Poll: Majority of Americans Believe It Should Be Illegal to Use Race as a Factor in College Admissions

The vast majority of Americans believe the Supreme Court should rule that colleges cannot use race as a factor when considering an applicant for admission.

Seventy-five percent of Americans favor such a ruling, according to a Marquette University Law School poll, and significant majorities still hold that opinion when broken down along partisan lines.

Republican and independent respondents maintained the largest majority for favoring the ruling at 89 percent and 76 percent, respectively. Even Democrat respondents, whose party appears relentless in making racial considerations at the forefront of every decision, still believe colleges should not be able to use race as a factor for admissions, as 58 percent believe the Supreme Court should ban the practice.

Forty-two percent of Democrats oppose, however.

Prohibiting colleges from being able to use race as a factor for admissions is still widely unpopular when broken down by racial demographic.

White and Hispanic respondents favor such a Supreme Court ruling at 79 and 79 percent, respectively, while black respondents aligned perfectly with the Democrat Party, with 58 percent favoring the prohibition and 42 percent opposing it.

The poll does not differentiate Asians for the demographic breakdown, but Asian students are at the center of many of the admissions issues across the country. Despite that, persons of “other/multiple” races or ethnicities still agree at 81 percent that the Supreme Court should bar race as an admissions factor.

The survey was conducted among 1,004 American adults from March 14-24 with a margin of error of +/- four percentage points.

Race has been used as a factor in American college admissions for decades through affirmative action, representing one actual example of institutionalized racism. In addition, through policies based on critical race theory, American leftists — who largely run the country’s institutions of higher education — have been pushing harder in recent years to make race a primary factor when considering applicants.

Through the same ideology, many leftists also believe race should be used as the primary trait through which persons should judge one another.

Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.