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    Harvard Will Require Test Scores for Admissions

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    The university is the latest in a series of highly selective schools to end its test-optional policy.Harvard will reinstate standardized testing as a requirement of admission, the university announced Thursday, becoming the latest in a series of highly competitive universities to reverse their test-optional policies. Students applying to Harvard in fall 2025 will be required to submit SAT or ACT scores, though the university said a few other test scores will be accepted in “exceptional cases,” including Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests. In making the decision, the college said it had been persuaded by research that found that standardized testing was a valuable tool to identify promising students in disadvantaged environments and struggling schools, especially when paired with other credentials.“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond,” Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, said in a statement announcing the move.“When students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application,” Ms. Hoekstra added. “In short, more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range.”Harvard was one of about 2,000 colleges across the country that dropped test score requirements over the last few years, a trend that escalated during the pandemic when it was harder for students to get to test sites. Critics of standardized tests have long raised concerns that the tests helped fuel inequality because some wealthier students raised their scores through high-priced tutoring.But new research has challenged the conventional wisdom, finding that bright students from disadvantaged backgrounds had been overlooked by admissions offices because they had chosen not to submit test scores, even though they outperformed their peers.A growing number of schools have now reversed their policies, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown and Purdue.This is a developing story. More

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      U. of Texas at Austin Will Return to Standardized Test Requirement

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      The university said SAT and ACT scores help it place students in programs that fit them best.The University of Texas at Austin said Monday that it would again require standardized tests for admissions, becoming the latest selective university to reinstate requirements for SAT or ACT scores that were abandoned during the pandemic.A few years ago, about 2,000 colleges across the country began to move away from requiring test scores, at least temporarily, amid concerns they helped fuel inequality. But a growing number of those schools have reversed those policies, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown and Purdue, with several announcing the changes in recent months. U.T. Austin, which admits a cross-section of high-achieving Texas students under a plan designed to increase opportunity in the state, cited a slightly different reason than the other schools in returning to test requirements. Without requiring test scores, officials said, they were hampered in placing the admitted students in programs they would be most suited for and in determining which ones needed extra help. After making test scores optional the past few years, the university will now require applicants to submit either SAT or ACT scores beginning Aug. 1, with applications for fall 2025 admissions.In an interview, Jay Hartzell, the U.T. president, said that the decision followed an analysis of students who did not submit scores. “We looked at our students and found that, in many ways, they weren’t faring as well,” Dr. Hartzell said. Those against testing requirements have long said that standardized tests are unfair because many students from affluent families use tutors and coaches to bolster their scores. But recent data has raised questions about the contention. In reinstating test requirements, some universities have said that making scores optional had the unintended effect of harming prospective students from low-income families.Brown, for example, said that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds had chosen not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, even when submitting them could have actually increased their chances of being admitted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yale, Duke and Columbia Among Elite Schools to Settle in Price-Fixing Case

