How the Supreme Court's Affirmative Action ruling might affect FAMU

The U.S. Supreme Court has settled a decades long debate over affirmative action, ruling Thursday that public and private universities may no longer use race or ethnicity as a factor when deciding who gets in.

The decision will reshape admissions at many of the nation’s top universities, but will have little impact in Florida, where race-conscious admissions have been banned at the state’s public universities since a 1999 executive order signed by then-Gov. Jeb Bush.

Florida is just one of a handful of states that prohibit race-based admissions.  

In the years following the 1999 executive order, called One Florida, overall representation of Black and Hispanic students at the state’s public universities did fall relative to population, but that wasn’t true everywhere. Some schools, including the University of Florida, actually made gains in Black and Hispanic representation.

However, over the past decade, the gap has widened between Black and Hispanic students and their white counterparts. And without race-conscious admissions, some worry that the state lacks the ability to address that inequality.

The One Florida Plan
One Florida was hastily assembled in order to preempt an impending ballot measure, which some speculated could turn out Black democratic voters, potentially swinging the state against George W. Bush in the razor-close 2000 election.
 
The executive order was drafted with little involvement from education officials, students or professors and quickly drew backlash from state Democratic lawmakers, who at one point staged a sit-in outside Bush’s Tallahassee office.

The governor’s plan would replace race-based admissions with a guarantee that the top 20% of graduates at every Florida high school would be admitted to at least one of the state’s public universities.

At the time, students and college officials worried that the move would push Black and Hispanic students out of the state system, or shift them to the state’s less selective institutions, similarly to what happened in California, which banned race-conscious admissions the year before.

Still, most university presidents reacted positively to the plan, and the state university system’s governing body, then called the Board of Regents, approved the governor’s plan unanimously.

The one dissenting voice was Charles E. Young, then-interim president at the University of Florida, who told faculty members that the plan could hurt minority enrollment at the university, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The school’s tough admissions standards could make it difficult to maintain diversity, Young told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000.

In the spring of 2021, 1 in 5 seniors from Florida public high schools were Black. That fall, they made up just 1 in 10 freshmen at one of Florida’s 12 public universities.

From 2010 to 2021, the share of freshmen at the University of Florida who are Black fell by half, from 9% to under 5%. At the University of South Florida, the share fell from 11.5% to 7.2% over the same span.

It’s a persistent gap that shows little sign of closing systemwide. Part of the issue may be that it’s harder to get into Florida’s public universities, with the state’s new performance based funding (PBF) model.  As FAMU, and Florida’s other public universities seek to climb in national rankings, and perform well on the PBF metric, entrance into those schools is becoming more competitive.

In 1999, the year One Florida was signed, 69% of freshmen students at UF were in the top 10% of their graduating class. By 2020, that number had climbed to 82%, according to university data.

At FAMU the number of freshman students in the top 10% of their graduating class in 2022 was 15%, down from 21% in 2021, and down from 16% in 2013, according to university data.