In the previous week, the US Supreme Court announced two decisions regarding colleges
- blocked President Biden's student debt relief plan
- banned the use of race in college admission decisions
1.) Student debt relief
President Biden had an executive order to give up to $20,000 in student debt relief to eligible borrowers.
I was one of those eligible borrowers.
Obviously, I was hoping to get that student debt relief. Especially since it would've wiped out all the interest I owe.
But Biden's plan was a long shot, being that it was an executive order and didn't get Congress approval.
Which was why Biden's plan wasn't approved by the Supreme Court.
If Congress passed student debt relief and Biden signed it into law, it wouldn't have been overruled by the Supreme Court.
So in other words, the Supreme Court decision wasn't about the morality of student debt relief, it was about the technicalities regarding presidential power.
For now, the US House of Representatives is dominated by Republicans, who mostly oppose student debt relief. The US Senate is dominated by Democrats, most of who supported student debt relief, though some like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema opposed it.
The US Congress would need to be overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats to pass anything like Biden's student debt relief plan.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Education is making any adjustments it can to assist student loan borrowers.
Stay tuned.
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My previous blog posts on student debt relief
2.) Affirmative Action
The US Supreme Court ruled against the use of race as a deciding factor in college admissions.
Many universities (like Harvard and the University of North Carolina, both of which were subjects of the recent Supreme Court case) use affirmative action, which gives special preferences to under-represented minorities (especially for African-Americans, Latines and Native Americans), even admitting them under lower standards than for those of European, Jewish or Asian ancestries.
Some states had already banned the practices including California, Texas, and Florida.
Supreme Court now banned the practice nationwide.
Affirmative Action was going to end sooner or later, and even the bluest diverse states (like California) voted against it TWICE!
At this point, it's NEVER coming back! It's over! It's a lost cause.
Some worry that would mean fewer African-Americans, Latines, and Native American in colleges.
Not really.
Yes, in California, after the ban on affirmative action in 1996, the enrollment of African-Americans, Latines, and Native Americans at prestigious universities like UCLA and UC-Berkeley declined. But their enrollment (and graduation rates) increased in lesser-known colleges (like UC-Irvine).
In the case of Texas, enrollment by race didn't change much because the policy was changed so that the top 10% of students from any Texas high school are guaranteed enrollment at the prestigious University of Texas at Austin. So the top 10% of students from Houston's 5th Ward (African-American majority) have the same chance as the top 10% from upper-class Anglo-majority schools.
Most colleges aren't really that much affected by affirmative action because many have enough room to enroll all eligible applicants. That is true for the University of Hawaii (my alma mater).
By the way, I got admitted to UH scoring higher than the listed minimum SAT score and with a higher GPA than the minimum listed for admission.
As for diversity at colleges, most of the efforts won't mean much until more of the public education system improves to the point where the average test scores for African-American and European-American students are similar.
By the time a student is 18, a university can only do so much, especially if the student was ill-prepared to begin with! Now that affirmative action is gone, we ought to do more with our pre-college education system, especially hiring more teachers/tutors/etc per classroom instead of expecting 1 teacher to handle 25 students of varying abilities!
Also, social services in lower-income communities need to improve to make it easier for the younger generation to succeed.
Meanwhile, prestigious universities (like Harvard) claim to be for "affirmative action" to distract from the fact that their real preference is the legacy admissions (children of the alumni).
Yes, the legacy students get special treatment and are admitted under lower standards than the rest of the student body. They also outnumber those admitted under affirmative action.
Now that "affirmative action" is over, those colleges are scrambling to protect their real preference for legacy admissions.
If "legacy admissions" was voted on by the general public, it would be eliminated by an overwhelming majority in red and blue states.
But those elite colleges have alumni in government that would try at all costs to avoid a vote on legacy admissions.
