The first college admissions season post-affirmative action
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Today: Pranking the BBC, how to cook fish, and your neologisms. Written by
Over 1.3 million teens in the U.S. will hear back from colleges this month — and, for the first time since 1961, admissions officers won’t be able to factor race into their decision-making process.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that affirmative action is unconstitutional last June,
, Director of the Social Justice Center at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, penned an open letter against the decision, echoing Justice Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson’s dissent: “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”Admissions departments who want to build diverse freshman classes are taking heart in this line from Justice John Roberts’ majority ruling: “Nothing… should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.” (Emphasis mine.) So: Colleges tweaked their application software to make the “race” field invisible to admissions officers, but some Black and Latinx students now feel pressure to mention race in their essays.
But ending affirmative action definitely won’t automatically guarantee equal footing based on merit. Another long-overlooked problem in college admissions: legacy admission. Princeton alum Bryan Walsh — who interviewed hopefuls at his alma mater for years — quotes Ted Kennedy, who called legacy admission “a birthright out of 18th-century British aristocracy.” And: “Research from Princeton’s own Thomas Espenshade found that legacy status provided a boost to a prospective student’s application equivalent to a 160-point increase in SAT scores.”
What else we’re reading
- pranked the BBC by submitting an AI-generated image and calling it human — and they believed him. Apparently, working with AI can be just as creatively fulfilling as going alone: “I worked creatively to get this exact result,” he writes, “with hundreds of iterations and tweaks to prompts until it showed what I saw in my mind’s eye. Michelangelo said that sculpting was about freeing the statue hidden within the marble, and that’s what this felt like for me [working with Midjourney].”
- It’s been 776 days since Russia invaded Ukraine. Attorney explains in plain English why Ukraine’s 1991 borders (which it maintained until Russia annexed Crimea in 2014) are legally legitimate. Essentially: Its 1991 Act of Independence was based on the UN’s legally binding right for self-determination.
- On Friday, we asked you to send us your favorite neologisms — inspired by Ellen Liebenthal’s “Fraudulinguistics” — and you delivered. Here’s one coined by reader : “Slowzo” is a noun meaning “the driver in front of you going 10mph below the speed limit.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about cooking)
How to cook any single filet of fish that is not salmon: 350 degrees, 18 minutes.
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