After more than 60 years, is the end of the road near for affirmative action in college admissions?
The idea of using race to help determine who gets a seat in public colleges has been under fire for decades. Eight states have essentially banned the practice, and a Michigan case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court could prompt others to do the same.
College officials nationwide got a wake-up call last June from the high court, which set a high bar for using race as part of a complex admissions program in Texas. Many observers say the combined weight of the two cases could finally push state universities to find another way to promote diversity.
“All the trends are pointing against the continued use of race in admissions,” says Richard Kahlenberg of the Washington, D.C.-based Century Foundation, a liberal think tank. Kahlenberg has for years advocated using family income,not race, as a way to ensure that public K-12 schools and colleges have a diverse student body.
A year after hearing Fisher, the justices last October heard arguments in a case from Michigan, where a 2006 state constitutional amendment banned racial preferences in public university admissions. Seven other states — California, Florida, Washington, Arizona, Nebraska, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — do the same, and about 29% of students live in states where affirmative action is banned, Kahlenberg estimates.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette says the state’s position was summed up well by Chief Justice John Roberts, who said the best way to stop racial discrimination “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
“Our constitution requires equal treatment in college admissions, which is an expression by 58% of Michigan voters in 2006 that says it is fundamentally wrong to treat people differently based on race or the color of their skin,” Schuette says. “It’s just wrong.”
A July 2013 study by Georgetown University scholars Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl found that in 2009, white students were more “over-represented” among the USA’s 468 most selective colleges than they had been in 1995. From 1995 to 2009, the nationwide share of young people ages 18-24 who were white dropped 6 percentage points, from 68% to 62%. But whites’ share of freshman slots at the USA’s most elite colleges dropped just 2 points during that same period, from 77% to 75%.
Another study, by Orfield’s Civil Rights Project, found that 15 years after California’s ban on racial preferences went into effect, increased competition has dropped the share of black in-state high school graduates admitted to UCLA from 47.6% of applicants to 13.7%; the percentage of Latino students admitted dropped from 54.9% of applicants to 14.8%. The percentage of white students admitted also dropped, but not as sharply.
Kahlenberg says the string of affirmative action cases has pushed universities to find alternative ways to create diverse freshman classes. He notes that Texas’ 10% rule has resulted in higher levels of black and Latino representation. Other state systems have gotten similar results by eliminating preferences for children of alumni and bolstering financial aid, among other measures. These strategies have led to more racially and economically diverse classes “in a way the Supreme Court can’t touch,” he says. “I think that’s the future of affirmative action.”
Recent surveys have found that Americans don’t like using race in admissions, Kahlenberg says, “but on the other hand, Americans don’t want to see universities and American higher education re-segregated.”
A decision in the Michigan case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, is expected this spring. If a majority of eight justices rule in Michigan’s favor (Elena Kagan, a former solicitor general, recused herself), it could prompt opponents of affirmative action in other states to push for similar bans.
But if the ban is overturned, states such as California again could weigh race in college admissions — and not a moment too soon, Orfield says. Admissions pressures there have become “very intense.” He notes that UCLA alone last year received nearly 100,000 applications. “It’s a big state, it’s growing … and we haven’t been growing the higher education system.” – USA Today
A house in Detroit, mirroring the black city’s decay
by Tom Krishner and Dee-Ann Durbin
The city of Detroit, which for years paid its bills with borrowed money, is the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy protection. Here’s a look at how the city spiraled into financial ruin and why it’s in so much trouble:
What happened?
For decades, Detroit paid its bills by borrowing money while struggling to provide the most basic of services for its residents. The city, which was about to default on a good chunk of its $14 billion-plus debt, now will get a second chance in a federal bankruptcy court-led restructuring. Detroit’s budget deficit this year alone is estimated at $380 million, and Kevin Orr, its state-appointed emergency manager, chose bankruptcy over diverting money from police, fire and other services to make debt payments. The move conserves cash so the city can operate, but it will hurt Detroit’s image for years. It also leaves creditors with pennies on the dollar and places in jeopardy the pension benefits of thousands of city retirees.
Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, after his federal indictment on corruption charges
Why did it happen?
It took decades of decay to bring down the once-mighty industrial giant that put the world on wheels. The city grew to 1.8 million people in the 1950s, luring them with plentiful jobs that paid good wages to stamp out automobiles for sale across the globe. But like many American cities, Detroit’s fall began late that decade as developers starting building suburbs. Then came the 1967 race riots that accelerated the number of white residents who moved to the cities north of Eight Mile Road, considered the region’s racial dividing line. At the same time, auto companies began opening plants in other cities, and the rise of autos imported from Japan started to cut the size of the U.S. auto industry. Detroit’s property values fell, tax revenue dropped, police couldn’t control a growing murder rate, and many middle-class blacks fled the city for safer suburbs with better schools. By 2009, the auto industry collapsed along with the economy as a whole, eventually pulling the city down with it. Government corruption under former black Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick only made things worse. In the 2000 census, Detroit’s population fell under 1 million in as the exodus continued. Today it’s barely above 700,000.
