The face of higher education could drastically change after the Supreme Court rules on affirmative action in the University of Michigan cases. However, while most agree minority enrollments are likely to decrease, some see universities altering admissions policies and being creative in how they attract and admit minorities.

A ruling by the Supreme Court will either uphold or overturn the court’s 1978 Bakke decision, which has been widely interpreted as allowing public and private colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions.

A growing number of academics and groups have been calling for an end to affirmative action in higher education. The basis for their argument is that higher education should be an environment free of discrimination, even if the intention is to benefit a minority population.

Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California-Los Angeles, said he hopes to see a campus climate free of any sort of discrimination, including affirmative action.

“I think it would help colleges, because treating people without regard to race is the right thing to do — morally and pragmatically,” Volokh said.

“I think universities will become much more credible in speaking out against race discrimination if they, in fact, treat people equally without regard to race. Right now, some institutions tell their students how wrong it is for people to discriminate against blacks or Hispanics and at the same time say to applicants who are Asian or white, ‘we’re sorry, but we have to reject you partly because of your racial background.’

“I think race preferences undermine the very important anti-discrimination message that leading institutions should be consistently sending.”

Volokh did say universities could give preference to applicants as long as the preference was not race-related.

“If there is an educationally justifiable reason for a university to choose people based on certain non-race-based characteristics, then a university is permitted to do that,” Volokh said.

“For instance, it would be justifiable for a university to give some preference to applicants who did fairly well on the SAT, even though they grew up poor or went to a bad high school, if that’s what the university wants to do.”

Higher education in California has operated in an affirmative-action-free climate since 1996. Since that time, minority enrollments have reduced dramatically. Under this environment, it will be difficult to achieve significant diversity, said Cheryl Harris, a law professor at UCLA.

“If the court were to rule against the University of Michigan and preclude the instance of race in admissions decisions, it would be difficult to achieve the same level of racial diversity under any alternative plan,” Harris said.

“There have been alternatives pursued in a number of other places, where they look at a person without reference to race and ask the question if they are adding to the diversity of class, and diversity here is not being defined in racial terms.

“The University of Texas has adopted an admissions policy that at the undergraduate level if a student is in the top 10 percent of their high school class, they will be considered to attend UT-Austin and other [state] campuses.”

The 10-percent policy in Texas has received positive and negative feedback since it began in 1997.

Hispanics and blacks continue to be under-represented. The same under-representation is happening at UCLA.

“The effect of the elimination of affirmative action is that the institution will go back to conditions we haven’t seen in 25 or 30 years,” Harris said. “At UCLA, there are now fewer than three African-American students out of a body of 1,000.”

At UCLA’s law school, the number of blacks and Hispanics has declined dramatically.

“The fact that affirmative action is basically prohibited to us as a law school in California has had dramatic effects in the composition of the class,” said Clyde Spillenger, a professor of law at UCLA. “The number of blacks and Latinos has gone down very dramatically.”

University of Texas System President Mark Yudof said he is grateful the program is a success but believes affirmative action would be more successful.

Harris said programs like Texas’s and others, while creative in their design, fail to achieve the diversity that affirmative action does.

“The bottom line is there are kinds of methods to try to achieve without explicitly considering race, but all fall short of what can be achieved by consideration of race,” Harris said.

“Some programs consider the candidate overcoming past disadvantage, but because the number of disadvantaged white people outnumber the number of disadvantaged [minorities], under that rubric you never do attain the same racial diversity.”

Spillenger said striking down affirmative action would be detrimental to closing the opportunity gap between the minorities and whites.

“There are so many different forms that the Supreme Court decision could take that it is hard to make a global prediction about what the effects of the decision could be,” Spillenger said.

“The primary consequence is bad, from my point of view; it will make it more difficult to close the gap between opportunities available to people of color, historically under-represented, and to historically over-represented minorities or majorities.”

Harris said she believes the Supreme Court will reject affirmative action, but that nothing is certain.

“I think it’s fair to say that there is a solid group that will reject [affirmative action]. What is harder to predict is what a judge like O’Connor will do,” Harris said.

“One of the things that the student interveners have tried to focus on in the Michigan case is not the question of whether or not diversity is a compelling government interest but also on the question of desegregation as a compelling government interest.”