Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/117

Rh admissions policies mandate that race is taken into consideration” in this process as a “ ‘plus’ facto[r].” Id., at 594–595. It is a plus that is “sometimes” awarded to “underrepresented minority” or “URM” candidates—a group UNC defines to include “ ‘those students identifying themselves as African American or [B]lack; American Indian or Alaska Native; or Hispanic, Latino, or Latina,’ ” but not Asian or white students. Id., at 591–592, n. 7, 601.

At UNC, the admissions officers’ decisions to admit or deny are “ ‘provisionally final.’ ” (opinion for the Court). The decisions become truly final only after a committee approves or rejects them. 567 F. Supp. 3d, at 599. That committee may consider an applicant’s race too. Id., at 607. In the end, the district court found that “race plays a role”—perhaps even “a determinative role”—in the decision to admit or deny some “URM students.” Id., at 634; see also id., at 662 (“race may tip the scale”). Nor is this an accident. As at Harvard, officials at UNC have made a “deliberate decision” to employ race-conscious admissions practices. Id., at 588–589.

While the district courts’ findings tell the full story, one can also get a glimpse from aggregate statistics. Consider the chart in the Court’s opinion collecting Harvard’s data for the period 2009 to 2018. The racial composition of each incoming class remained steady over that time—remarkably so. The proportion of African Americans hovered between 10% and 12%; the proportion of Hispanics between 8% and 12%; and the proportion of Asian Americans between 17% and 20%. Ibid. Might this merely reflect the demographics of the school’s applicant pool? Cf. (opinion of ). Perhaps—at least assuming the applicant pool looks much the same each year and the school rather mechanically admits applicants based on objective criteria. But the possibility that it instead betrays the school’s persistent focus on numbers of this race and numbers of that race is entirely consistent with the findings