Ricci v. DeStefano and Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that “experts” are glad the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano won’t hamper colleges’ use of racial preferences in admissions.
Robert M. O’Neil, emeritus professor of law at the University of Virginia, says Grutter v. Bollinger, a case in which the Supreme Court barred racial quotas but allowed some racial considerations in admissions, protects schools that lower the bar for minority applicants in the name of skin deep-only diversity.
Will Ricci affect hiring in higher education? American Council on Education’s Ada Meloy said, “The opinions rendered today do not explicitly or impliedly threaten the complex and nuanced faculty hiring or promotion procedures used in most institutions which struggle to increase diversity while complying with the law.”
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg said, “Unfortunately a lot of universities do weigh race and ethnicity in their hiring and promotion practices. And if you do that, you are on legally thin ice.”
Others argue that Ricci applies to standardized employment tests only and won’t impact overall efforts to achieve a diverse workplace.
Peter Wood of the National Scholars Association asks what Ricci means for higher education (emphasis added):
Recently Bryan O’Keefe and Richard Vedder have argued that one of the unintended consequences of the decision in Griggs was to fuel the vast expansion in college enrollments over the ensuing decades. How? Because Griggs effectively ruled out the possibility of employers using their own tests to determine the general level of competence of job applicants, employers fell back on the next most convenient proxy: the applicant’s possession of a college degree. Suddenly for all manner of jobs that didn’t before require a college degree, such a degree became a prerequisite–evidence of some basic level of “determination, critical thinking and writing, organization, and independence.”
The O’Keefe/Vedder hypothesis may have new bearing in light of the Ricci decision. If Ricci turns out to mean that employers can now administer skills tests for hiring and promotion with much less fear of disparate impact lawsuits, perhaps we will see some relief from the pressure on high school graduates to go to college to “get the credential.” History, of course, cannot just be shoved into reverse. The cultural pattern in America of sending on to college higher and still higher percentages of high school graduates has momentum of its own, and is bolstered by the need of colleges and universities to keep the tuition flowing.
If the college degree has served as a replacement for lawsuit-prone employment testing, as Wood notes, obtaining it becomes more important; hence, the need to fill college campuses with brown faces to bolster a school’s diversity quotient. Consequently, schools assess certain minority applicants on a lesser standard in order to achieve an arbitrary percentage of these students. This practice is unfair to those who have the scores and grades.
And the vicious cycle continues.
