Conrad Miller on Affirmative Action and Discrimination

Hello, and welcome to the inequality podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Durlauf, the director of the Stone Center for Research on wealth inequality and mobility. Thanks for joining us. So hello, everyone, and I'm delighted to welcome you to this, this edition of the inequality Podcast. I'm Steven Durlauf, the director of the Stone Center for Research on wealth inequality and mobility. And it's a real pleasure to introduce Conrad Miller. Conrad is an associate professor at the Haas School at UC Berkeley and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is one of the leading figures in what I'm going to call the young generation of inequality scholars and has done foundational work on important dimensions of both racial and group inequality. His work spans labor, economics, the economics of crime, and is really already become fundamental to understand contemporary understandings of inequality. I can also say as an anecdote, I first met Conrad Murray was on the job market and visited me when I visited the University of Wisconsin was on the faculty. And I don't want to embarrass him, but I can actually say it's the only time I ever walked out of a job talk, and said, that paper is not really very of highest quality, it's important for public policy. And the reason for that is that I think it's not that uncommon to say that something is outstanding in terms of its construction, but the the topics and the the findings themselves were a first order significance. So Conrad, thanks so much for for taking the time to do this. Welcome.

Thank you, Steven, great to be here.

So I thought we could start with your paper, the persistent effect of affirmative action, obviously, with the Supreme Court decision, which is actually banned affirmative action in higher education, everything is on the table in terms of policies that, that promote diversity here, you know, heterogeneity by, by race in, in education. And presumably, there'll be subsequent decisions having to do with, with employment, that all said, is an actual to ask what the effects are of such policies. And so I thought it would be important to start with a description of the paper, both how you were able to measure the dynamic effects of affirmative action, and as well as obviously, what the findings were. Sure.

So this is a paper looking at federal affirmative action regulation that applies to firms that have significant contracts with the federal government. So federal contractors. And what I was looking at is what happens to firms that first start contracting with the federal government, what happens to the demographic composition of their workforce? The idea of these regulations is they're supposed to require federal contractors to make good faith efforts to essentially have a diverse workforce to have a workforce that reflects the composition of the local qualified workforce. And so one question is whether these regulations indeed, influence the composition of workers at these firms. And the second piece I was interested in is, well, what happens to firms that contract with the government for some period, and so they're subject to this regulation. And then after that period, stop contracting with the government, and so in a sense, become deregulated. What I found in this paper, which was using data from the late 70s, to the early aughts, is that when firms first become regulated, so when they first started doing business with the federal government, you see that indeed, the racial composition of their workforce changes in response to the regulation, the black share of their workforce begins to increase year over year. And to some extent, the Hispanic share of their workforce is also increasing year over year. Probably the more surprising fact, though, was that, for firms that stopped doing business with the federal government, and so became deregulated, you actually see that the black and Hispanic Sheriff there were forced, actually continues to increase following their deregulation. You know, it's not immediately clear why a temporary regulation would have a persistent effect on what these firms are doing. You might have expected that prior to these firms facing any regulation, they were hiring whoever they thought, made sense for their workforce. And so you might expect them to revert back to whatever they were doing pre regulation. But instead, what I found was that these four firms appear to be continuing on whatever trajectory, the affirmative action, affirmative action regulation put them on in the first place.

You know, one of the reasons why I think this paper is so important is it demonstrated the importance of information and the consequences of segregation and desiccating information sets. And so the interpretation that you developed in the paper is that firms had adverse priors. Again, with respect to African Americans, they had data as a result of the hiring, and, and those, those priors updated. That's an extremely important message for thinking about 21st century disparities, and that is that these interventions created a wedge between priors and posteriors. And so might you think about the consequences for thinking about integration as a redistributed policy? Yes,