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      Five universities have agreed to pay $104.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of violating an agreement to be “need-blind” when awarding financial aid.For almost a quarter of a century, a coterie of the nation’s most elite universities had a legal shield: They would be exempt from federal antitrust laws when they shared formulas to measure prospective students’ financial needs.But the provision included a crucial requirement: that the cooperating universities’ admissions processes be “need-blind,” meaning they could not factor in whether a prospective student was wealthy enough to pay.But a court filing on Tuesday night revealed that five of those universities — Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Yale — have collectively agreed to pay $104.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of, in fact, weighing financial ability when they deliberated over the fates of some applicants.Although the universities did not admit wrongdoing and resisted accusations that their approach had hurt students, the settlements nevertheless call into question whether the schools, which spent years extolling the generosity of their financial aid, did as much as they could to lower tuition.Brown University maintained that all financial aid decisions were made in the “best interests of families and within the law,” but in a statement on Tuesday night, said resolving the case will permit it to “focus its resources on further growth in generous aid for students.”The agreements from the five universities came months after the University of Chicago agreed to pay $13.5 million to settle its portion of the case. Other schools, including Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania, remain mired in the litigation, with no trial date set.The sprawling lawsuit targeted 17 schools, which were, or had been, members of the 568 Presidents Group, named for the legal provision that offered antitrust cover. The case contended that universities did not actually abide by the need-blind admissions mandate when they deliberated over wait-listed applicants, making their financial aid protocols illegal.Vanderbilt University, for example, said on one of its websites in 2018 that it reserved “the right to be need-aware when admitting wait-listed students,” echoing previous statements by university employees.Vanderbilt, located in Nashville, told the court last year that it planned to settle.By considering need in any context, the suit argued, the universities were defying the conditions of their antitrust exemption. Complicating the path for the universities, the case drew muscle from a legal doctrine that holds that members of a group are responsible for actions of others in the same group.Ultimately, the suit claimed, about 200,000 students over about two decades were overcharged because the 568 Group had eliminated competition on cost, leaving the net price of attendance “artificially inflated.”Had universities more aggressively competed over financial aid, the lawsuit said, students could have received more support and spent less to attend college.The antitrust shield expired in 2022, and the 568 Group has disbanded.Although the University of Chicago said the suit was “without merit” when it settled the case, it agreed to share records that could be valuable in the litigation against the other universities.A handful of other universities have since made similar calculations, admitting no fault while limiting both their financial exposure and the risk of damaging revelations surfacing in records or depositions.“Though we believe the plaintiffs’ claims are without merit, we have reached a settlement in the best interest of our continuing focus on providing talented scholars from all social, cultural, and economic backgrounds one of the world’s best undergraduate educations and the opportunity to graduate debt-free,” Vanderbilt, which is still finalizing its settlement, said in a statement.For plaintiffs, the planned settlements offer an advantage, beyond the surge of money to divide among students and lawyers: By whittling the ranks of the defendants, they also streamline a case that could prove exceptionally complex at a trial.Emory and Yale are both expected to pay $18.5 million, and Brown is settling for $19.5 million. Columbia and Duke have agreed to pay $24 million each. Separately from Tuesday’s filing, Rice University said in a recent financial statement that it had agreed to pay almost $34 million.In their filing on Tuesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs said the settlements “were not achieved as a group or all at once, but instead were separately pursued over the course of time.” The lawyers added that they had “pursued a strategy of increasing the settlement amounts with each successive agreement or set of agreements to exert pressure on non-settling defendants to reach agreement imminently or risk having to pay significantly more by waiting.”Financial aid practices at elite universities have long drawn antitrust scrutiny. In the late 1980s, the Justice Department opened an inquiry into price-fixing, leading to a string of settlements in the 1990s as Ivy League schools sought to dodge potentially titanic legal fights. (M.I.T. refused a settlement at first and opted for a trial. It later reached an agreement with the government, too, with the settlement’s language becoming something of a template for Section 568.)In a filing last year, the Justice Department signaled its support for some of the legal arguments underpinning this current civil case that schools are settling.Stephanie Saul More

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      Overturning Roe Changed Everything. Overturning Affirmative Action Did Not.

