The Potential Impact of Ending Affirmative Action on Educational Consulting

Hours ago, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that affirmative action – the practice of some of the country's most prestigious universities to openly use race as a factor in promoting diversity of admitted students – is unconstitutional. As expected, among watchers of higher education in the country, this decision has triggered immediate and widespread discussions. The impact of affirmative action policies, especially among overrepresented minorities like Asian Americans, has been noted more than a decade ago when I was a university student. With the policy's formal abolishment, changes to universities' admissions may be significant.

At the moment, it is too early to tell what SCOTUS' ruling on affirmative action means in practice. Universities that practiced the policy consistently in the past are bound to be scrambling to see how changes can be made in the wake of the ruling. However, what is clear, both in the verdict of SCOTUS and messages from top universities, is that just because affirmative action is ending, it does not mean the pursuit of inclusiveness and diversity will. As SCOTUS noted, "racial experience" will remain one factor out of many in how universities ought to consider how to choose incoming students.

Given that formulation and implementation of non-affirmation action-based policies on diversity take time, it may be the perceptions, rather than realities on the ground, that guide how students, parents, and educational consultants interpret the SCOTUS ruling. Without any empirical evidence yet, they will need to decide whether certain high school students may be more advantaged or less so in their pursuit of an elusive spot in some of America's best universities. Consultants, supposedly the guru of admissions-related trends, may be able to quickly influence the thinking of families at this time of great policy volatility.

As cynical as it may sound, some influencing can be targeted toward higher sales in the short term. Playing upon the widespread (mis)conception that affirmative action worked against Asians and whites in favor of blacks and Hispanics, educational consultants can easily portray that their Asian and white clients are likely to benefit from the SCOTUS ruling. Citing evidence that the University of California system, which do not practice affirmative action even before the latest ruling, has a much higher percentage of Asian and white students than the likes of Havard and Yale, one can argue that hundreds, if not thousands, of new spots on the roster, would be open to Asians and whites in the coming years.

Hence, many Asian and white high school students, who would have been less than hopeful in their chances of getting admitted into top universities, may now see their chances are more favorable. Perhaps a good many would be much more willing to splurge on the services of professional educational consultants, who, alongside the death of affirmation action, can push some "racially disadvantaged" students from rejection to acceptance. Given that many educational consultants' clientele is Asians and whites today anyways, this psychological effect of "renewed hope" can translate to a good chunk of new revenue.

But in the long term, the end of race-based preferences in university admissions can potentially spell disaster for the admissions consulting industry. For too long, elite universities were able to use race as a shield to refute their elitism. By recruiting from successful black and Hispanic families, the schools were able to talk about their measures to provide diversity at a truly "skin-deep" level. As top universities move away from their original status as bastions of Anglo-Saxon privilege, they remain bastions of privilege in every skin color possible. 

Now that the race-based selection policy is unconstitutional, universities would be under pressure to reexamine their affinity for students from high socioeconomic status. With race no longer openly considered, other markers of identity, from class to gender to sexual orientation, may become criteria that schools will have to abide by to show their continued interest in advancing diversity on campus. Indeed, the Republican championing of the white working class and rural folks, as well as the Democrat support among liberal minorities and the urban poor, means that there is bipartisan political support for helping the non-privileged. 

Clients of educational consulting firms are not exactly a diverse bunch on anyone's socioeconomic scale. Consulting services are expensive, meaning that only the truly wealthy can afford years of services needed to prepare well for applications to top universities. And the truly wealthy are certainly not minorities in non-racial aspects. Traditional business cycles still largely frown upon non-traditional values and belief systems, no matter what their public relations department would say in public. "Standing out" and "being unique" are nice qualities in a university application, but their correlation with generation-spanning wealth is not there yet.