so I think I think what you're landing on is one potential interpretation for this persistence result. You know, part of that process of, of hiring of screening involves making some guess about how productive someone is based on their application. And, you know, there might be some statistical discrimination involved with that, where you say, well, this, this applicant is from this group, on average, I think this group is less productive or less well matched for my job. And so I'm going to base some of my guests for how productive this person is based on their group identity. Often we assume those guesses are correct on average. But, you know, there's also good reason to think there are many instances when they won't be correct, on average. And so when affirmative action regulation might lead firms to update their beliefs about these groups of employees, I think another type of explanation here is that that model of hiring that I described is much too static, in the sense that, you know, firms can do a lot of different things to change the set of people they recruiting, to change how they're screening, how they're deciding who's a good, who's a good fit, and who isn't. And firms are not fixed in their hiring practices. So one example of this might be, you know, a firm prior to any affirmative action regulation tends to recruit their applicants from some particular set of schools or some other set of firms, some neighborhood, and it might make perfect sense to hire from that limited set of pipelines, because you know, those pipelines are providing exactly the set of workers you need, maybe opening up to other schools, other pipelines is costly in some way. And so in the absence of any intervention, there's no reason to pay that cost and recruit more broadly. But what could happen in response to affirmative action regulation is that that firm might decide, well, if I need to recruit a more diverse set of applicants, one thing I can do beyond just changing the hiring standards I apply to different groups, is I can recruit more broadly. Or I can develop a pipeline through some other set of schools or some other set of neighborhoods. And what might happen is that there's some costs associated with doing that. But that cost can be relatively fixed in the sense that once you pay that cost, as a way of compliance with this regulation, even when I am no longer a contractor, it's are no longer am directly incentivized to have a particularly diverse workforce. I've already opened up those pipelines that may be in my interest to continue using them continue those hiring practices.

So that actually leads to a second paper of yours the dynamics of referral hiring and racial inequality evidence from Brazil. And I guess the maybe the way that I would make the segue is to say that the A key message I took from the first paper is the role of what I'm going to economy jargon called adverse priors with respect to certain groups which update because of the generation of information I think adverse priors is a is a very neutral way to say what a prejudice is. The second paper emphasizes the issue of heterogeneity of information flows, in other words, the role which is of course, low lineage and in, in, in social networks, for example, in transferring information about labor markets and the like. And so can you tell tell us about the structure of that paper and the main findings that you have?

What we look at in Brazil, the stylized fact that we start off with in this paper, is that if you look at a given set of firms, the racial composition of that firm's employees changes systematically, the more and more hires that that firm makes. You know, if you look at the initial hires that affirmed the average firm makes in Brazil, the non white share of their hires is about 40%. And whereas once you look at about the 500 hire that one of these firms makes the non white share increases to about 4046 47%. And it turns out that that pattern holds, even if you control for things like occupation, you know, these firms are operating the same market. And so in a lot of ways, the types of workers that these firms are hiring is not changing, they have probably similar labor needs, early versus late in the firm's lifecycle, yet the racial composition of the people that they're hiring is changing in this systematic way. What we were interested in in this paper is what explains that stylized fact. The first is that there are big racial differences in entrepreneurship. In Brazil, most founders are white. The second ingredient is that it looks like the composition of a firm's workforce affects the composition of the hires that that firm makes in the future. So there's a few reasons that might be the case. You know, one reason would simply be something like referral hiring, where referral hires are going to typically be drawn from incumbent employees at a firm. So that means if a firm is disproportionately white today, you would expect a disproportionate share of their referral hires in the future to also be white, same same would be true if the firm were initially disproportionately nonwhite. But people have also kind of documented other mechanisms that would generate kind of similar patterns. So for example, it could be managers, for whatever reason, a manager for one group is going to tend to hire people from the same group, not necessarily because of social networks, but maybe you know, they, they just have a preference, they have a discriminatory preference for working with people from that group. Maybe they're better at screening people from that group for reasons that are not you know about prejudice, per se, but just about the ability to communicate in your language, cultural differences. It could also be that people are just more productive when they're working with people from the same group. Whatever story like that you want, you could get this kind of this kind of implication where you'd expect composition of workforce today effects composition of people hire tomorrow. It turns out that stylized spec looks quite different if you compare firms with white founders versus non white founders. So initially, these firms look quite different in the racial composition of their workforce firms with non white founders. Their early hires are disproportionately nonwhite firms with white half of white founders, their initial hires are disproportionately white. But what you see is that, as those firms make more and more hires, the racial composition of their workforce actually tends to converge. You know, after 400 hires or so actually, the racial composition of these firms next hire is close to uncorrelated with the race of their initial founder. I think that potentially has interesting implications for interpreting affirmative action type interventions here. So the fact that firms over time are initially going to become non white, more non white in the absence of any intervention suggests that well, an intervention might speed along that process, in a way that's less distortionary than you might have been concerned about to begin with.

