The amici and other highly selective educational institutions consider an academically qualified student’s race or ethnicity as one among many factors in a carefully designed, competitive admissions process that views each applicant as an individual and weighs the capacity of each to contribute to the class as a whole.</p>
<p>Academically selective universities have a compelling interest in ensuring that their student bodies incorporate the experiences and talents of the wide spectrum of racial and ethnic groups that make up our society. Amici should be free to compose a class that brings together many different kinds of students; that includes robust representation of students from different races and ethnicities; and that prepares graduates to work successfully in a diverse nation. </p>
<p>Indeed, highly selective universities have long defined as one of their central missions the training of the nation’s business, government, academic, and professional leaders. By creating a broadly diverse class, amici’s admissions policies help to assure that their graduates are well prepared to succeed in an increasingly complex and multi-racial society. The policies also make certain that no racial or ethnic group is excluded from that vital process.</p>
<p>Although petitioners suggest that universities should consider factors like economic circumstances and personal hardships, the truth is that those factors are already taken into account in the typical selective admissions process. Petitioners’ proposals for guaranteed admissions plans for the top GPA achievers among the applicant pool are unworkable for relatively small private universities, which simply cannot promise to admit the top ten percent (or even the top one per cent) of graduating high school seniors. Nor could graduate schools, with fewer available spaces and even more selective criteria, feasibly operate under such formulas.</p>
<p>Even if a policy of guaranteed admission for students graduating in a specified percentile of their high school class succeeded in admitting a certain number of minority students, it would likely compel the admission of so many others, non-minority applicants as to eliminate available spaces in the college class for those with unusual backgrounds, experiences, and other talents to contribute. </p>
<p>**Such alternatives are therefore fundamentally incompatible with the commitment to consider each applicant on his or her individual merit, taking into account all factors, not just test scores or class rank that would militate for or against admission to a selective university. **</p>
<p>Whatever strict scrutiny properly requires, it should not force universities to achieve one vital interest (racial diversity) to the exclusion of another (treatment of students as individuals) and thereby compromise the constitutional imperative of academic freedom.</p>
<p>pages 26- 28 of the pdf document states:</p>
<p>**The purpose of a university admissions process is not simply to identify the students who, if admitted, would be likeliest to earn the highest grade-point averages. **</p>
<p>Quite apart from the impossibility of reliably making that prediction, pursuit of so narrow a goal would be unlikely to yield a student body that any sensible university would wish to enroll. While amici continue to place the highest priority on academic rigor,** they have always sought to enroll a broad cross-section of students who can bring a critical mix of experiences and perspectives into the university community and who can leave it well prepared to serve as future leaders of our society. **</p>
<p>The factors considered in amici’s individualized admissions programs are extraordinarily varied, wide-ranging, and notoriously difficult to quantify. Although petitioners and the United States sometimes give the impression that university admissions officers consider just test scores, class rank, and race, little could be more misleading.</p>
<p>Admission factors begin, of course, with the core academic criteria, including not just grades and test scores but teacher recommendations and state, regional, national, and international awards. In some cases, those criteria will be all but decisive, either positively (very rarely) or negatively (more often). In the vast majority of cases, however, they are not themselves decisive, and the process continues. </p>
<p>Admissions officials give special attention to, among others, applicants from economically and/or culturally disadvantaged backgrounds, those with unusual athletic ability, those with special artistic talents, those who would be the first in their families to attend any college, those whose parents are alumni or alumnae, and those who have overcome various identifiable hardships. The committee also extends favorable consideration to applicants who write exceptionally well, to applicants who show a special dedication to public service, and to those who demonstrate unusual promise in a wide variety of fields. </p>
<p>By the same token, the individualized admissions process means that simply eliminating the consideration of minority race and ethnicity would not significantly increase any given non-minority student’s odds of gaining admission to an academically selective university.</p>
<p>page 29 of the pdf states:</p>
<p>The Interest In Racial Diversity Cannot Be Served By Race-Neutral Reliance On Factors, Such As Economic Disadvantage, That Are Already Carefully Considered.</p>
<p>Petitioners argue that race-conscious admissions decisions are unnecessary because suitable attention to race-neutral factors will do just as well. The United States urges (as one solution) that universities look to such factors as special economic hardship instead of race. See U.S. Grutter Br. 24-25. But the decisive fact is that all of the suggested race-neutral factors, and many more besides, already enter into admissions decisions.13 Consideration of those factors alone does not achieve the distinctly racial diversity that amici seek in their student bodies. To accomplish that goal, admissions committees must give favorable consideration to minority race in addition to those other factors, not instead of them.</p>
<p>To “tweak” the race-neutral factors emphasized by petitioners – for example, by deliberately tilting individual admissions toward “hardship” students in the hope of thereby selecting a large enough increment of minority students to make up for the losses that would result from race-blind admissions – would be disingenuous at best. Such an approach would in truth be a race based policy and not a race-neutral alternative at all.</p>
<p>A race-neutral preference for economically disadvantaged students, for example, would admit many more whites than non-whites, because of sheer demographic realities.14 And, of course, the university interest in admitting minority students goes well beyond just admitting minority students from disadvantaged backgrounds.