--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: Let me take you back to June of 2023. Good morning. We're coming on the air because the Supreme Court has just released a major decision concerning one of the most defining cases brought before the justices this term.
--:-- Noel King: The Supreme Court today struck down race-conscious admissions policies, often called affirmative action, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
--:-- Noel King: For too long, many universities have wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.
--:-- Noel King: Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
--:-- Noel King: When colleges and universities were told to stop factoring race into admissions, many of them started asking applicants to instead describe obstacles that they'd overcome.
--:-- Noel King: The Trump administration thinks this is a sneaky way of getting around the Supreme Court's ruling and says it's going to require colleges to start submitting data proving that they are not breaking the rules.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained from Fox.
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--:-- Noel King: Adler? Here.
--:-- Noel King: Anderson? Here.
--:-- Noel King: Today. Okay. It's flamed.
--:-- Noel King: Um, he's sick.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King with Eric Hoover. He's a senior writer with the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he covers college.
--:-- Eric Hoover: All right, so last week, President Trump signed a memo that makes an ask or makes a demand of colleges and universities.
--:-- Eric Hoover: What's the ask?
--:-- Eric Hoover: So colleges will now have to report data disaggregated by race and gender for three subgroups.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Subgroups, and those subgroups are all applicants in a given year, all the admitted students in a given year, and then the cohort of enrolled students, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: In other words, the freshman class that ends up attending each college.
--:-- Eric Hoover: President Trump taking aim at higher ed again.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Thursday, signing a memorandum ordering all colleges submit data to prove they don't consider race in the admissions process.
--:-- Eric Hoover: This is a continued pattern of the government probing into universities' practices in admissions.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Legal experts say the new order could have a chilling effect on universities, and experts say the order could wind up making wealth even more influential in admissions.
--:-- Eric Hoover: We don't know exactly what data the government is going to be asking colleges for.
--:-- Eric Hoover: They haven't spelled that out.
--:-- Eric Hoover: All we know is that colleges will have to include what the government has called quantitative measures of applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students' academic achievements.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And those measures will include standardized test scores, high school grade point averages, and other applicant characteristics.
--:-- Eric Hoover: We don't know what other applicant characteristics beyond grades and test scores will end up being.
--:-- Eric Hoover: That remains to be seen.
--:-- Eric Hoover: A clue to what all colleges will be asked to hand over now perhaps lies in the terms of the agreements that Columbia University and Brown University recently signed with the Trump administration.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And what Columbia and Brown have agreed to do already is those institutions are now required for the next three years to turn over to the federal government disaggregated data by race and ethnicity on all applicants who applied, all of those applicants who were admitted, and then all of those admitted students who end up enrolling.
--:-- Eric Hoover: So is it possible that Columbia and Brown cutting these deals actually emboldens the Trump administration to say, OK, everybody else now has to do it, too?
--:-- Eric Hoover: I think it's possible.
--:-- Eric Hoover: I don't have any knowledge of whether whether things would have gone differently if Columbia and or Brown had dug in.
--:-- Eric Hoover: But I do think it's likely, though, that this pot was already boiling, that this was already something being cooked up.
--:-- Eric Hoover: The Trump administration has all year long been kind of giving it to higher ed, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: These students can't add two and two and they go to Harvard.
--:-- Eric Hoover: They want remedial math and they're going to teach remedial math at Harvard.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Now, wait a minute.
--:-- Eric Hoover: So why would they get in?
--:-- Eric Hoover: How can somebody that can't add or has very basic skills, how do they get into Harvard?
--:-- Eric Hoover: And has been, I would say, almost obsessively hunting down details about colleges, diversity, equity and inclusion strategies and programs and trying to eradicate those.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And so I think some people felt like this was going to be the next shoe to drop, doing something big, broad and bold to peer into the college admissions process and ask colleges to do something that they had never been asked to do before.
--:-- Eric Hoover: In 2023, the Supreme Court hands down a ruling that basically ends race-based affirmative action.