So one thing I take from both the reformative action paper and the network's paper is that they're again, they're they're demonstrations of the importance of what, what I in some others called bottlenecks. In other words, are there certain configurations of social and for that matter, family circumstances, just make the conditional probabilities of upward mobility relatively unlikely they can be across generations within the life course. It struck me that you have another example of a bottleneck, which is the issue of spatial of space. And so there was an old idea of the so called spatial mismatch hypothesis that argued the locations of jobs and locations of people were sufficiently disparate that That by itself could produce black white inequality, you've actually helped to resuscitate that as a as an important mechanism for inequality in the paper. When work moves jobs, suburbanization and black employment, so I was hoping you could talk a bit about that paper next.

So this is a hypothesis dating back to John came in late 60s. And part of the idea here is that this is during a period where you saw a lot of movement of work from the central cities of metropolitan areas, to suburban areas. At the same time, most black households were typically concentrated in the central city. So you have you've potentially jobs moving away from these areas, where black households tend to be concentrated. And so what I did was I treated my A unit of observation here as the metropolitan area. And what I used was the fact that in some metropolitan areas from, in my cases, looking at 1970 to about 2000, some metropolitan areas experienced more jobs suburbanization than others. And so the idea was, let's see whether areas that experience more jobs, suburbanization, also experienced differential changes in racial inequality, in particular unemployment rates, but also in in earnings as well. So what you see is that, indeed, when firms move to the suburbs to black shirt, their workforce changes, you also see just cross sectionally, for the same types of work. firms in the same metropolitan area that are located closer to the central city have more black workers and firms located further away from the central city. And so at least at the firm level, this idea that jobs, urbanisation potentially reduces black employment seems to play out, nothing can do is try and find some exogenous source of variation in zombie jobs and reposition across metropolitan areas. So that's one thing I do building on prior work, I use the fact that metropolitan areas that were more exposed to the interstate highway system tend to experience more jobs of urbanization than metropolitan areas that are less exposed. And from that kind of variation, you see exactly the same pattern. So for reasons that are outside of local labor market concerns, you see places that experience more jobs, urbanization, due to interstate highway construction, also see bigger relative increases, or relative decreases in black employment rates. But you know, it is the case that there are people that are commuting from the central city to the suburbs during this period. It's not as though that's something that is impossible, but it is, it does have frictions associated with it that seem to reduce black employment in the aggregate.

And I also thought it was an important observation that in talking about the location of the jobs, that's a partial equilibrium effect, the other location of people, yes, and if, if you have an increase in racial residential segregation, as a consequence to public to the highway system, or what have you, the net effects in terms of labor market allocation become ambiguous. And so that, again, strikes me as a very interesting direction for future research. So I thought we might turn to your work on gender discrimination, and perhaps draw a contrast in terms of thinking about gender versus races, as foci of discrimination and inequality.

