Beyond college, affirmative action's demise threatens corporate diversity and prosperity

For basketball fans, the June NBA draft offers drama every year. This year’s draft featured a great story surrounding the massively talented French teenager named Victor Wembanyama, who was the first to be signed. Wembanyama has the gift of height — he’s 7-foot-4 — that is a tremendous advantage on the court. But mixed in with Wembanyama and players who were nearly his height there were a few who topped out at just over 6 feet — comparatively short in the world of pro basketball. As fans know, that’s because a lot of factors go into making a successful basketball team, so they don’t draft for height alone. There are moments when it really matters to have someone who can see the court from a different angle. 

Why is this important? Because in life, and basketball, there are more ways to measure a person than by any single metric. And that’s why the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina is so disheartening.  In reversing 40 years of precedent to effectively outlaw the consideration of race in college and other higher education admissions, the court is striking a serious blow against admissions policies that don’t look at just one metric and don’t just benefit individual students of color; they benefit entire institutions. 

For decades now, colleges and universities have recognized the importance of multiple characteristics of prospective students, with the implementation of  “holistic” admissions.  Schools don’t just admit the applicants with the highest GPAs or scores on their SATs; at Harvard, they say it’s not just undesirable — it’s impossible. The university noted in its filing to the Supreme Court that each year, it gets more than 35,000 applications for a 1,600-seat freshman class. It points out that “to admit every applicant with a perfect GPA, Harvard would need to expand its class fourfold and reject all other applicants, regardless of their other academic credentials, talents, or life experiences and perspectives.” 

Different life experiences and perspectives, of course, are a huge part of what makes a university education enriching. And the ruling isn’t just bad for college affirmative action programs. It also tees up some really serious potential downstream effects inside and outside academia.    

Depending on how lower courts interpret it, this ruling could undermine minority scholarship programs and even DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) efforts in the corporate world. It could doom the Small Business Administration’s program to aid businesses owned by Black, Latino, Native and Asian American entrepreneurs. This is not a distant possibility; there are already a number of cases coming up through lower courts where we could see ramifications like this. 

Right now, a federal district court in Texas is preparing to hear a case, Nuziard v MBDA, challenging the constitutionality of the federal Minority Business Development Agency, an agency within the Department of Commerce. The MBDA is focused on assisting minority businesses — an effort that dates back to the Nixon administration and could now be at risk.

Another case, Do No Harm v Pfizer, targets the pharmaceutical company’s program offering college fellowships and other opportunities to help more people from Black, Latino and Native American communities rise to leadership positions within the company.  The case is now on appeal to the Second Circuit; all eyes are on how that court might take the Supreme Court’s ruling into account. 

And the loss of diversity initiatives in business is every bit as bad as their loss in academia. The management consulting behemoth McKinsey states unequivocally that companies with diverse management teams make more money. Business media laud the effects of diversity on creativity, decisionmaking and recruitment. Researchers have found that diverse institutions are overall more resilient because a greater variety of viewpoints and perspectives leads to better observation of “critical changes and preparations for future events.” And a recent Glassdoor study found one in three job seekers say they wouldn’t even apply to a company that lacks diversity.   

The question now is what to do in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that could threaten diversity efforts on campuses and beyond. One answer is to look at lower courts, where current and future affirmative action cases are bubbling up. The Trump administration worked hard to stack these courts with ultraconservative, anti-affirmative action judges, but now the Biden administration has numerous vacancies to fill. Filling them could make the difference between whether the legality of a wide range of diversity programs is upheld, or not; the Senate should waste no opportunity to confirm new Biden judges while it can.   

The stakes are as high as they are clear.   

Svante Myrick is the president of People For the American Way.