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      What do the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings, one on abortion, the other on affirmative action, suggest about the future prospects for the liberal agenda?Last year’s Dobbs decision — overturning the longstanding precedent set by Roe v. Wade in 1973 — angered both moderate and liberal voters, providing crucial momentum for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, as well as in elections earlier this month. The hostile reaction to Dobbs appears certain to be a key factor in 2024.Since Dobbs, there have been seven abortion referendums, including in red states like Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Abortion rights won every time.In contrast, the Supreme Court decision in June that ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions provoked a more modest outcry, and it played little, if any, role on Election Day 2023. As public interest fades, so too do the headlines and media attention generally.There have been no referendums on affirmative action since the June decision, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. Six states held referendums on affirmative action before that ruling was issued, and five voted to prohibit it, including Michigan, Washington and California (twice). Colorado, the lone exception, voted in favor of affirmative action in 2008.Do the dissimilar responses to the court decisions ending two key components of the liberal agenda, as it was originally conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, suggest that one of them — the granting of preferences to minorities in order to level differences in admissions outcomes — has run its course?On the surface, the answer to that question is straightforward: Majorities of American voters support racial equality as a goal, but they oppose targets or quotas that grant preferential treatment to any specific group.In an email, Neil Malhotra, a political economist at Stanford — one of the scholars who, on an ongoing basis, oversees polling on Supreme Court decisions for The New York Times — pointed out that “race-based affirmative action is extremely unpopular. Sixty-nine percent of the public agreed with the court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, including 58 percent of Democrats.”On the other hand, Malhotra noted, “the majority of Americans did not want Roe overturned.”The July 1-5 Economist/YouGov poll posed questions that go directly to the question of affirmative action in higher education.“Do you think colleges should or should not be allowed to consider an applicant’s race, among other factors, when making decisions on admissions?”The answer: 25 percent said they should allow racial preferences; 64 percent said they should not.“Do you approve or disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, which ruled that colleges are not allowed to consider an applicant’s race when making decisions on admissions?”Fifty-nine percent approved of the decision, including 46 percent who strongly approved. Twenty-seven percent disapproved, including 18 percent who strongly disapproved.I asked William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, about the significance of the differing reactions to the abortion and affirmative action decisions, and he referred me to his July 2023 essay, “A Surprisingly Muted Reaction to the Supreme Court’s Decision on Affirmative Action”:In a marked contrast to last year’s Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the response to its recent decision prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions has been remarkably muted. The overall reason is clear: while voters wanted to preserve access to abortion by a margin of roughly 20 percentage points, they were willing by the same margin to accept the end of affirmative action.“To the surprise of many observers,” Galston writes, citing poll data, Black Americans “supported the court by 44 percent to 36 percent.”Key groups of swing voters also backed the court’s decision by wide margins, Galston goes on to say: “Moderates by 56 percent to 23 percent, independents by 57 percent to 24 percent, and suburban voters, a key battleground in contemporary elections, by 59 percent to 30 percent.”Sanford V. Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin, wrote me by email thatThere has always been a certain ambivalence on the part of many liberals regarding the actual implementation of affirmative action. I thought that it would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories such as “white” or “Black,” and the impossibility of clearly defining who counts as “Hispanic” or “Asian.”In contrast, Levinson continued,Abortion has become more truly polarized as an issue, especially as the “pro-life” contingent has revealed its strong desire to ban all abortions. Moreover, it’s become immediately and obviously clear that the consequences of Dobbs are absolutely horrendous for many women in Texas, say, and that the “pro-life” contingent simply doesn’t seem to care about these consequences for actual people.I asked Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., about the divergent responses to the two decisions, and he emailed his reply:There are two reasons the public and political reaction differs so dramatically between the two decisions. The first is that in public opinion polling, affirmative action has always had significantly less than majority support.Pildes pointed out thatin perhaps the most liberal state in the country, California, 57 percent of voters in 2020 voted to keep in place the state’s ban on affirmative action, even as Biden won the state overwhelmingly. Popular opinion on abortion runs the other way: a majority of the country supports