Sure, so in this paper, is looking at quite different contexts, we're looking at gender inequality in Saudi Arabia. So Saudi Arabia, like many countries in the Middle East, and as well as South Asia has very low female labor force participation rates, very low employment rates among among women. And there's a lot of focus on supply side factors, including gender norms, you know, could just be about it not being socially acceptable for women to work. But what we're interested in is, well, how much can those social norms also affect the demand side, and in Saudi Arabia, it's, there's some some clear reasons to think firms are also affected by these norms. So in particular, as far as a firm in Saudi Arabia, if you want it to operate business, and employ both men and women, historically, there would have been rules around this. But at least, you know, informal social norms would also play a similar role, there might be rules around how much interaction between men and women is socially permissible within that firm. So that even if I wanted to hire both men and women for positions in my company, there might be some costs associated with doing that, to the extent that, you know, I might need to have separate facilities for men and women, I might need to have some extreme cases, you know, separate floors for my employees that are men and women. And so what we thought is that you could think of that as just a fixed cost associated with employing both men and women that firms need to pay. And in response to that fixed costs, what might happen is that a firm that in the absence of those costs, would want to employ both men and women might instead decide to be completely gender segregated, particularly they might decide to only hire men. And what we found, which was consistent with this idea is that you see, basically much more for many more firms with exactly zero women working there than you would expect by chance, given the occupational mix that that firm has. What you also see is that for firms that do hire both men and women, the composition of their workforce looks a lot more like what you would expect to happen by chains in the sense that welcome hiring both men and women 50% of people and that, in this particular position are women in that local labor market. Well, what you'll see is that roughly 15% of their workforce in that position, are going to be women. During our period of study, Saudi Arabia introduces this program nit the cot, which was a gender neutral program, but was intended to get more Saudi nationals working in the private sector. So as sort of an affirmative action policy for Saudi nationals relative to a workforce that was predominantly migrant workers, what you see in response to that, now that I incentivize to hire more Saudis, what I could do in response to that is I could, I could simply, you know, if I was only hiring men to begin with, I could just continue doing that and continue only drawing from the male workforce. But now that the pool of people now that the number of positions I need to fill grows, actually, it might make more sense for me to actually pay that fixed costs, and just operate a workforce that has both men and women. So if I only had to hire one person, maybe that fixed cost isn't worth paying. But if I have to hire 10. Now, maybe that is something worth considering. Consistent with that type of story, what you see is that in responses, regulation, firms that are now incentivized to hire more Saudis are much more likely to inter integrate along gender lines, and hire more women. And you actually can see this in the aggregate so that after the introduction of this policy, you see the female share of the workforce in the private sector, increasing more than doubling in a few years after the introduction of this, this policy. So again, this, I think, is another story where you might think a firm has some kind of natural composition dictated by their labor needs. But again, this is a situation where the same firm can look very different, depending on whether there's some sort of intervention, or basically whether a firm has decided that they're going to be in one regime versus the other.

So I was hoping the last thing we could talk about is your work on criminal justice, which of course has essential way inequality dimensions to it. And they're one of the important contributions you've made is to actually directly tackle the so called equity efficiency trade off. And so I really wanted to hear about that or ask you to share with the audience, the work you did on traffic stops and how you went about assessing whether there's like a trade off exists.

