The US Supreme Court has struck down the practice of considering an applicant’s race during university admissions, reversing decades of policy that benefitted ethnic minority students.
The court’s conservative majority overturned admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), the nation's oldest private and public colleges, respectively.
Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the colour of their skin”.
He added: “Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice”.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress”.
She added that the court “cements a superficial rule of colourblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter”.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson - the court’s first black female justice - called the decision “truly a tragedy for us all”.
Affirmative action was first introduced as a policy in the 1960s to increase diversity in US higher education.
Universities and corporations have long backed the schemes to ensure a talent pool that can bring a range of perspectives to the workplace.
But Justice Roberts claimed that students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite”.
According to Harvard, around 40 per cent of US colleges and universities consider race in some fashion.
Arne Duncan, a former education secretary under Barack Obama, said the ruling marked a “terrible day for our nation”.
“America is going backwards. Reversing decades of progress that has made us better, stronger and more inclusive hurts all of us. The Supreme Court isn’t just losing credibility due to all the recent scandals, it is also losing moral authority.”
The Supreme Court had twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 20 years, including as recently as 2016.
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