--:-- Eric Hoover: The Trump administration with this memo seems to be suggesting we don't believe that you guys, you elite colleges, really stopped doing it.
--:-- Eric Hoover: That is exactly right.
--:-- Eric Hoover: There is a there's suspicion, I would say deep suspicion on the part of the government and many conservative activists who scrutinize admissions all the time.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Yes, you can no longer consider an applicant's race, per se, as one of many factors in admissions.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Colleges have said, we have stopped doing it to comply with the law.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And now you have an administration that it seems to be saying nope we shaking our heads we don believe you
--:-- Eric Hoover: We believe that you are secretly quietly behind closed doors trying to get around the impact of that ruling and that you are, in some way, giving an advantage to underrepresented minority students and, you know, flouting the Supreme Court decision.
--:-- Eric Hoover: We have not seen proof or evidence that colleges are violating the law in that regard.
--:-- Eric Hoover: I think it's fair to say that the Trump administration is hunting for that evidence.
--:-- Eric Hoover: All right. So the Trump administration says we're looking for evidence that you guys are not playing by the rules, as determined by the Supreme Court two years ago.
--:-- Eric Hoover: What has actually happened in the past two years?
--:-- Eric Hoover: Do we have evidence that fewer Black and Hispanic students are being accepted to colleges?
--:-- Eric Hoover: And do we see colleges trying in ways to get around this?
--:-- Eric Hoover: Yeah, well, we just have one year of data that would even begin to help us make sense of the immediate impact of the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action.
--:-- Eric Hoover: About a year ago is when we started to see colleges releasing, as they do every year, publishing the enrollment data broken down by race and ethnicity.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And this was the first admission cycle to be completed for which the Supreme Court ruling had an effect.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And you saw among elite, so-called elite institutions, the most selective colleges and universities, in many, if not most cases, they saw a decline, right, a drop, small or large, in the number of African-American students who were enrolling and or the number of Hispanic students who were enrolling.
--:-- Eric Hoover: But you did not see that at every single institution, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: There were a handful of private colleges where the numbers of underrepresented minority students held steady or, in some cases, actually increased slightly.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And I think that was a key point.
--:-- Eric Hoover: That was a key development, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: Students for Fair Admissions, which is the group that sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which led us up to the Supreme Court ruling, they pounced on a small handful of colleges that had not seen declines in underrepresented minority students.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Private colleges and universities are under no FOIA requirement to explain what they're doing.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Now, the University of LSU, the University of Florida, could get a FOIA request and say, tell us exactly what you're doing in detail.
--:-- Eric Hoover: You know, you can't do that at Princeton.
--:-- Eric Hoover: You know, you can't do that at Rice.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And they basically pointed a finger at those institutions and said, aha, you must be doing something illegal to have not seen the same outcomes, the same declines in Black and or Hispanic students that many other elite colleges saw.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And so I think from that moment, right, suspicions that were already there became even more intense.
--:-- Eric Hoover: There is some real tension in the assumptions that the Trump administration is engaging in here.
--:-- Eric Hoover: In particular, the idea that if the numbers of Black and Hispanic students didn't go down at a particular college, it means that college must be doing something to get around the rules.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Without considering that maybe a lot of Black and Hispanic students applied to these colleges and just had really darn good test scores, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: How do you see both colleges and the administration trying to square this tension?
--:-- Eric Hoover: Look, there are plenty of smart people who believe that, hey, you know what? The best way to do college admissions would really be to just look at two factors.
--:-- Eric Hoover: A student's performance and score on the SAT or ACT exam for one.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And then their high school grades, their high school grade point average for another.
--:-- Eric Hoover: But once you have a huge group of applicants who light up the board on both metrics, you have to look at other things, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: Because you have way too many students to possibly enroll them all who have that going for them.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And this is where colleges want the public to understand and the message often doesn't get through.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Hey, we're looking at those.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Yes, you've got to bring that to the table in most cases.