the basic right of access to abortion, and we see strong majorities even in red states voting to support that right, as in recent votes in Ohio and Kansas.Pildes’s second reason involves the advance preparation of the public for the decisions. In the case of affirmative action in college admissions,It was widely expected the Supreme Court was going to ban it. That outcome did not come as a surprise; it had long been discounted into the assumptions of those who follow these issues closely.In the case of the Dobbs, according to Pildes, “there was far more uncertainty in advance, even though the expectation was that the court would uphold Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks.”While the court majority might have decided the case “on narrow grounds, without overruling Roe,” Pildes wrote, it took “the far more extreme path of overruling Roe altogether. That came as a stunning shock to many people and it was the first time the court had taken away a personal constitutional right.”Nicholas Wu reported last month in Politico (in “Why Dems Aren’t Campaigning on Affirmative Action”) that some of the strongest proponents of affirmative action in the House do not see campaigning against the court decision as an effective strategy.Representative Mark Takano, a California Democrat who believes affirmative action helped get him into Harvard, told Wu, “I don’t see it as a rallying point for Democrats.”Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and Workforce, told Wu, “This is going to cause some heartburn, but we need to campaign on the fact that we are opening opportunities to everybody, and we’ll do everything we can to maintain opportunities.”“It’s difficult,” Scott added, “to bring back a strategy that the Supreme Court has directly ruled as unconstitutional.”Nicholas Dias, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, responded by email to my inquiry by noting that his “read of the existing data is that Americans care more about equality of opportunity than equality of outcome.”Dias conducted a study asking Americans how they prioritize three social goals in setting policies concerning wealth: “ensuring wealth is determined by effort (i.e., deservingness); providing for basic needs (sufficiency); and ensuring wealth equality.”He found that Republicans overwhelmingly give top priority to ensuring that wealth is determined by effort, at 70.5 percent, while Democrats give top priority, at 51.2 percent, to ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met.Dias noted that very few Democrats, Republicans or independents gave wealth equality top priority.Dias sent me a 2021 paper, “Desert and Redistribution: Justice as a Remedy for, and Cause of, Economic Inequality,” in which Jacob S. Bower-Bir, a political scientist affiliated with Indiana University, makes the case that:People tolerate grave inequalities if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Moreover, people who assign a significant role to personal responsibility in their definitions of economic desert oppose large-scale redistribution policies because government intervention makes it harder for people to (by their definition) deserve their economic station.In short, Bower-Bir argues, “people must perceive inequality as undeserved to motivate a policy response, and the means of combating inequality must not undermine desert.”In that context, Dias wrote in his email, it would be inaccurate to say thatpolicies designed to benefit minority constituencies have run their course. There’s plenty of evidence that members of these constituencies lack economic opportunities or cannot meet their needs. However, I think many Americans need to be convinced of that.In a further elaboration of the affirmative action debate, three sociologists, Leslie McCall, Derek Burk and Marie Laperrière, and Jennifer Richeson, a psychologist at Yale, discuss public perceptions of inequality in their 2017 paper “Exposure to Rising Inequality Shapes Americans’ Opportunity Beliefs and Policy Support”:Research across the social sciences repeatedly concludes that Americans are largely unconcerned about it. Considerable research has documented, for instance, the important role of psychological processes, such as system justification and American dream ideology, in engendering Americans’ relative insensitivity to economic inequality.Challenging that research, the four scholars contend that when “American adults were exposed to information about rising economic inequality in the United States,” they demonstrated increased “skepticism regarding the opportunity structure in society. Exposure to rising economic inequality reliably increased beliefs about the importance of structural factors in getting ahead.” Receiving information on inequality “also increased support for government redistribution, as well as for business actors (i.e., major companies) to enhance economic opportunities in the labor market.”The intricacies don’t end there.In their April 2017 paper, “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” three professors of psychology, Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom, write thatThere is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies.How can these two seemingly contradictory findings be resolved?The authors’ answer:These two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness.Human beings, Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom write, “naturally favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”My interest in the subdued political response to the court’s affirmative action decision was prompted by a 2021 book, “The Dynamics of Public Opinion,” by four political scientists, Mary Layton Atkinson, James A. Stimson and Frank R. Baumgartner, all of the