Yes. So the context that we were studying is, you're stopped for speeding, or some other sort of traffic or regulatory violation. In some percentage of those stops, police will search a car or the driver passenger for some form of contraband, typically, drugs or weapons. And what you see is there big racial differences in the rates at which people are subjected to these searches? In addition to those differences in search rate, you'll often see reports on how often those searches actually yield some kind of contraband. So we often call this in the literature, the hit rate. And typically, what you'll see there is that the hit rate for black and Hispanic motorists tends to be equal to or lower than the hit rate for white motorists. A common reading of that finding would be that well, that suggests there's something inequitable happening here in the sense that you're searching Black and Hispanic motorists more often, but those searches are not more likely to be successful. Right? So you could have thought, well, it could be that black and Hispanic voters are searched more often because they're indeed more likely to carry contraband. And so there's a sense in which they should be searched more often. But that doesn't seem to be borne out by the fact that these searches on average, are not more productive. Another interpretation of that findings, a more kind of skeptical one. And that's that, well, this actually isn't enough information to determine whether there's any sort of discrimination or inefficient profiling occurring here. Because what I really want to know is how productive is the marginal search, you know, what's the search that you were just kind of on the border on the boundary of conducting or not, you know, you weren't quite sure whether it's worth making the search or not, but this person is just suspicious enough that I'm going to conduct a search. You want to know how successful those searches are? Because what a nondiscriminatory police officers should be doing if they're trying to maximize the amount of contraband they find is setting the same threshold, or the same kind of criteria for motorists from different racial groups when deciding whether to serve someone. So what we did in this paper was try and tackle this idea directly. We tried to think is there a way we could identify? Is there a way we can identify whether police officers are setting different thresholds for different groups. So in particular, are there differences in the hit rates at the margin for Black, Hispanic white motorists? The way we do that, is we use the fact that police officers vary quite a bit in how often they're searching people. So the context, we're studying this paper with data from Texas Highway Patrol on every stop, they're conducting. And it turns out that, you know, some state troopers search motorists in 1% of stops, some troopers searched and 5% some troopers search and 10% of stops. So the idea is, you know, if I see someone who searches 5% of the time, if I compare them to someone who searches 10% of the time, and I compare how often they're finding contraband, I should be kind of identifying the set of people who the low search propensity Trooper decided not to search. But the high search propensity Trooper decided to search and then in some sense identifies a marginal group of motorists where whether their search or not depends on who actually stops, then what you would expect is you'd expect that well, troopers that search more often should find contraband less often. Because you expect is if I'm searching more often, that must mean that I'm searching people who are less suspicious than the people that a low searching, YouTuber or searching, right if I only search 1% of time, I must only be searching the most suspicious people where someone's searching 10% of time is searching a much broader group of people. So what that would predict is this decreasing relationship between how often your searches are successful and how often you're searching overall. Instead, what you see is actually that relationship is basically flat, the troopers that search more often, their hit rate is about the same as the hit rate for troopers that search less often. And that's true. When you look at White motors. That's true when you look at black motors, Hispanic motors. And what that means is that you could change how often you're searching one group of motors versus another, without actually affecting how successful your searches are, on average, what we find is that troopers could search black motors less often achieved the same hit rate, and they could search white motorists more often and achieve roughly the same hit rate. In that sense, there is no equity efficiency trade off, you could have search rates that are more equitable, while the overall amount of contraband you're finding is unchanged.

But I think that's a very important finding and to be somewhat self serving in my own writings about racial profiling. You know, I've argued that the key ethical issue is whether innocent people are treated the same regardless of race. And yours is a perfect demonstration. That simply is not the case. Because if I could reallocate that, by implication says that conditional probabilities of innocent people being searched are currently unequal. And I can equalize them with no efficiency cost, as you said. So it seems that that pretty much speaks to the I think some of the underlying key ethical issues. Conrad, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I have to say, I'm really delighted that you're a member of the Advisory Committee for the Stone Center. So let me do a little promotion of of the center. But the most important thing is very grateful that you shared this wonderful research with us. Thank you.

Thank you. Great to be here.

We'll hear argument next in Case 2011 99 students for fair admissions versus the president and fellows of Harvard College. Mr. Norris.

29:08

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court

just over one year ago, in the fall of 2022, Supreme Court heard opening arguments for two cases that would prove incredibly consequential for the role of affirmative action in higher education and none of better students for fair admissions. A conservative nonprofit advocacy organization sued two elite universities, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and alleged that their admission processes were unconstitutional and negatively impacted certain minority groups, namely Asian Americans, because Harvard gives them so much has been said about these court cases and their subsequent rulings primarily on the legacy of affirmative action. In fact, Professor Durlauf recently shared the stage with Brown University economist Glenn Lowry to discuss this topic. It's certainly a hot button issue, but it's also highly nuanced. What precedent did the court overturn exactly what's the link? We'll basis for affirmative action, and how if past rulings affected affirmative action as it relates to hiring and employment. For this episode segment, I'll try to answer these questions as I dig into the legal history and background surrounding affirmative action. Our journey starts in 1868. When the United States added the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the second sentence of Section One has come to be known as the Equal Protection Clause and reads, No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. This clause in the 52 words that comprise it would be used as the legal basis for many of the most important Supreme Court decisions, including those regarding discriminatory intent given to one's identity, such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. With that foundational law in mind, let's jump forward now almost 100 years to 1961, which marks the first use of the term affirmative action. It appeared in executive order 109 to five, issued by President John F. Kennedy, which required government contractors to take, quote, affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated fairly without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin, under which we live. And two years later, in a televised address, Kennedy urged Congress to enact legislation that would further outlawed discrimination the

country wronged or inflicted on Negro citizens, and there are no remedies at law unless the Congress acts, their only remedy is the street. I am therefore asking the Congress to enact legislation.

This inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was actually passed during Lyndon Johnson's administration, and in it, Title Seven specifically prohibits hiring discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. This act applied to both public and private sector employers with 25 or more employees, a number that was later lowered to 15 employees in the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. But back in 1965, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which required companies that receive over $10,000 in government contracts to have a written formal affirmative action plan with goals and timetables to fully utilize women and minority status employees. This is notable because it's the first implementation of an affirmative action program where we see a reference to racial quotas. These executive orders, congressional acts and constitutional amendments collectively serve as the legal basis for affirmative action. However, as we'll see, the Supreme Court has most heavily relied on two things, the Equal Protection Clause and Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act. Okay, so now let's look at some important cases. We'll start with the role of affirmative action in hiring. The earliest notable case teamsters versus the United States came in 1977, the federal government had accused the teamsters a nationwide carrier of motor freight have systematically discriminating against black and Hispanic workers by allowing them to occupy only the lowest paying positions, while reserving higher paying jobs for whites. The Court sided with the government in a seven two decision, noting that the teamsters had in fact discriminated against minority employees and had violated Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act. The ruling also allowed these workers to be retro actively compensated for the mistreatment, even if they personally hadn't applied for the higher paying positions. Next came Connecticut first teeth, argued in 1982, a Connecticut state agency had required conditionally promoted supervisors to pass a written test as one requirement before being awarded permanent status. Black employees failed this test at higher rates than whites, and some of them including Winnie teal, sued the state. As their defense the agency argued that they had an affirmative action program in place and later found that the results of the multi step promotion process actually benefited more black applicants than white applicants. However, the court was not convinced with this argument. They ruled that discriminatory components of an otherwise positive program still violated Title Seven. This was supported by the fact that the courts determined the test was arbitrary, and was not related to skills required of this supervisory. To wrap up our employment coverage, we'll look at two contrasting cases. The first Metro broadcasting versus the Federal Communications Commission centered around minority preference policies that the FCC had adopted. An important distinction in this case is that these policies weren't about hiring per se. Instead, these policies established a preference for minority owned radio or television stations. When offering licensing bids. Here, a white radio station owner felt that the policy discriminated against him. In a narrow five four ruling the Court sided with the FCC, the policy was allowed because it provided appropriate remedies for past discrimination. The court also established that policies like these and the racial categories that underpin them needed to pass what is called intermediate scrutiny, meaning that it had to show that it further an important government interest. In 1995, the court overturned this ruling and Adarand constructors vers Pena. This case dealt with government subcontractors. Under Department of Transportation Policy, contractors were provided financial incentives if they subcontracted to firms operated by, quote socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, namely Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native Americans. a subcontractor not deemed as a minority firm sued the government. And unlike their previous case, the court actually sided with the subcontractor. The equally narrow five four decision declared that race alone was insufficient to determine whether a benefactor of a policy was socially or economically disadvantaged. They also said, and this will be important that all future race based classifications had to be judged under strict scrutiny, not intermediate scrutiny. This meant that affirmative action policies had to achieve a compelling state interest, and that it had to achieve that interest in a narrowly applicable way that employed the least restrictive means. With that all in mind, let's now shift our attention to higher education, the center of the affirmative action debate today, we'll need to look back at 1978, one year after that teamsters case. 33 year old Alan Bucky was an impressive figure by any measure. He attained a 3.5 GPA and his undergrad studies, served four years in the Marine Corps, then served as a NASA engineer. Nonetheless, when he applied to medical schools, he was repeatedly turned down. One of these schools was the University of California Davis, which had established a racial quota that set a specific number of seats each year for students who declare themselves to be disadvantaged, and would have had their applications reviewed by a special committee. This was done to address the inequality of public schools that left minority students much less prepared for elite institutions like UC Davis. However, Baki felt that another consequence of this program was that it deprived him of a chance of admission despite his relatively high test scores. The surprising eight one decision from the Supreme Court effectively split the baby. They ruled that UC Davis's use of racial quotas was illegal and violated the Equal Protection Clause. They also forced the school to admit Bucky as a student. However, they ruled that affirmative action programs in general were okay, as long as strict quotas were absent. And that's how things pretty much stayed for the next 25 years. And then there was Grutter versus Bollinger, the University of Michigan's law school had implemented its own affirmative action program that gave applicants belonging to certain minority groups a plus score. In their admission, a white applicant, barber Grutter, sued the school and claimed that the policy violated the Equal Protection Clause. Here, the court was unconvinced and sided with the University of Michigan. They ruled that the law schools policy passed the strict scrutiny and furthered a compelling state interest. Furthermore, they deemed the admission process to be narrowly tailored to achieve the state interest, since it focused on the individual applicant, not a group of applicants. And it also did not diminish the chances of other non minority students. And although this case upheld precedent, it also introduced some new concepts that would go on to influence future judicial rulings. One of these concepts was over what constituted a compelling state interest was at the interest of righting the wrongs of past discrimination and allowing minorities greater access to higher education. Not exactly the actual interest, so argued the court was increasing the diversity of the student body, a more diverse student body led to a wider breadth of ideas and viewpoints, which would benefit all students and ultimately make for a better society. This may seem like hairsplitting, but it'll end up becoming an important distinction. As would that number of years I mentioned earlier 25 years Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's words would become famous. We

