As seniors bury themselves in applications, conversations about college bubble up frequently on CA campus. Many of these conversations reference the admissions process. Students worry about midterm grades, standardized test scores, essays, and extracurriculars. However, the college process is much more than that, and our discussions surrounding them should go deeper than worrying about our own applications and focus on the systemic flaws that we currently face.

One major problem is affordability. People who can pay for more resources such as tutoring for standardized testing can have an advantage when taking the exams. Just the cost of touring colleges and submitting applications is expensive. The average cost of submitting one application is 50 dollars. Some students apply to more than seven colleges… that’s 350 dollars before students even receive their admission decision! Pricing for AP exams are similar. Between my sister and me, the total cost of our exams last year was just under $800. That certainly gives an advantage to students who can afford the costs.

As a result, more privileged students get admitted to higher-tiered colleges than those who face economic and racial inequalities. A great example of this is the college admissions scandal where fifty people were charged for illegally entering students into elite colleges with cheating and bribery, with parents paying up to 6.5 million dollars. To quote Netflix’s Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, “They had every advantage and yet they still cheated.”

A more common topic in the news relating to privilege is affirmative action. The official definition is, “the practice or policy of favoring individuals belonging to groups known to have been discriminated against previously.” The goal of this policy is to create more equality among underrepresented groups, in areas including gender, race, sexuality, or nationality. However, affirmative action could be coming to an end very soon.

There are currently two cases on affirmative action: one against UNC-Chapel Hill, and the other against Harvard. In court last week, a New York Times article outlined the oral argument between Students for Fair Admissions and UNC. The Supreme Court Justices were split on their beliefs. The three liberal justices made the point that without factoring race into admissions, minorities would be severely impacted, leading to significantly less opportunities for those minorities, especially Black and Hispanic students. This led the conservative justices to question the meaning of diversity. They asked how to measure diversity, using Harvard as an example. They said that while Harvard may have racial diversity, over 80% of their students are wealthy. Justice Kavanaugh then made a similar argument of religion, asking why colleges don’t track the different religions if they add to diversity, and where to draw the line.

If affirmative action is overturned, it will create a ripple effect into changing diversity within employment, the military, national security, and many other areas. Justice Elena Kagan solidifies this point by saying, “Universities are the pipeline to that leadership. Now, if universities are not racially diverse… then all of those institutions are not going to be racially diverse either. And I thought that part of what it meant to be an American and to believe in American pluralism is that actually our institutions are reflective of who we are as a people in all our variety.” This makes me question how many more steps backwards we will take before stepping forwards into an equal, just, and diverse world.