Supreme Court Could Consider Virginia High Schools Admissions

The justices will soon rule on race-conscious admissions plans at Harvard and U.N.C. A new appeals court case asks whether schools can use race-neutral tools to achieve racial diversity.

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is very likely to forbid colleges and universities to use race as a factor in admissions decisions. Indeed, when the cases challenging the admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were argued in October, some justices were already looking at the next question on the horizon: whether admissions officers may promote racial diversity by using race-neutral criteria.

Your position, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh told a lawyer for the challengers, will put a lot of pressure going forward, if its accepted, on what qualifies as race neutral in the first place.

That question grew more concrete last week, when a divided three-judge panel of a federal appeals court allowed an elite public high school in Alexandria, Va., to revise its admissions policy by, among other things, eliminating standardized tests and setting aside spots for the top students at every public middle school in the area.