University of North Carolina, and K. Elizabeth Coggins of Colorado College.The four scholars argue that there are three types of issues. The first two types are partisan issues (safety net spending, taxation, gun rights etc.) and nonpartisan issues, like the space program. Public opinion does not change much over time on these two types of issues, they write: “Aggregate opinion moves up and down (or, left and right) but fifty years later remains roughly where it started.”Such stability is not the case with the third category:These are social transformations affecting society in powerful ways, literally shifting the norms of cultural acceptability of a given issue position. These can be so powerful that they overwhelm the influence of any short-term partisan differences, driving substantial shifts in public opinion over time, all in the same direction.Two factors drive these transformations:Large swaths of the American public progressively adopting new, pro-equality positions on the issue, and the generational replacement of individuals with once-widespread but no-longer-majority anti-equality opinions — with younger individuals coming-of-age during a different time, and reflecting more progressive positions on these cultural shift issues.Opinion on these mega issues, Atkinson and her co-authors argue, has been moving steadily leftward. “The overall trend is unmistakable,” they write: “The public becomes more liberal on these rights issues over time,” in what Atkinson and her co-authors describe as the shifting “equality mood.”While trends like these would seem to lead to support for affirmative action, that is not the case. “We cannot treat belief in equality as a normative value as interchangeable with a pro-equality policy preference,” Atkinson and her co-authors write:This is particularly true because many pro-equality policies emphasize equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. And while equality of opportunity is the touchstone of a liberal society (i.e., all Americans are entitled to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness), the right to equality of outcomes has not been equally embraced by Americans. Once equality of opportunity is significantly advanced, or de jure equality is established, public support for further government action focused on equalizing outcomes may not exist, or at least wanes significantly.In other words, there has been a steady leftward movement on issues of equality when they are described as abstract principles, but much less so when the equality agenda is translated into specific policies, like busing or affirmative action.Atkinson and her co-authors point specifically to growing support for women’s equality in both theory and in practice, reporting on an analysis of four questions posed by the General Social Survey from the mid-1970s to 2004:When asked whether women should let men run the country and whether wives should put their husbands’ careers first, the policy responses look nearly identical to women’s ‘equality mood.’ The series trend in the liberal direction over time and reach a level of approximately 80 percent liberal responses by 2004.But when asked whether it is better for women to tend the home and for men to work, and whether preschool children suffer if their mothers work, the responses are far less liberal and the slopes of the lines are less steep. While responses to these questions trend in the liberal direction during the 1970s and 1980s, by the mid-1990s the series flattens out with liberalism holding between 50 and 60 percent.I asked Stimson to elaborate on this, and he emailed in reply:We have long known that the mass public does not connect problem and solution in the way that policy analysts do. Thus, for example, most people would sincerely like to see a higher level of racial integration in schools, but the idea of putting their kids on a bus to achieve that objective is flatly rejected. I used to see that as hypocrisy. But I no longer do. I think the real issue is that they just do not make the connection between problem and solution. That is why affirmative action has such a troubled history. People are quite capable of supporting policy goals (e.g., racial balance in higher education) and rejecting the means.Where does that leave the nation? Galston, in his Brooking essay, provided an answer:In sum, the country’s half-century experiment with affirmative action failed to persuade a majority of Americans — or even a majority of those whom the policy was intended to benefit — that it was effective and appropriate. University employers — indeed the entire country — must now decide what to do next to advance the cause of equal opportunity for all, one of the nation’s most honored but never achieved principles.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Is the Democratic Base Eroding?

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      More from our inbox:Income Inequality and Test ScoresHelping Kids Thrive With Full WIC Funding Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Democrats Are Their Own Worst Enemies,” by Pamela Paul (column, Nov. 3), about why polls are showing a loss of support for the party among minorities and the working class:Ms. Paul writes that “the Democratic Party cannot win and America cannot flourish if it doesn’t prioritize the economic well-being of the American majority over the financial interests and cultural fixations of an elite minority.”That, she says, is the reason that “the Democratic Party’s reliable base — the working class, middle-class families, even Black and Latino Americans and other ethnic minorities — have veered toward the G.O.P.”Is she talking about the same G.O.P. that, under the former president, passed legislation that