In the past, minorities have been discriminated and underrepresented on college campuses. Much of this is a result of the Jim Crow laws that kept African Americans and whites in segregated schools, preventing blacks from receiving an equal education. It wasn’t until the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that education opportunities for minorities began to change. The Brown decision in 1954 ruled that schools had to begin dismantling segregation, citing the idea “separate but equal,” was actually far from equal. Then in 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which bared discrimination by federally funded colleges. The Civil Rights Act was the base behind the creation of affirmative action, a policy President Johnson greatly supported. “You do not take a person, Johnson said, who for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, You are free to compete with all the others; and still justly believe you have been completely fair” (Jost, 745). Thus, in the sixties many colleges began using affirmative action programs to raise the number of minorities enrolled. However, starting in the nineties, race-based admission policies began receiving a lot of criticism from people claiming that affirmative action only added to racism.

As a result of race being a factor used in determining whether or not universities accept specific applicants, numerous lawsuits have been filed claiming that race-based decisions are unconstitutional, violating the fourteenth amendment. In the Supreme Court case DeFunis v. Odegaard, Marco DeFunis a white graduate from the University of Washington claimed he was “denied admission from the universities law school so that a less qualified minority student could be accepted” (Worsnop). The law school had received 1,600 applicants for 150 openings said that 36 minority students had been admitted with lower grades and test scores than DeFunis. Though this case was never decided because DeFunis was admitted during the deliberation, it demonstrates the problems and costs associated with using race in admission decisions.

Another case dealing with affirmative action