I’ve just begun to read this board, and it seems that affirmative action is as controversial as ever… But it seems that people don’t realize one crucial fact about it as it is practiced today.
Affirmative action is not a nationally mandated policy for all colleges/universities to follow. The current state of affirmative action today is a result of hundreds of individual private colleges and state university systems deciding to use or not to use affirmative action in admissions for a variety of reasons. Among the first schools to use affirmative action were private Ivy League schools in order to include diversity in their educational system-- not to “right past wrongs” or not as broad social policy.
In the US, public colleges and private colleges compete for the same students, so the public ones followed suit, to the ire of lawsuit filers. Therefore, in these court cases, judges and lawyers argue “compelling state interest” for diversity not to judge some “national affirmative action policy,” but to see if the state’s voluntary decision (in the form of public colleges having AA) is appropriate constitutionally. Regardless of these results, schools like Ivy Leagues will always continue to practice whatever kind of affirmative action / legacy / geography / talent preferences they want, as is their right.
The reason public colleges (like Michigan) always get stuck is that they handle large numbers of applications and balance the desire of being national universities like private schools, being selective, and serving their state populations. This is increasingly difficult to do, as Michigan’s and Georgia’s recent troubles of attracting black applicants has shown.