--:-- Eric Hoover: But beyond that, we're trying to do all kinds of other things in admissions.
--:-- Eric Hoover: We're trying to look at other aspects of a student's record, for one.
--:-- Eric Hoover: But as a college, we have all these wants and needs that if we're only looking at grades and test scores, there's no way to meet all those needs, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: I think there's a disconnect there between a rather simplistic setup that the government is proposing here, which is that, hey, you know what really matters? Grades and test scores.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And colleges are saying, like it or not, that's not how we operate.
--:-- Eric Hoover: What ultimately do you think this means for the amount of power that the Trump administration has over higher education?
--:-- Eric Hoover: Like, is this an expansion? Is it maybe less of an expansion than it might at first seem?
--:-- Eric Hoover: It's just a bunch of names and numbers and details.
--:-- Eric Hoover: What does it all mean?
--:-- Eric Hoover: We're all trying to figure that out, what it all means.
--:-- Eric Hoover: I think one thing is colleges and universities have been told that they have 120 days from the release of this executive memorandum to comply with a long list of data requests.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And what do we know about the National Center for Education Statistics, the part of the education department that oversees the collection and analysis and presentation of all this data?
--:-- Eric Hoover: Well, that part of the education department got gutted recently.
--:-- Eric Hoover: So who's going to take all this data and do whatever it is that is meant to be done with it and then spit it out in a way that the public and the government can make sense of however they plan to do that, right?
--:-- Eric Hoover: So this is a huge logistical challenge.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Just because you put on paper that something must be done within 120 days doesn't mean that that will actually happen or happen on time.
--:-- Eric Hoover: I guess the next thing I would say is why this matters, why people should care, even if they don't care about the nitty gritty of how elite colleges work.
--:-- Eric Hoover: It's clear that in this executive order, the Trump administration and the Secretary of Education are emphasizing metrics, GPAs, and standardized test scores that we know correlate with families' wealth.
--:-- Eric Hoover: And if you are incentivizing colleges in any way right now to consider these metrics these two measures to consider them as being even more important than they were before
--:-- Eric Hoover: You essentially incentivizing colleges to admit even more of the students who excel on those two measures.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Does this take us down a road of elite colleges pulling back or rolling back their commitments to enrolling lower income students over time?
--:-- Eric Hoover: We don't know, but I think that's a definite fear.
--:-- Eric Hoover: Eric Hoover of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up, a lefty lawyer argued for years that race-conscious admissions should be overturned.
--:-- Noel King: He ended up siding with conservatives in that 2023 Supreme Court case.
--:-- Noel King: We're going to ask whether he has any regrets about how things have turned out.
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--:-- Noel King: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Richard Kallenberg, and I am director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: The Progressive Policy Institute, I would take it to mean that you are a progressive?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So it's complicated these days.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I'm left of center.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I think of myself more as liberal than progressive.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I ask because you testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case Students for Fair Admission.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: This is the case that essentially gutted race-based affirmative action.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: It doesn't sound like a progressive or even a left-of-center position.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: What was going on?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So I've long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I think that's enormously important.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: But I've been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated but economically segregated.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And so I think there's a better way of creating racial diversity, a more liberal way, if you will, which is to give economically disadvantaged students of all races, low-income and working-class students who are Black, Hispanic, white or Asian, a leg up in the admissions process in order to create both racial and economic diversity.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that it was primarily, you know, wealthy black and Hispanic students that were benefiting from affirmative action?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So, there had been a number of studies over the years that had come to that conclusion, including from supporters of race-based affirmative action that was primarily more privileged black and Hispanic students who benefited from race-based affirmative action.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And then in the litigation, further evidence came out.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So at Harvard, 71% of the black and Hispanic students came from the most socioeconomically privileged 20% of the black and Hispanic population nationally.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Now, to be clear, the white and Asian students were even richer.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: But for the most part, this was not a program that was benefiting kind of who many Americans would think of as the most deserving applicants for, you know, special consideration.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: That is working class students and low income students.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: All right.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So the Supreme Court in 2023 hands down this decision that says essentially we're done with race based affirmative action.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Was there a difference in how progressives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling and how conservatives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I would say there a difference between how progressives interpreted it and how kind of extreme conservatives interpreted it, because most mainstream conservatives have always said they were opposed to racial preferences, but of course they were for economic affirmative action.