Did the auto industry’s fall drag down Detroit?
It’s a big factor. The city is littered with abandoned factories built in the postwar boom years, most of which have multiple stories. As the Japanese auto invasion began cutting into Detroit’s sales, General Motors, Chrysler, Ford and hundreds of auto parts companies looked outside the city to build one-story plants that could handle modern assembly lines. With every downturn, more companies abandoned the city, leaving the hulking buildings to squatters. Detroit’s tax base continued to erode. By the time the auto industry melted down in 2009, only a few factories from GM and Chrysler were left. GM is the only one with headquarters in Detroit, though it has huge research and testing centers with thousands of jobs outside the city.
Where else has this happened?
Before Detroit, the largest local government bankruptcy filing was in Jefferson County, Ala., in November 2011. The county cited more than $4 billion in debt, mostly from corrupt deals involving sewer financing that fell apart when the home mortgage crisis hit in 2008. The county is still trying to clean up the mess. Last month, commissioners sought a compromise that calls for paying creditors a little over half the money they’re due and raising sewer rates. They hope to exit bankruptcy by December. Jefferson County has nearly 700,000 people, which is similar in size to Detroit, and includes the city of Birmingham. The economic crisis also caused bankruptcies of smaller cities. The California cities of Stockton, San Bernardino, and Mammoth Lakes all filed for bankruptcy last year. Stockton and San Bernardino were hit by plummeting home values during the recession, which cut property and sales taxes, while Mammoth Lakes was overwhelmed by a $43 million breach-of-contract judgment brought against it by a developer.
General Motors rebounded after bankruptcy: can Detroit follow?
Maybe. In GM’s 2009 government-funded bankruptcy, the company was split in two, with money-making assets staying at GM and decrepit plants and billions in debt going to a separate company. GM reduced its debt from $46 billion to $8 billion and used the bankruptcy to close factories, shed brands and get more concessions from union workers. The new, leaner company has since racked up $17.2 billion in profits and added jobs in Detroit. For the city, the comeback will be much harder. Its decaying neighborhoods can’t be sent elsewhere. But creditors whom Detroit owes more than $14 billion will have to take pennies on the dollar. Thousands of retired city workers could lose at least part of their pension benefits. Concessions could be forced upon dozens of city unions, including pay and benefit cuts. Free of these financial burdens, Detroit will be able to concentrate its limited dollars on services such as basic police and fire protection. Better services could bring more people and lure more business investment. Already the downtown and an area to the north called Midtown are seeing business and residential growth — signs that Detroit has a future. – AP
Mitt Romney’s narrow but campaign-saving primary victory in Michigan lost some of its luster when the final outcome showed that his top rival, Rick Santorum, still won half of the state’s delegates, muddying the race ahead of 10 key state contests next Tuesday.
A win in Michigan was crucial for Romney, who was born there and whose father was governor of the state, to affirm his contention that he is his party’s best choice to defeat Democratic President Barack Obama in November.
He overcame the religious conservative Santorum by a slim margin – 41 percent to 38 percent – in the vote Tuesday by sticking to his core and mainstream Republican message of fixing the economy and reducing unemployment in a country still recovering from the worst recession in decades.
Romney is favored by much of the Republican establishment, and enjoys more campaign funds and a stronger organization than his primary rivals. But Santorum has electrified the party’s conservative base, which trusts his views on social issues such as abortion and gay rights, and considers Romney too moderate and inconsistent.
Santorum remains on solid ground heading into Super Tuesday, a day next week when 419 delegates are up for grabs in 10 states. The day could go a long way in determining who will win the state-by-state race for delegates that yields the party’s nomination at its national convention in August.
Santorum is leading the polls in Ohio, possibly the most important contest on Super Tuesday. It is a big industrial state with 8.1 percent unemployment, 63 convention delegates at stake and a long history as a battleground in general election campaigns. Santorum also is keeping an eye on two other big prizes among the 10 Super Tuesday states: Oklahoma and Tennessee.
Romney is all but assured of victories in at least two of next Tuesday’s states – Massachusetts, where he was governor and faces little or no competition in the primary, and Virginia, where neither former House speaker Newt Gingrich nor Santorum qualified for the ballot. Those two contests offer 84 delegates combined.
News that Santorum’s narrow loss in Michigan would yield him as many delegates as the winner – 15 each – enabled him to label the results a success on Romney’s home turf, putting some wind in his sails ahead of the big contests next week.
The other two candidates in the race, Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, did not campaign in Michigan and got no delegates.
