Court to review Texas racial preference plan

The Supreme Court announced today that it granted the petition for certiorari filed by the plantiffs in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case which challenges the use of racial preferences in UT’s undergraduate college.  The case is an opportunity for the Court to revisit its 2003 ruling in CIR’s case, Grutter v. Bollinger.  In Grutter, the Court ruled that schools may take race into account in order to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.  After Grutter, the University of Texas re-instituted the use of race in admission to supplement the racial diversity it already was achieving through use of the so-called “Ten Percent Plan,” which provided for near-automatic admission of every applicant who graduated in the top ten percent of their Texas high school class.  In addition, UT began to take race into account as a plus factor in evaluating individual applicants.  The plaintiffs are asking the Supreme Court to rule that the additional use of race to evaluate individual applicants over and above the the Ten-Percent plan to achieve racial diversity was unconstitutional.