Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2023

Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College

600 U.S. 181

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, the Court held that Harvard's and UNC's race-conscious admissions programs violate equal protection because their diversity goals were not sufficiently measurable, their use of race operated as a negative and stereotype, and their policies lacked a meaningful endpoint; schools may still consider an applicant's individual race-related experiences without awarding a benefit based on racial identity itself.

Background

Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a nonprofit membership organization, sued Harvard College and the University of North Carolina (UNC). It alleged that Harvard's consideration of race violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that UNC's consideration of race violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Court treated Title VI as coextensive with the Equal Protection Clause for purposes of these cases.

Both schools used holistic admissions systems that considered many factors, including academic achievement, activities, recommendations, essays, personal qualities, and race. Harvard considered race at several stages, including initial review, committee deliberations, and its final “lopping” stage. UNC required readers to consider race and allowed it to operate as a potentially significant plus factor in individual cases.

After bench trials, the District Courts upheld both programs under Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher. The First Circuit affirmed Harvard's judgment. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the Harvard case and certiorari before judgment in the UNC case, then reversed both judgments.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether SFFA had Article III standing to sue on behalf of its members.

Holding

Yes. SFFA had representational, or organizational, standing under Hunt v. Washington State Apple Advertising Commission.

Reasoning

An organization may sue on behalf of its members when its members would have standing in their own right, the interests asserted are germane to the organization's purpose, and neither the claims nor the requested relief requires individual members to participate. The parties did not meaningfully dispute that SFFA satisfied those three Hunt requirements.

UNC argued that SFFA was not a genuine membership organization because its members did not control or fund it. The Court rejected that argument. Hunt's inquiry into the “indicia of membership” concerned a state agency with no formal members; it did not impose a further control-and-funding requirement on a voluntary organization with identifiable members.

SFFA was a valid nonprofit with voluntary members who supported its mission and whom it represented in good faith. Because it satisfied Hunt, it could invoke federal jurisdiction on behalf of members injured by the challenged admissions systems.

Issue #2

Whether Harvard's and UNC's asserted educational-diversity interests were sufficiently definite to justify racial classifications under strict scrutiny.

Holding

No. The universities did not identify focused and measurable objectives that permitted meaningful judicial review of their use of race.

Reasoning

Racial classifications receive strict scrutiny: they must further a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored, meaning necessary, to advance that interest. The Court emphasized that the Equal Protection Clause ordinarily demands individual rather than racial treatment, and that exceptions are rare.

Harvard invoked interests such as training future leaders, preparing students for a pluralistic society, improving education through diversity, and producing knowledge from diverse outlooks. UNC similarly invoked robust idea exchange, innovation, cross-racial understanding, empathy, and producing engaged citizens and leaders.

The Court did not deny that these goals are worthy. But it concluded they are too amorphous to be judicially measured: courts cannot determine how many leaders have been sufficiently trained, whether an exchange of ideas is sufficiently robust, or when the asserted benefits have been achieved so that racial preferences may stop.

The racial categories used by the universities also did not supply a sufficiently tight fit between means and ends. Broad categories such as “Asian” and “Hispanic” can group together people with vastly different backgrounds, while omitting or ambiguously treating other groups. The Court found that those categories did not coherently track the educational benefits the universities claimed to pursue.

Although universities receive some deference concerning academic judgments, deference does not eliminate judicial review. The Court held that the universities' request for judicial trust could not substitute for an exceedingly persuasive, concrete, and reviewable justification for classifying applicants by race.

Issue #3

Whether the admissions programs complied with Grutter's limits that race not operate as a negative or as a racial stereotype.

Holding

No. The programs necessarily imposed racial disadvantages in a zero-sum admissions process and relied on impermissible racial stereotyping.

Reasoning

The Court reasoned that selective college admissions are zero-sum: a preference that helps one applicant obtain a limited seat necessarily disadvantages another applicant competing for that seat. Thus, a race-based benefit for some racial groups operates as a negative for others, notwithstanding the universities' characterization of race as merely a plus factor.

The record showed that Harvard's use of race reduced the number of Asian American and white applicants admitted overall, and the Court found that race could be determinative for at least some applicants at both schools. In the Court's view, these consequences could not be reconciled with the rule that race may not be used as a negative against an applicant.

