What if the Supreme Court rules decisively against Harvard in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College? Will racial preferences fade into history as has Prohibition? Or will universities employ legally safe proxies such as social class to admit less qualified minorities?
Let me suggest one resistance tactic not yet on the agenda but, rest assured, it will show up: challenging the definition of “merit” that underlies the SAT, MCAT, GRE’s and similar tests. To be sure, racial and ethnic differences in these scores are probably intractable but developing new tests to replace old “racist” ones might narrow gaps sufficient for judges to conclude “close enough” to escape the verdict of racial discrimination.
For fans of preferences, this quest is relatively simple, and I suspect that woke Education Testing Service (ETS) psychometricians are already at work, given the firm’s financial incentives.
Let me try to predict the possible transformation of “merit.”