An End to Affirmative Action?

Racketeering, millions of dollars, celebrities, the Ivy League: The alleged conspiracy by the wealthy and well-connected to ensure their children's admission into elite colleges goes beyond Hollywood scandal. The story inflamed already smoldering concerns about the ways that money corrupts the supposedly meritocratic college admissions process. If any aspiring students across America—and around the world—still believed that every applicant had the same shot, they and their parents now know for certain that that's not the case. There are already calls for reform.

But the process of taking privilege out of the system might also bring an end to something else: Affirmative Action.

Race-based affirmative action, a concept first introduced in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, has steadily been losing public support to alternative, race-blind methods of college admission, A February Pew Research Center Poll indicated that 73 percent of Americans did not think colleges and universities should consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions. Over 60 percent of black respondents and 65 percent of Hispanic respondents did not want race to be a factor in admissions.

The Trump administration has also attacked the system; a conservative Supreme Court will likely soon hear a case about Harvard, accused of using racial screening to limit the number of Asian-American students accepted. But the alleged scheme by more than 50 celebrities, business executives and rich parents to fix SAT scores and bribe athletic coaches to get their kids into college could be what finally kills the controversial policy.

"People are using this as an argument against affirmative action because these rich students had their own type of advantages," said Ivory Toldson, a Howard University professor and editor-in-chief of the "They're saying we need to level the playing field and that also means ending race-based