When the Supreme Court ruled against race-based college admissions in 2023, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that it was time to eliminate racial preferences — all of them. But lots of schools and states continued merrily along with programs that were limited only to students of certain races.
Many of those programs have been challenged in court and declared illegal. Perhaps surprisingly, one such case was recently decided in Wisconsin. In today’s Martin Center article, Dan Lennington discusses it.
He writes:
Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a race-based scholarship created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 1985. The scholarship provided taxpayer-funded grants to students based on need. Critically, however, the scholarships were available only for “minority undergraduates.” And even that definition further restricted eligibility by providing that only certain minorities qualified: blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. All other students were excluded because of their race.
That scholarship was challenged by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law for all. The Court agreed.
That’s good news, but there are, as Lennington notes, many other such programs, and schools need to eliminate them.
Read the whole thing.