Here’s What Happened After Affirmative Action Ended In These 4 States

Topline

The effects of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action will take time to materialize—but a 2013 Harvard study found that after affirmative action ended in key states “sharp declines” in the workplace followed for Asian women, Black women and Hispanic men.

Study found “significant loss” in workplace diversity when affirmative action was repealed by four … [+] states from 1996 to 2008.

Getty Images

Key Facts

The study, which ranged from 1990 to 2009, examined California, Michigan, Nebraska and Washington after those states banned affirmative action.

Once affirmative action was repealed in the states, workforce participation from Latino men decreased by 7%, Black women’s participation decreased 4% and Asian women’s participation decreased 37%—the study notes that the last figure was particularly large because few Asian women were in the workforce.

Black women’s decrease in participation continued to drop up until five years after the ban, while Hispanic men’s decline continued through the third year and Asian women’s decline was limited to the first year after the ban.

The study’s 19 year duration allowed the author to examine the share of minorities and women that worked in state and local government before and after affirmative action bans went into effect.

Key Background

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of/against two cases focused on the role of students’ race in college admissions processes. With the Court’s rulings on the lawsuits—Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University—race will no longer be able to be considered as a factor in college and university admissions decisions. Such changes could significantly shift the composition of collegiate student bodies across the country. A poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans believe race should have a small role in college admissions as opposed to being outright banned, with 63% of the poll’s respondents saying the Supreme Court should not block colleges from considering race or ethnicity in admission decisions.

Contra

Critics have argued that in addition to White and Asian students being discriminated against, affirmative action takes away from the achievements of minority students in favor of satisfying quotas.

Big Number

74%. That’s the percentage of adults surveyed in a 2022 Pew Research Center study who believed race should not be considered in college admissions decisions.

Tangent

Bans on affirmative action at universities, which greatly impacted minority student populations, are not unprecedented. When the University of California system eliminated affirmative action in 1995, the number of Black and Latino students accepted by Berkeley and UCLA was cut by nearly half by 1998, the first year affected by the ban. Black and Latino students made up for 32% of all University of California admits in 2022, compared to the 15% of admits they represented in 1998, according to system data.