The Court also held that awarding an admissions benefit based on race assumes that persons assigned to the same racial category will contribute a shared viewpoint or quality because of their race. That premise treats people as products of racial identity rather than as individuals with distinct experiences, abilities, and character.

The Court distinguished permissible consideration of an individual's experiences from an impermissible racial preference. An applicant may be evaluated for demonstrated courage, leadership, resilience, or other qualities developed through confronting discrimination or drawing on cultural experiences, but not simply because the applicant belongs to a racial group.

Issue #4

Whether Harvard's and UNC's race-conscious admissions programs had the meaningful endpoint required by Grutter.

Holding

No. Neither program had a logical, measurable endpoint, and periodic review did not cure that deficiency.

Reasoning

Grutter allowed race-conscious admissions only as a temporary departure from equal treatment and repeatedly required a logical endpoint. The Court read that temporal limitation as essential to Grutter's constitutional justification for allowing race to be considered in admissions.

The universities' proposed endpoint of “meaningful representation” depended on comparing racial enrollment figures with prior classes, the general population, or another demographic benchmark. The Court concluded that this amounted to racial balancing, which precedent describes as patently unconstitutional.

The alternative endpoint—the point at which students receive the educational benefits of diversity—was equally inadequate, the Court held, because those benefits were not measurable and offered no judicially administrable way to decide when race-based admissions should cease.

Harvard and UNC had not identified any sunset date and did not contend that race would become unnecessary by 2028, the date Grutter had anticipated. Periodic internal reviews could not make an otherwise unconstitutional practice constitutional or replace the requirement that the use of race eventually end.

Issue #5

Whether the Court's ruling prohibited universities from considering how race has affected an individual applicant's life.

Holding

No. Universities may consider an applicant's discussion of race-related experiences when it is tied to the applicant's individual character, abilities, or potential contribution.

Reasoning

The Court stressed that its decision did not require universities to ignore an applicant's experiences with discrimination, cultural heritage, inspiration, adversity, or leadership. Those experiences may be relevant to an individualized assessment of merit.

But a university may not use essays or other application materials as a proxy for reestablishing the same race-based regime. Any admissions benefit must rest on the applicant's demonstrated qualities or accomplishments, not on racial identity itself.

Concurrences

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas joined the Court's opinion and offered an originalist defense of a colorblind Constitution. In his view, the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts established a rule of legal equality for all citizens regardless of race, and the Fourteenth Amendment condemns racial discrimination whether it is characterized as hostile or benevolent.

He argued that the historical evidence offered for an antisubordination reading of the Fourteenth Amendment does not establish that the Amendment permits ordinary race-based preferences. Reconstruction-era measures directed to freed persons or victims of government-imposed discrimination were, in his view, remedial and compatible with a constitutional commitment to colorblind government.

Justice Thomas argued that Grutter was wrongly decided because universities never established a concrete causal link between racial diversity, as defined by broad racial categories, and measurable educational benefits. He also rejected deference to universities accused of discriminating on the basis of race.

He warned that affirmative action can stigmatize its supposed beneficiaries, create academic mismatch, foster racial resentment and segregation, and burden applicants from other groups, including Asian Americans. He maintained that institutions can pursue opportunity through race-neutral measures and pointed to the achievements of historically Black colleges and universities as evidence that racial preferences are unnecessary.

Justice Gorsuch

Reasoning

Justice Gorsuch joined the Court's opinion but wrote separately to argue that Title VI independently resolves the Harvard claim. In his view, Title VI's text categorically prohibits recipients of federal funds from intentionally treating an individual worse because of race, color, or national origin.

Drawing on Bostock's interpretation of materially similar language in Title VII, Justice Gorsuch concluded that Title VI employs ordinary but-for causation. A school violates the statute if race is one cause of an applicant's worse treatment, even if the school also relies on other considerations or acts from an assertedly benign motive.

He reasoned that Harvard and UNC intentionally give race-based tips or plusses to some applicants and thereby disadvantage competing applicants in a finite admissions process. That conduct, he concluded, violates Title VI without needing to decide precisely how much race affects admissions or whether the universities' ultimate purposes are well intentioned.

Justice Gorsuch criticized Bakke's treatment of Title VI as merely coextensive with the Equal Protection Clause. Because Title VI has distinct text, applies to private recipients of federal funding as well as state entities, and contains no strict-scrutiny exception, he maintained that courts should enforce its direct prohibition on intentional racial discrimination.

