional schools. It’s a very important part of this process of moving students forward.”
Durgans said diversity in the medical fields is a critical component of healthcare.
