Supreme Court to Weigh Race in College Admissions By ADAM LIPTAK JUNE 29, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take a second look at the use of race in admissions decisions by the University of Texas at Austin, reviving a potent challenge to affirmative action in higher education.

The move, which supporters of race-conscious admissions programs called baffling and ominous, signaled that the court may limit or even end such affirmative action. …

A decision barring the use of race in admissions would undo a 2003 ruling that the majority said it expected to last for 25 years. In that 5-to-4 decision, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court said that public colleges and universities could not use a point system to increase minority enrollment but could take race into account in vaguer ways to ensure academic diversity. …

In 2003, the Supreme Court endorsed such holistic admissions programs in Grutter v. Bollinger, saying it was permissible to consider race as one factor among many to achieve educational diversity. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said she expected that “25 years from now,” the “use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

How’s that going anyway? We’re hearing fewer and fewer complaints from blacks all the time, right? You never hear about slavery and Jim Crow anymore, do you, what with them receding ever further into the distant past, so I guess it would be noncontroversial if the Supreme Court were to junk affirmative action in 2015. Of course, if the Supreme Court were to announce that, in accordance with O’Connor’s 2003 statement, affirmative action would be abolished as of 12.5 years from now, then there would be no objection whatsoever, right?

I wrote in VDARE over 12 years ago:

O’Connor would be 98 years old in 2028. So she’s probably not expecting to suffer any embarrassment in case her prediction doesn’t come true. But even she might not have been so glib if she knew psychometricians are already able to test her test score forecast. And the prognosis looks bad.

Age three is the first point at which children can be effectively tested for mental aptitude. Unfortunately for O’Connor, the racial gaps that cause demand for quotas are already [PDF] apparent among preschoolers.

Some of the kids who will be applying to law school in 2028 are already alive. The rest will be born fairly soon. Unless the race gap in aptitude among toddlers suddenly, miraculously, vanishes in the next few years, there’s no hope for O’Connor’s forecast.