Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
The Ohio Attorney General’s Office has told Ohio’s universities they should reconsider using race as a factor in scholarship awards and eliminate race in admission considerations following a 2023 Supreme Court decision.
The 2023 decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, has forced universities to review the role of race in admissions process and many U.S. universities have already made changes, including most recently schools in Florida.
“Although the Court did not expressly prohibit race-based scholarships, it indicated that ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ Race-based scholarships discriminate on the basis of race in awarding benefits,” said Bethany McCorkle, communications director for the Ohio AG’s office. “Therefore, it would follow that such programs are unconstitutional.”
It’s not clear how many race-based scholarships are available at Ohio universities. Many scholarships are offered based on athletic ability, GPA, ACT or SAT score, class rank, first-generation college student or essays.
One Ohio State scholarship, the Land Grant scholarship, offers a full ride to students with Pell-eligibility and academic ability with a goal of offering it to two students in each of Ohio’s 88 counties.
Very few of Ohio’s public universities admit students based on race, according to the Common Data Set, a list of standardized questions about students at each university. The questions are a collaboration from the College Board, Thomson Peterson’s, and U.S. News & World Report, and include a set of questions about how admissions decisions are made.