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: But now some on the extreme, including the Trump administration, saying that economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Yeah.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: What do you make of that?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: That was your team once upon a time, right?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Well, I think it's troubling when people shift the goalposts.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And it was clear that in a number of the Supreme Court concurring opinions in the case that conservatives said that economic affirmative action made a lot of sense.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Justice Gorsuch, for example, said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and preferences for faculty and instead gave economic affirmative action, that would be perfectly legal.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So there would have been a longstanding conservative position in favor of economic affirmative action.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And now some extremists are shifting their position and saying they're opposed to any kind of affirmative action, whether race-based or economic-based.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Are you surprised by that shift?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I don't know that I'm surprised.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I'm confident, however, that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court won't go that far.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: The Supreme Court, to some degree, looks to public opinion, and racial preferences were always unpopular.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: But economic affirmative action is broadly supported by the public.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: The Supreme Court has had two cases come before it subsequent to the Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard decision.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: One involved a challenge to class-based affirmative action at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia, and the other involved an attack on a similar class-based affirmative action program at the Boston exam schools like Boston Latin.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And in both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said we're not going to hear those cases over the vehement dissent of a couple of extremely conservative justices.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So I think I'm fairly confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic-based preferences.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: What do you make of this move by the Trump administration to ask colleges for data?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And as we heard it described earlier in the show, maybe catch colleges secretly doing affirmative action anyway.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Yeah, so I'm of two minds about it.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I do think transparency is good in higher education.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: These institutions are receiving lots of taxpayer money.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: We want to make sure they're following the law, following the Supreme Court ruling, which said you can't use race because we don't know whether institutions are cheating or not.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And so we don't want institutions to break the law.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Having said that, I'm quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Because if a college discloses the average SAT scores and grades by race of applicants, of those admitted and then those enrolled, one of two things can be going on.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: One is that the university is cheating and they're using racial preferences, and that would be a violation of the law.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: The other possibility is that they did shift to economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And because black and Hispanic students are disproportionately low income and working class, they will disproportionately benefit from a class-based affirmative action program.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And so the average SAT score is going to look somewhat lower.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And so I'm worried that the Trump administration will go after both race-based and class-based affirmative action.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Because class-based affirmative action still might mean a college is admitting more Black and Hispanic students.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And what the Trump administration seems to have the issue with is that fact.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Yes.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Increasingly, that's what it looks like.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: I mean, as long as the Trump administration was focused on, you know, counting race and deciding who gets ahead, he had the American, you know, the administration had the American public on their side.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: But Americans also support the idea of racially integrated student bodies.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: They just don't like racial preferences as the means for getting there.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So if Trump says, no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I'm just opposed to racial diversity, he'll have lost the public.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And I don't think he will be consistent with the legal framework under Students for Fair Admissions either.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Do you think he cares?
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: Well, I think he ought to care if he cares about the future of his political party, because under class-based affirmative action, it is true that black and Hispanic students will disproportionately benefit.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: But it will also benefit white working class students.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: And those are the students who are coming from families that form the base of the Republican Party.
--:-- Richard Kallenberg: So I think it would be a big mistake if the Trump administration were to really push hard on that angle.
--:-- Noel King: Richard Collenberg is the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
--:-- Noel King: Guess where Richard went to college?
--:-- Noel King: Gabrielle Berbet produced today's show.
--:-- Noel King: Amina El-Sadi edited.
--:-- Noel King: Laura Bullard checks the facts.
--:-- Noel King: Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter are our engineers.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
