Two years ago, the Supreme Court, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, reversed a Fifth Circuit ruling that had favored UT-Austin and its use of racial preferences in admissions. Justice Kennedy, delivering the opinion, stated that the lower court had failed to apply the “strict scrutiny” standard – a heightened form of judicial review applied when a law or policy touches upon fundamental rights or involves classifications based on race, national origin, religion, etc. According to Kennedy, the Fifth Circuit had accepted UT-Austin’s justifications for racial preferences without critical examination. The case was remanded to the Fifth Circuit.

Upon rehearing, however, a three-judge panel reached the same conclusion that had been rejected by the Supreme Court, upholding UT’s racial preferences and deferring to the university’s stated goal (to foster more “diversity” by creating a “critical mass” of minority students). Fisher is now back before the Supreme Court, which must decide whether to hear the case again (a decision has not been made yet).

George Leef, in today’s Pope Center feature, says that Fisher has produced “strange bedfellows,” such as the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) and Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation. The CEO wants to do away with policies that “divide people…according to skin color and national origin” and encourage policymakers to instead consider the drawbacks of race-based admissions, such as the problem of “mismatching,” where underprepared minority students get accepted to top colleges and then perform poorly.

Kahlenberg, on the other hand, is fine with achieving “diversity” through preferential admissions policies, so long as they’re focused less on race and more on applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds. He and others believe that the current race-based policies disproportionately benefit wealthy minority students.

Leef takes issue with Kahlenberg and other progressives who wish to use admissions policies to create “diversity” – socioeconomic or otherwise.

“The essential flaw in both preference policies [racial and socioeconomic] is the mistaken belief that going to a prestige university necessarily means a superior education for the student – that it’s much better for the student to go to UT-Austin than one of the regional Texas state schools, much better to go to Yale than to Western Connecticut State. It simply isn’t true, however, that elite colleges necessarily mean an elite education. Nor is it true that going to a low-ranked school means that you won’t get a good education,” he writes.