Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/194

Rh why this Court’s precedents have never imposed the majority’s strict deadline: Institutions cannot predict the future. Speculating about a day when consideration of race will become unnecessary is arbitrary at best and frivolous at worst. There is no constitutional duty to engage in that type of shallow guesswork.

Harvard and UNC engage in the ongoing review that the Court’s precedents demand. They “use [their] data to scrutinize the fairness of [their] admissions program[s]; to assess whether changing demographics have undermined the need for a race-conscious policy; and to identify the effects, both positive and negative, of the affirmative-action measures [they] dee[m] necessary.” Fisher II, 579 U. S., at 388. The Court holds, however, that respondents’ attention to numbers amounts to unconstitutional racial balancing. But “ ‘[s]ome attention to numbers’ ” is both necessary and permissible. Grutter, 539 U. S., at 336 (quoting Bakke, 438 U. S., at 323). Universities cannot blindly operate their limited race-conscious programs without regard for any quantitative information. “Increasing minority enrollment [is] instrumental to th[e] educational benefits” that respondents seek to achieve, Fisher II, 579 U. S., at 381, and statistics, data, and numbers “have some value