Black Adults Split on Race-Conscious College Admissions Ban: Gallup Survey

Less than one year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions, a new Gallup survey shows that 2 in 3 Americans think the decision is “mostly a good thing.”

However, Black Americans are split on the decision — with 52% saying the decision was “mostly a good thing,” while 48% say it was “mostly a bad thing.”

Gallup this month announced the results of its Gallup Center on Black Voices survey, which ran from Oct. 25-Nov. 9, 2023.

“Although the ruling receives fairly wide public support, predictions about the specific impact of the decision draw mixed responses across racial lines, underlining the uncertainty experienced by universities and students alike as they prepare for the next school year,” according to a Gallup article.

Despite being split on whether the ruling was good or bad, 50% of Black adults said the decision will have a mostly/slightly negative impact on higher education.

Most white, Hispanic, and Asian adults said the decision will have a mostly/slightly positive impact on higher education.

Most Black adults reported that it would be much/slightly harder to attend a college or university after the Supreme Court ruling.

A majority of Asian adults (73%) were most likely to say that the decision would impact the colleges they may apply to, while white adults were the least likely (39%) to have the ruling affect their college application decisions.

“The Supreme Court decision comes at a precarious time for Black Americans considering pursuing higher education, as Black enrollment has been on the decline for more than a decade and Black students are more likely than other students to be juggling competing priorities that hamper their ability to complete a degree,” according to the Gallup article.

Law schools are diversifying, but the end of affirmative action may threaten that.

According to the American Bar Association, last fall’s entering law school class was 40% students of color, 1 percentage point more than the year before. That’s 12 percentage points higher than a decade ago when about 28% of first-year law students were ethnic or racial minorities.

BestColleges’ Mark Drozdowski previously reported that student diversity in law schools will likely suffer if history is any guide.

“In the wake of statewide bans on affirmative action in California and Michigan, law schools at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan experienced dramatic declines among minority students,” Drozdowski reported.

While the end of affirmative action could mean less diversity at predominantly white institutions, it could result in historically Black college and university (HBCU) enrollment growth, BestColleges contributor Pamela “Safisha Nzingha” Hill, Ph.D., reported.

Black students at HBCUs are also 40% more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than Black students who don’t attend HBCUs, according to a study from Brown University.

“These results suggest that relatively broad-access HBCUs are improving the educational and labor market outcomes of their enrollees,” the study says.

“In fact, even after controlling for institutional characteristics, such as the average SAT of enrollees and level of institution, we still find that initially enrolling in an HBCU improves students’ longer-term outcomes. In other words, something about HBCUs appears to positively impact our outcomes of interest above and beyond common measures of institutional selectivity. Researchers occasionally refer to this as the ‘secret sauce’ … of HBCUs.”