Race matters: the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider the use of race in college admissions.

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: Cover story

When it comes to affirmative action, Taqee Vernon, a junior at the University of Michigan and a leader of the Black Student Union, is a big supporter. For hundreds of years, he says, African-Americans were oppressed, first by slavery and then by racial discrimination. So using race as a factor in college admissions, he says, is only fair.

"The only way to counterbalance acts against a people is with active acts for a people," says Vernon. "Before you can be completely neutral on racial grounds, you have to level the playing field."

Shawn Lewis, a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, sees it very differently. To him, affirmative action is a fundamentally unfair policy.

"We have to look at people as individuals," Lewis says. "Race says nothing about who they are or where they grew up or what kind of resources their families had. Those are the kinds of things we should be looking at."

The Supreme Court has now jumped back into this contentious debate by agreeing to hear a case involving race-conscious admissions at a public university, the University of Texas. The Court's decision could have a major impact on the racial makeup of student bodies at colleges across the country.

Fewer Blacks & Latinos?

If the Court decided to bar affirmative action entirely, many educators say, it would reduce the number of black and Latino students at nearly every selective college and graduate school, with more Asian-American and white students gaining entrance instead. (A ruling forbidding the use of race in admissions at public universities would effectively bar it at most private schools as well.)

The phrase "affirmative action" was first used in 1961 in a speech by President John F. Kennedy. It has since come to refer to policies intended to compensate for the effects of past discrimination. Affirmative action programs have since been used in government, schools, and private companies to increase minority representation.

The case the Supreme Court has agreed to hear, Fisher v. University of Texas, was brought by Abigail Fisher, a white student who says the university denied her admission because of her race. In Texas, students in the top 10 percent of their high school class are automatically admitted to the state's public university system. That policy does not consider race but increases racial diversity in the university system in part because so many high schools are racially homogeneous.

Fisher just missed the 10 percent cutoff at her high school in Sugar Land, Texas, and was placed in a separate pool of applicants in which race is considered along with other factors. She sued in 2008 after she was rejected. (She now attends Louisiana State University.) The Court will likely hear the case in November and issue a ruling by June 2013.

Schools that use race as a factor in admissions are worried that a decision to restrict or end the use of race in college admissions could reverse efforts to create more...