Page:Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, 579 U.S. (2016) (slip opinion).pdf/31

Rh

neutral AI/PAI system—UT’s entering class was 4.5% African-American, 17.9% Asian-American, and 16.9% Hispanic. Supp. App. 156a. The 2004 entering class thus had a higher percentage of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanics than the class that entered in 1996, when UT had last employed racial preferences.

Notwithstanding these lauded results, UT leapt at the opportunity to reinsert race into the process. On June 23, 2003, this Court decided Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306 (2003), which upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s race-conscious admissions system. In Grutter, the Court warned that a university contemplating the consideration of race as part of its admissions process must engage in “serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives that will achieve the diversity the university seeks.” Id., at 339. Nevertheless, on the very day Grutter was handed down, UT’s president announced that “[t]he University of Texas at Austin will modify its admissions procedures” in light of Grutter, including by “implementing procedures at the undergraduate level that combine the benefits of the Top 10 Percent Law with affirmative action programs.” App. 406a–407a (emphasis added). UT purports to have later engaged in