Following the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday that upholds the legality of affirmative action in college admissions, Twitter users showcased their glee by using a hashtag calling out the case’s plaintiff.
Abigail Fisher, a native of Sugar Land, Texas, sued the University of Texas for denying her admission to its Austin flagship campus in 2008. High school seniors in Texas who are in the top 10 percent of their graduating class are granted admission to any state university, and Fisher did not make that cut.
After allocating slots reserved for the Top Ten program, UT then scores and considers applicants based on an Academic Index and a Personal Achievement Index. These measurements — which consider such things as class rank, standardized …show more content…
But Fisher believed she wasn’t admitted because of affirmative action, and argued that black and Hispanic students with lower grades had been accepted to the university instead of her.
One black and four Hispanic applicants with test scores and grades lower than Fisher’s were admitted in 2008, UT said in court filings. However, so were 42 white applicants. Additionally, 168 black and Hispanic applicants “in this pool who had combined AI/PAI scores identical to or higher than [Fisher’s] were denied admission” that year, UT said.
The university added that it had offered Fisher the chance to participate in its Coordinated Admissions Program, which admits Texas residents to the school for their sophomore year if they finish 30 credits at another UT System campus and keep up a 3.2 GPA. Fisher declined that, and went on to attend and graduate from Louisiana State University.
The Fisher case was larger than one white woman applying to a competitive state university. The lawsuit argued that affirmative action was violating the constitutional rights of white Americans under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause when government officials consider race in a way that might help blacks and Latinos, ProPublica reported in
Abigail Fisher, a native of Sugar Land, Texas, sued the University of Texas for denying her admission to its Austin flagship campus in 2008. High school seniors in Texas who are in the top 10 percent of their graduating class are granted admission to any state university, and Fisher did not make that cut.
After allocating slots reserved for the Top Ten program, UT then scores and considers applicants based on an Academic Index and a Personal Achievement Index. These measurements — which consider such things as class rank, standardized …show more content…
But Fisher believed she wasn’t admitted because of affirmative action, and argued that black and Hispanic students with lower grades had been accepted to the university instead of her.
One black and four Hispanic applicants with test scores and grades lower than Fisher’s were admitted in 2008, UT said in court filings. However, so were 42 white applicants. Additionally, 168 black and Hispanic applicants “in this pool who had combined AI/PAI scores identical to or higher than [Fisher’s] were denied admission” that year, UT said.
The university added that it had offered Fisher the chance to participate in its Coordinated Admissions Program, which admits Texas residents to the school for their sophomore year if they finish 30 credits at another UT System campus and keep up a 3.2 GPA. Fisher declined that, and went on to attend and graduate from Louisiana State University.
The Fisher case was larger than one white woman applying to a competitive state university. The lawsuit argued that affirmative action was violating the constitutional rights of white Americans under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause when government officials consider race in a way that might help blacks and Latinos, ProPublica reported in