The Supreme Court is revisiting the issue of racial preferences in higher education. The last time it did so, in 2016, it upheld them by a 4-3 vote. All three dissenters are still on the court, along with three new conservative colleagues. In this term’s cases, involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Students for Fair Admissions asks the justices to hold that racial preferences violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, when practiced by public institutions, the 14th Amendment. The common expectation is that they will do so and definitively overturn 45 years of precedent permitting colleges and universities to discriminate in the interest of achieving “the educational benefits of a diverse student body.”

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