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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)?

Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with.

In any case I doubt this will change the makeup of schools at all:

> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.

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It is already illegial to consider all of the characteristics you mentioned.

Historically, there was a specific legal exemption 14th ammendementment allowing racial discrimination.

This ruling closes the exemption for racial consideration. Discrimination based on other protected statuses remain closed

>Any exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee must survive a daunting two-step examination known as “strict scrutiny,” first whether the racial classification is used to “further compelling governmental interests,” and second whether the government’s use of race is “narrowly tailored,” i.e., “necessary,” to achieve that interest. Acceptance of race-based state action is rare for a reason.

This is not true and is more nuanced than you’re making it seem. See title 9 and the continued existence of schools like Wellesley college.

I agree that there is nuance, but I think this is still accurate in terms of the ruling. Protected class discrimination is illegal in the absence of the compelling interest.

There are still tons of exemptions and hypocrisy, but in general you typical public university can not discriminate admissions based on sex, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, ect.

If a public university instituted a no-gays or no-immigrants admission policy it would be quickly struck down under the status quo, so there is no need to discuss that.

Im not sure how single gender schools fit into the whole scheme. is there a specific case about Wellesley I should look up? I didnt see anything about title 9 challenges on Wikipedia.

The tests for discrimination based on race and sex are different, and the bar is lower for sex-based discrimination.

The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to the Supreme Court then they won’t decide on it.

I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.

Narrow rulings are central to the process. It's the difference between a "holding" and "dictum." A court can express an opinion about something, but if that opinion wasn't essential to resolve the case before the court, it's nothing more than an opinion, and later/lower courts can ignore that part.

http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/legal-miscell...

> That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.

Potentially quite a bit. Here's some recent data about admissions into the highly-competitive Illinois CS program: https://www.reddit.com/r/UIUC/comments/12kwc4a/uiuc_cs_admis...

Note that admissions rates for female applicants are higher across all categories—international, out-of-state, and in-state. Obviously you can't fully tell what's going on here without more of an understanding of the strengths of the different pools, but a 10–30% spread (for in-state) suggests that gender is being directly considered.

IANAL, but I'm also concerned about the degree to which this decision affects the use of other factors during college admissions. Fundamentally admissions is a complex balance between prior performance and future potential, and only admitting based on prior performance means that we're stuck perpetuating existing societal inequities.

I do know that 25 years ago or so there considerable weight given to gender in sciences and engineering. I do feel like all talk of it has disappeared, and wasn't sure if it was because it was no longer a factor or because race became the dominant talking point.

From the data you present I suspect that there is weight still given to gender. I wonder how much energy there would be to investigating this? I wonder how many guys who get rejected from MIT CS will now do Tik Toks about how a girl took his spot, since he can no longer say it was a black kid?

Harvey Mudd seems to discriminate heavily in favour of women.

It's not a matter of ruling narrowly. Gender and sex based discrimination is already illegal in admissions.

Really? Gender-based discrimination is subject to intermediate scrutiny, not strict scrutiny (which is used for race). I thought it was well-known that some schools give boys a leg up because otherwise they would be 60/40 girls/boys.

This article [1] indicates that state schools cannot discriminate, but private schools can. It's a decade old, but I can't think of any intervening laws/cases that would have changed this analysis (IAAL).

1: https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/affirmative-actio...

I don't know how prevalent gender discrimination is in colleges. My understanding is that enrollment and admission numbers do in fact overwhelmingly admit women over men, at approximately a 60/40 ratio. The article you reference states that while some private institutions can be single gender, once they choose to admit both, they are legally prohibited from discriminating to maintain a 50-50 balance.

It could be very well true that some or many institutions are violating the law, but I don't think that negates the point that I made about what the law is.

I posted hastily — it looks like schools can discriminate legally by disallowing a sex entirely, but not in gradations.

That's occurred to me too. Or put more bluntly, the admissions boards who strongly disagree with this ruling will find a way around it by simply putting their own personal bias into essay anecdotes about race.

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