TrulyGrace

The court’s three liberals dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench, a rare move that signals deep disagreement. “Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote.

She added that the ruling “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

Whether a justice views affirmative action as positive or negative appears to hinge on whether he or she primarily sees it as holding down or pulling up prospective students. The majority and concurring opinions focused on affirmative action’s downsides for white and Asian students, while the dissents focused on the benefits to Black and Latino students. The disagreement comes down to which effect someone believes matters more.

What comes next

Some states have already banned race-based affirmative action, offering real-world examples of what could happen. Many schools saw drops in Black and Latino student attendance, my colleague Stephanie Saul, who covers education, wrote. The same could happen at Harvard, North Carolina and other universities.

But one large university system, the University of California, adopted policies that helped increase the number of Black and Hispanic students after the state ended affirmative action. California’s experience indicates that schools can, if they’re willing, take steps that improve diversity even without explicitly considering race.

For most college students, the ruling will have limited direct impact. Few colleges outside of elite institutions have affirmative action policies; they accept a majority of applications.