The Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear a challenge to new admissions criteria at an elite public high school in Virginia that eliminated standardized tests, clearing the way for the use of a policy intended to diversify the school’s student body.
As is its custom, the court gave no reasons for turning down the case. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. issued a dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, that was harshly critical of an appeals court’s ruling in the case upholding the new criteria and rejecting the challengers’ argument that they unlawfully disadvantaged Asian Americans.
The Supreme Court’s “willingness to swallow the aberrant decision below is hard to understand,” Justice Alito wrote. “We should wipe the decision off the books, and because the court refuses to do so, I must respectfully dissent.”
The Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina in June but left open the constitutionality of admissions standards that do not directly account for race in trying to diversify enrollment. Still, the majority opinion, by Chief Justice John. G. Roberts, quoted an earlier ruling that stated, “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”
The court’s decision not to take up the case from Virginia, along with an order this month declining to block West Point’s race-conscious admissions program, suggests that most of the justices are not eager to take immediate steps to explore the limits of its ruling from June.
The revisions to the Virginia admissions program followed protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Amid concerns about how few Black and Hispanic students attended the school, one of the country’s top public high schools, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., adopted what it said were race-neutral admissions standards. The school board did away with a rigorous entrance examination and offered admission to the top students from each middle school in the area rather than the top applicants from any school.