gave enormous tax breaks to the wealthiest in the country? Is she referring to G.O.P. legislators who now want to reduce funding for the I.R.S., an agency that serves as a watchdog against unfair tax manipulation that leaves the middle class with a proportionately greater tax burden than the richest?If so, it is hard to imagine that the G.O.P., as opposed to the Democratic Party, is prioritizing the economic well-being of the American majority.Sheila Terman CohenMadison, Wis.To the Editor:OMG! I had no idea how crazy the Democrats really are! As Pamela Paul reminds us, they are out of touch with the “broadly shared beliefs within the electorate.”Democrats support legal immigration and care for refugees. They think Social Security is a good idea. They think everyone is entitled to equal protection under the law regardless of race, gender or ethnicity. They think that people who want to impose their religion on this country are just wrong. They think that people are entitled to autonomy over their own bodies and health care. They recognize the rule of law.And the worst part is they are right up front about it. Thank you, Pamela, for helping me feel better about how I plan to vote.Richard W. PoetonLenox, Mass.To the Editor:Pamela Paul is correct that there is room for robust debate about what policies the Democrats should adopt to better help most Americans, but she misses the bigger problem. The Republican Party is full of one-issue voters who will vote to promote racist policies, misogyny or guns regardless of whether most Republican policies are good for America or not.Many Democratic voters have been quick to say they won’t vote for a Democratic candidate since that candidate promises to do only seven of the 10 things they want. Especially with the Electoral College and gerrymandering favoring minority rule, everyone who recognizes the danger that the current Republican Party poses to our freedoms must vote for the Democratic candidate, even if they want some different policies.Until the current Republican Party is out of power, any debate within the Democratic Party must take a back seat to saving our country from election deniers.Richard DineSilver Spring, Md.Income Inequality and Test ScoresNew SAT Data Highlights the Deep Inequality at the Heart of American EducationThe differences in how rich and poor children are educated start very early.To the Editor:Re “‘18 Years Too Late’ to Solve SAT Gap” (The Upshot, Oct. 30):It is unsurprising that SAT scores correlate strongly to family income. A huge portion of top scorers come from the richest families. Only 0.6 percent of all students from the bottom 20 percent of family income score above 1300 out of 1600.This data dispels the myth that the SAT boosts access to higher education by identifying “diamonds in the rough” from historically underrepresented populations. They are far outnumbered by students from wealthy families taking full socioeconomic advantage to achieve higher scores. The “rough” — in the form of under-resourced public education and family poverty — completely obscures the diamonds.Furthermore, the SAT is a very weak predictor of undergraduate performance. Grades work better. The test is a strong measure of accumulated opportunity rather than college readiness. Relying on SAT results to prejudge future educational performance locks in inequity.That is one reason that nearly 90 percent of U.S. four-year colleges and universities now have SAT/ACT-optional or test-blind policies.Of course, such policies alone will not solve the college access problem. Admissions offices need to scrutinize other determinative factors. A fair process should not provide the greatest opportunities to teenagers who have already had the most advantages in life.Harry FederBrooklynThe writer is the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest).To the Editor:Again and again, research has shown that poverty and income inequality are the most powerful influence on school performance. How could it be otherwise in a country without a real safety net, with parents working two gig jobs and juggling which bills to pay, with no secure access to health care, rampant evictions and parking lots for employed people who have to live in their cars? Yet the public refuses to believe this, and at best seeks to bolster schools in the hopes that they will make up for fundamental deprivation.It is deeply distressing to see how many reader comments declare that wealth reflects genetic superiority and other “virtues.” In an era of barely taxed billionaires building self-perpetuating stock market fortunes on the labor of warehouse workers and A.I., that view is not only undemocratic and ahistorical. It’s also dangerously complacent.Nina BernsteinNew YorkThe writer is a former New York Times reporter.Helping Kids Thrive With Full WIC FundingTo the Editor:Re “Infant Mortality Up for 1st Time in Two Decades” (front page, Nov. 2):The increase in America’s infant mortality rate is a deeply alarming sign that policymakers do not adequately prioritize children’s health and well-being.Sadly, it is not the only sign.The child poverty rate more than doubled last year. Nearly 9 percent of households with children were food insecure in 2022, up from 6.2 percent the year before. Children’s reading and math scores have plummeted since the pandemic.No single program can fix all of this. But the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which serves about half of all infants born in the United States, should be considered our first line of defense.A 2019 study found that WIC participation is directly attributable to a 16 percent reduction in the risk of infant mortality. WIC participation also lowers the risk of poverty, reduces food insecurity, improves nutritional intake and strengthens kids’ cognitive development.Yet new data from the Department of Agriculture finds a significant gap between WIC eligibility and coverage. For instance, only 25 percent of 4-year-olds eligible for WIC are actually enrolled.All children deserve to grow up healthy and thrive. Full funding for WIC is an essential step toward that goal.Georgia MachellWashingtonThe writer is interim president and C.E.O. of the National WIC Association. More

