By Garrett Snedeker
Now that the first slate of undergraduate admissions statistics following the Supreme Court's decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its companion case has been released, it is clear that elite colleges are following one of two paths.
The first path is largely one of prudential compliance with the Court's ruling. Elite colleges following the first path feature incoming classes of first-year students with higher proportions of Asian and white students than in previous classes while maintaining stellar secondary school class rank and standardized test scores. Call this the path of least resistance, demonstrating prima facie that these colleges' admissions practices hew toward the race-neutrality the SFFA decision requires.
The second path is one of greater resistance toward the Court's ruling. With the composition of incoming classes of first-year students unchanged from previous admissions cycles or even in some cases featuring increased numbers of black and Hispanic students, elite colleges following the second path are taking increased risks of future litigation. Such litigation, even if unwelcome, would demonstrate fidelity to a regime that preserves race-based affirmative action and quotas, in spirit if not in name.
Affirmative action in college admissions has redounded toward greater percentages of black and Hispanic students, to the detriment of Asian-American and white applicants. The problem at root though is that race-conscious admissions, a group quota regime which Tom Klingenstein has rightly decried on this website and in his public remarks, runs contrary to the first principles of moral and legal judgment. As philosopher Hadley Arkes has observed, "It is the fallacy of assuming that we can draw moral inferences about persons, their goodness or badness, their moral deserts, as though race determined or controlled their conduct and character." | 
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