The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a major case over whether admissions criteria at elite Boston public high schools discriminated against white and Asian students, upholding a lower court ruling that the criteria were legal.
It marks the second time the high court has rejected an opportunity to clarify its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which banned the consideration of race in college admissions. In February the court declined to hear a similar admissions discrimination case brought against a selective, public Virginia magnet school.
The lawsuit alleged that several highly selective high schools in the Boston area—including the Boston Latin School, one of the oldest public high schools in the country—violated the 14th Amendment when they adopted temporary admissions policies during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. Those policies eliminated test score requirements, established admissions quotas based on what ZIP code applicants lived in and instituted a ranking system that factored in both GPA and family income. The change led to a nearly 20-percentage-point drop in the share of white and Asian students in those high schools’ fall 2021 incoming classes.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, writing that the policy was “racial balancing by another name”; Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that he’d have been inclined to hear the case had the policy still been in place.
While technically race-neutral, the plaintiffs argued the policies led high schools to admit Black and Hispanic students over white and Asian applicants who were technically more academically qualified.