“We had a much better night in Michigan than maybe was first reported. This was a really great race to go into, in a sense, the belly of the beast, the hometown of my chief rival here in the Republican primary,” Santorum said Wednesday during a campaign stop in Tennessee.
Romney was campaigning in Ohio, where he kept on the economy, promising “more jobs, less debt and smaller government” if he’s elected in November. Romney was headed next for North Dakota, which holds caucuses Tuesday.
Gingrich and Paul made little effort in either of Tuesday’s contests in Michigan or Arizona, focusing instead on Super Tuesday. Gingrich campaigned in Georgia, the state he represented in the House of Representatives for 20 years. Paul appears to be contesting Romney in Vermont, which carries 17 delegates.
In the Associated Press tally, Romney now has 167 delegates, including all of Arizona’s 29 delegates, which he won easily on Tuesday in the day’s second race. Santorum has 87, Gingrich has 32 and Paul has 19.
It will take 1,144 delegates to win the Republican nomination for president.
The next vote happens Saturday, when Washington state holds its caucuses.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney scored a hard-won, home state triumph in Michigan and powered to victory in Arizona Tuesday night, gaining a two-state primary sweep over Rick Santorum and precious momentum in the most turbulent Republican presidential race in a generation.
“We didn’t win by a lot, but we won by enough,” Romney told cheering supporters in Michigan. He also tweeted his delight – and his determination: “I take great pride in my Michigan roots, and am humbled to have received so much support here these past few weeks. On to the March contests.”
Santorum was already campaigning in Ohio, one of the Super Tuesday states, when the verdict came in from Michigan.
“A month ago they didn’t know who we are, but they do now,” he told his own supporters, vowing to stay the conservative course he has set.
The two other candidates, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, made little effort in either state, pointing instead to next week’s 10-state collection of Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses.
Romney’s Arizona triumph came in a race that was scarcely contested, and he pocketed all of the 29 Republican National Convention delegates at stake in the winner-take-all state.
Michigan was as different as could be – a hard-fought and expensive battle in Romney’s home state that he could ill afford to lose and Santorum made every effort to win.
Returns from 82 percent of Michigan’s precincts showed Romney at 41 percent and Santorum at 38 percent. Paul was winning 12 percent of the vote to 7 percent for Gingrich. In Arizona, with votes counted from 52 percent of the precincts, Romney had 48 percent, Santorum 26, Gingrich 16 percent and Paul 8 percent.
In Michigan, 30 delegates were apportioned according to the popular vote. Two were set aside for the winner of each of the state’s 14 congressional districts. The remaining two delegates were likely to be divided between the top finishers in the statewide vote.
With his victory in Arizona, Romney had 152 delegates, according to The AP’s count,, compared to 72 for Santorum, 32 for Gingrich and 19 for Paul. It takes 1,144 to win the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Tampa next summer.
In interviews as they left their polling places, Michigan voters expressed a notable lack of enthusiasm about their choices. Just 45 percent said they strongly favored the candidate they voted for, while 38 percent expressed reservations and 15 percent said they made the choice they did because they disliked the alternatives.
The lengthening GOP nomination struggle has coincided with a rise in Democratic President Barack Obama’s prospects for a new term. A survey released during the day showed consumer confidence at the highest level in a year, and other polls show an increase in Americans saying they believe the country is on the right track.
Along with the improving economy, the long and increasingly harsh campaign, in which Gingrich and Santorum have challenged Romney as insufficiently conservative, has prompted some officials to express concern about the party’s chances of defeating Obama in the fall.
Exit polling showed a plurality of Republican voters in both Michigan and Arizona saying the most important factor to them in the primaries was that a candidate be able to beat Obama in November. Romney won that group in Michigan, where it mattered most, and also prevailed among voters in the state who said experience was the quality that mattered most.
Santorum ran particularly well among voters who cited a desire for strong conservatism or strong moral character.
The polls surveyed both primary day and absentee or early voters. Interviews were conducted at 30 polling places in each state. Early results from Arizona’s poll included interviews with 1,617 voters, including 601 absentee or early voters interviewed by phone. In Michigan it was 2,133 interviews including 412 absentee or early voters interviewed by telephone. The margin of sampling error for both polls was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Not even the opening of polls on Tuesday brought an end to the squabbling between the two leading Republicans.
Romney accused Santorum of trying to hijack a victory in Michigan by courting Democratic votes through automated telephone calls and suggested his rival was appealing to conservatives by making the kind of “incendiary” statements he would not.
“I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support,” Romney said. “I am what I am.”
Santorum brushed aside the allegations of hijacking, saying Romney had appealed for support from independents in earlier states.
“We’re going to get voters that we need to be able to win this election. And we’re going to do that here in Michigan today,” Santorum said, referring to blue collar voters with a history of swinging between the parties.