Justice Kavanaugh

Reasoning

Justice Kavanaugh joined the Court's opinion and emphasized Grutter's temporal limitation. In his view, Grutter permitted race-conscious higher-education admissions only as a temporary measure and expressly anticipated that racial preferences would no longer be needed after 25 years.

He explained that the Court's equal-protection cases require even otherwise permissible racial classifications to be limited in time. Grutter's 25-year expectation was therefore not a passing aspiration but an important part of the decision's balance between the interests asserted by universities and the constitutional norm of equal treatment.

A generation has passed since Grutter and roughly 50 years since Bakke. Because neither Harvard nor UNC identified a genuine endpoint for its use of race, Justice Kavanaugh concluded that the schools could not claim an indefinite extension of the exception Grutter had allowed.

He acknowledged that present discrimination and the effects of past discrimination persist. In his view, however, governments and universities may still combat those problems through civil-rights enforcement and race-neutral measures rather than ongoing racial classifications in admissions.

Dissents

Justice Sotomayor

Reasoning

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan and joined by Justice Jackson as to UNC, argued that the Equal Protection Clause permits race-conscious measures aimed at achieving genuine racial equality. She traced the Reconstruction Amendments and Reconstruction-era legislation, including the Freedmen's Bureau Acts, to show that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect formerly enslaved people through affirmative measures rather than to require rigid colorblindness.

She read Brown and subsequent desegregation decisions as rejecting passive race neutrality when it perpetuates existing inequality. In her view, Brown required affirmative steps to dismantle entrenched segregation and create a genuinely integrated educational system, making the majority's colorblind interpretation historically and doctrinally mistaken.

She maintained that Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher firmly established that the educational benefits of student-body diversity are compelling. Those benefits include improved learning, reduced stereotypes, cross-racial understanding, institutional legitimacy, and preparation for citizenship and leadership in a diverse democracy.

Applying that settled framework, Justice Sotomayor concluded that both programs were narrowly tailored. The trial courts found that SFFA's proposed race-neutral alternatives were unrealistic, ineffective, or required unacceptable sacrifices to the schools' broader educational objectives. Harvard and UNC used race as one flexible factor in individualized, holistic review rather than a quota or mechanical preference.

She rejected the majority's claims that the universities engaged in racial balancing, used race as an impermissible negative, or lacked a valid endpoint. In her view, Grutter required ongoing review of whether race-conscious measures remained necessary, not a fixed expiration date based on an arbitrary prediction that racial inequality would disappear by a certain year.

Justice Sotomayor stressed that persistent racial disparities in K–12 education, wealth, health, employment, and access to opportunity make formal colorblindness inadequate. She predicted that the decision would substantially reduce enrollment of underrepresented minorities at selective institutions, diminish diverse professional pipelines, and entrench rather than remedy segregation and inequality.

Justice Jackson

Reasoning

Justice Jackson dissented only in the UNC case. She argued that the country has never been colorblind and that enduring race-linked gaps in wealth, health, educational access, and professional opportunity reflect the intergenerational effects of slavery, segregation, exclusion from property ownership, and discriminatory government policy.

Using hypothetical North Carolina applicants John and James, she explained why a holistic admissions process may properly consider race. A white applicant's multigenerational university legacy and a Black applicant's first-generation status may each reflect histories that matter to their individual opportunities, accomplishments, resilience, and prospective contributions. Considering those realities does not make race determinative or confer an automatic benefit.

Justice Jackson emphasized that UNC's process evaluates applicants across numerous academic, personal, extracurricular, and background criteria. Race is voluntary to disclose, can be relevant to applicants of any race, is never automatically assigned numerical weight, and operates alongside many other factors rather than as a quota or the sole basis for an admissions decision.

She argued that diverse educational environments benefit all students and society. In her account, they improve learning and critical thinking, reduce prejudice, help produce professionals better able to serve diverse communities, and create pathways that can gradually narrow persistent race-linked disparities.

Justice Jackson concluded that the majority's insistence on race blindness ignores the historical and present conditions that make race relevant. By preventing UNC from evaluating applicants in their full context, she warned, the Court would delay progress toward the genuinely equal society that the Equal Protection Clause seeks to secure.