take the law school at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race neutral admissions formula, and will terminate its race conscious admissions program as soon as practicable. It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first suggested approval of the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity. In the context of higher education. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest that we approved today.

So that brings us back to 2022. almost 20 years after Grutter Harvard and the University of North Carolina both had affirmative action programs that they believed were narrowly tailored and adhered to prior court rulings. Students for fair admissions though, argued that the school effectively established quotas, even if those quotas didn't technically exist. The suit focused on their observation that Asian American students admission rates remained roughly the same year over year, and were dragged down by lower than average scores on their personality, despite having above average scores and other categories like testing, extracurriculars, and high school grades. The highly anticipated ruling, which fell squarely along the six three conservative and liberal ideology of the court overturned both Baki and Grutter. The court deemed that race based affirmative action policies violated the Equal Protection Clause and could no longer be instituted in admission processes. Justice Roberts, who read the majority opinion did leave open one opportunity, students can still write about personal experiences of past racial discrimination, quote, so long as the discussion is concretely tied to the quality of character or unique ability that a particular applicant can contribute to the university. And that last part is a nod to the Grettir opinion, the diversity earned by admitting such students must be able to benefit the university as a whole. And so after all, that this is where things currently stand with affirmative action. While it's still illegal with regard to hiring, there will likely be attempts by other conservative groups to challenge this in court as well. Dr. Miller's research though, might offer some optimism for whichever way things shake out. Federal Legislation promoting greater diversity in the workforce may actually serve as an impetus for companies and they may continue to seek out greater pools of candidates, even if that legislation happens to go away, or be overturned. Special thanks to philosophy's for all his help and producing this segment. More information on these important Supreme Court rulings can be found in the show notes.

The inequality Podcast is a production of the Stone Center for Research on wealth inequality and mobility at the University of Chicago. It is hosted by myself, Steven Durlauf, along with Damon Jones, Jeffrey Wodtke, and Ariel Kalil. This episode was recorded sound engineered and produced by Eric Geber with support from Gerardo Espinal Franco. Thanks as well to the center's Executive Director Grace Hammond for all her support. Please consider liking, subscribing and sharing this podcast among your friends and send any questions or feedback to UCstonecenter@gmail.com. That's all for now. Thanks for joining us.