The exit poll said about 10 percent of the day’s Michigan primary voters were Democrats.
If nothing else, the unexpected clash on Romney’s home field dramatized that two months into the campaign season – after nearly a dozen primaries and caucuses – the GOP race to pick an opponent for President Barack Obama remains unpredictable.
Unopposed for renomination, Obama timed a campaign-style appearance before United Auto Workers Union members in Washington for the same day as the Michigan primary. Attacking Republicans, he said assertions that union members profited from a taxpayer-paid rescue of the auto industry in 2008 are a “load of you know what.”
All of the Republicans running for the White House opposed the bailout, but even in the party’s Michigan primary a survey of voters leaving polling places showed about four in ten supported it.
Michigan loomed as a key test for Romney as he struggled to reclaim his early standing as front-runner in the race. The first of the industrial battleground states to vote in the nominating campaign, it is also the place where the former Massachusetts governor was born and where he won a primary when he first ran for the party nomination four years ago.
But Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, rolled into the state on the strength of surprising victories on Feb. 7 in caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado plus a non-binding primary in Missouri. He quickly sought to stitch together the same coalition of conservatives and tea party activists that carried him to a narrow victory in the Iowa caucuses that opened the campaign nearly two months ago.
The Michigan primary was open to Republicans or any voter who declared they were Republican for the purpose of voting, and there was precedent for an influx of outsiders influencing the outcome.
A dozen years ago, John McCain defeated the heavily favored George W. Bush, relying on the support of Michigan independents and Democrats. Exit polls then showed that Bush won 66 percent of Republican votes, while McCain won 82 percent of self-described Democrats and 67 percent of independents. Together, the non-Republican voters accounted for more than half the electorate.
In a measure this year of the state’s importance to the battle for the nomination, the two leading candidates and the super PACs that support them spent about $6 million on television advertisements, and Romney and Santorum spent much of the past 10 days crisscrossing the state in search of support.
Arizona was Romney’s to lose, judging by the behavior of his rivals, who spent little time campaigning in the state and no money advertising on its television airwaves.
In all, there were 59 delegates at stake in the two states.
Arizona awarded all 29 of its delegates to the winner of the statewide vote.
In Michigan, by contrast, 30 delegates were apportioned according to the popular vote. Two were set aside for the winner of each of the state’s 14 congressional districts. The remaining two delegates were likely to be divided between the top finishers in the statewide vote.
Romney entered the night the delegate leader in The Associated Press count.
He had 123, compared to 72 for Santorum, 32 for Gingrich and 19 for Paul. It takes 1,144 to win the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Tampa next summer.
There are 40 delegates at stake in Washington caucuses on Saturday, followed by 419 on Super Tuesday, including big state primaries in Ohio and Georgia.
Already, the television advertising wars were under way. Romney and restore Our Future, the super PAC that supports him, have spent more than $3 million combined on ads in Ohio.
In Michigan, Santorum campaigned heavily for the support of tea party activists and other non-establishment Republicans, appearing in churches at times and often dwelling on social issues, as is his custom. In a string of attention-gathering remarks in the race’s final days, he said Obama was a snob who wanted everyone to attend college, said he nearly threw up over a speech that candidate John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 about the separation of church and state, and said Romney was uniquely unqualified to defeat Obama because the two men shared so much in common on issues like health care.
The former Massachusetts governor made a play for tea party support, too, at a pair of appearances, but for the most part campaigned on his pledge to use his background as a successful businessman to help create jobs and fix the economy. Last week, he issued a call for 20 percent across-the-board cuts in personal income tax rates.
But he was hampered by off-the-cuff comments that reinforced his difficulty in reaching out to struggling voters in a state with 9.3 percent unemployment. He said at one point that his wife drives a couple of Cadillacs, and at another that he was friends with some of the owners of NASCAR teams.
At a rare news conference after the polls opened on Tuesday, he conceded that his own mistakes had hurt his campaign.
The primaries in Michigan and Arizona were the first contests since Romney squeaked out a victory over Paul in the Maine caucuses on Feb. 11, a lull of two and a half weeks.
Except for a debate in Arizona last Wednesday and a brief burst of campaigning in the hours before and after, Romney and Santorum have focused their time and campaign money on Michigan.
Polls showed Santorum racing to a large advantage after his victories on Feb. 7, before the weight of attack ads by a Romney-aligned super PAC and the candidate himself began to narrow and finally erase the gap in many surveys.
In the end, the combination of Romney and the outside group accounted for about $3.8 million in TV ads, compared to about $2.2 million for Santorum and a super PAC supporting him.
While that gave Romney an advantage, it wasn’t nearly as lopsided as in some of the earlier states.
—
Kasie Hunt reported from Michigan
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