James Fox, Campus Carrier deputy news editor

In 2023, the United States Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in college admissions. In this scenario, affirmative action is when schools take one’s race into consideration when deciding who to admit to any given college. This year is the first term in which the new supreme court decision has taken effect; however, it has not affected Berry. 

“For your highly selective schools where you’re getting 50,000 applications and you’re trying to choose 1,000 students to enroll, they were often looking for a certain class with a certain makeup and there might be slots for various races or ethnicities,” Vice President of Enrollment Management Andrew Bressette said. “Berry is selective, but we are not in the position where we are trying to pick one student from 50,000 applicants. Our philosophy has been to try and cast a very wide net for students to learn about Berry. We’ve never really considered race or ethnicity in our admissions decisions.”

Berry admissions focuses more on reaching out to a diverse array of students rather than relying on affirmative action.

“A lot of our work in the past four or five years has been around actually going and meeting students in places where there is a lot of diversity,” Bressette said. “We’re lucky Georgia is a state where the graduating high school population is fairly diverse. Berry was known as a welcoming place for a lot of students of color. On the admissions side, it’s been a lot of work to try and introduce Berry to places where we weren’t known, getting [students] to come visit campus, getting them to apply coupled with the work that’s happening on campus to ensure this is a welcoming community.” 

Unlike other schools, Berry applicants that identify as students of color have increased in the year after the Supreme Court ruling.

“Our applications from students of color are up this year,” Bressette said.  “Our admits are up this year, and our incoming class has the highest percentage of students of color we’ve ever had at Berry.”

Outside of Berry the removal of affirmative action has affected students and become a rather polarizing issue. Eric Sands, associate professor of political science, further explained the role of affirmative action in higher education.

“We think affirmative action has resulted in a higher representation of communities, races, all those kinds of things to be represented in higher education,” Sands said. “The presumption is that without affirmative action a lot of these groups wouldn’t be able to get into various schools. We believe that with bringing in more minorities, you add to a more rich, a more diverse student body so that students are getting exposed to more perspectives.”

On the other hand, affirmative action, by choosing students purely based on race, can be seen as creating a signaling out effect.

“I think it’s likely that affirmative action has opened the doors to more minorities than would have otherwise been the case,” Sands said. “But I’m always mindful that we don’t want to create a system that encourages some people to think that they couldn’t get in here if it weren’t for their race. It results in a kind of stigma that you didn’t really earn it, but they only let you in because you’re black or you’re Hispanic or something like that. I don’t think that’s going on very much these days, but you can’t entirely know what embeds itself in people’s minds.”

There is a possible alternative moving forward that could prove to still benefit underrepresented students. The Supreme Court’s ruling opposed admission on the basis of race, but not economic status, which opens a new door for admissions in higher education.

“There [is some wiggle room] that admissions directors can still utilize to take race into consideration,” Sands said. “You can’t do affirmative action on the basis of race anymore, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do affirmative action on the basis of economics, which a lot of people point to as a possible solution to this. What we’d be doing is helping students from all disadvantaged backgrounds and using affirmative action policies to give them a step up in the admissions process since they probably didn’t go to private schools, they probably didn’t have SAT tutors, they probably didn’t have [college] application advisors and all these other things privileged kids get to have.”