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      Justices Ignoring the ‘Scent of Impropriety’

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      More from our inbox:The Costs of the Trump InquiryGiuliani’s False AccusationsReform the College Admissions SystemBiden’s Dog Needs a New HomeA Brit’s Struggles, After Brexit Hannah RobinsonTo the Editor:Re “What Smells Off at the Court?,” by Michael Ponsor (Opinion guest essay, July 16):Judge Ponsor’s bewilderment at the loss of olfaction on the Supreme Court is spot on. As he explained, it isn’t that hard for a judge to catch even a faint whiff of the scent of impropriety.And you don’t have to be a federal judge to smell it. Every federal employee knows that aroma. When I was a Justice Department lawyer, a group of federal and state lawyers spent months negotiating in a conference room at the defendant’s law firm. The firm regularly ordered in catered lunches and invited the government attorneys to partake. None of us ever accepted a bite.Another time, a company hoping to build a development on a Superfund site hosted a presentation for federal and municipal officials. The company’s spokesperson presented each city official with a goodie bag filled with stuff like baseball caps bearing the project’s name. To me and my colleagues, the spokesperson said: “We didn’t bring any for you. We knew you wouldn’t take them.” They were right.The sense of smell is more highly evolved in the depths of the administrative state than in the rarefied air at the pinnacle of the judicial branch.Steve GoldCaldwell, N.J.The writer now teaches at Rutgers Law School.To the Editor:Judge Michael Ponsor alludes to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges as the guide he has followed his entire career. However, he implies that the code is faulty by stating the Supreme Court needs a “skillfully drafted code” to avoid political pressure on justices. He does not elaborate on what shortcomings the existing code has that make it inapplicable to the Supreme Court.The existing code is very skillfully drafted. It emphasizes that the foundation of the judicial system is based on public trust in the impartiality of judges. The code is very clear that the “appearance of impropriety” is as important as its absence.This is at the core of the scandals of current sitting justices. The actions and favors received most certainly have the appearance of impropriety. Those appearances of impropriety are undermining confidence and trust in the Supreme Court. No amount of rationalization and argle-bargle by the justices can change that.R.J. GodinBerkeley, Calif.To the Editor:When I served as a United States district judge, it did not take an acute sense of smell for me to determine what action was ethically appropriate. I had a simple test that was easy to apply: Do I want to read about this in The New York Times? I think the current members of the Supreme Court are beginning to realize the value of this simple test.John S. MartinFort Myers, Fla.The writer served as a district judge for the Southern District of New York from 1990 to 2003.The Costs of the Trump InquiryThe scope of Jack Smith’s investigation of former President Donald J. Trump greatly exceeds that of the special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Cost of Scrutinizing Trump Continues to Grow” (front page, July 24):We should weigh the cost of investigating and prosecuting allegations of major crimes committed by Donald Trump against the cost of doing nothing.Imagine a world in which the United States descends into an authoritarian regime — with our rulers selected by violent mobs rather than in elections. The costs to our rights as citizens and our system of free enterprise would be incalculably larger in such a world than what Jack Smith is currently spending to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions.Eric W. OrtsPhiladelphiaThe writer is a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor of law at Columbia University.Giuliani’s False Accusations Nicole Craine for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Poll Workers Get Retraction From Giuliani” (front page, July 27):If there was such widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, why did Rudy Giuliani resort to falsely accusing the two Atlanta election workers? Didn’t he have many true examples of fraud to choose from?Tom FritschlerPort Angeles, Wash.Reform the College Admissions SystemThe Harvard University campus last month. The Biden administration’s inquiry comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of college admissions practices.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Legacy Admission at Harvard Faces Federal Inquiry” (front page, July 26):While I applaud the focus on legacy admissions, it is clear that the entire process needs an overhaul. Every day now it feels as if a new study is released that confirms what we had long suspected: that elite colleges favor the wealthy and the connected. Does anyone believe that removing legacy admissions alone will change this?As it stands, elite schools care too much about wealth and prestige to fundamentally alter practices that tie them to wealthy and connected people. If the Education Department is serious about reform, it will broaden its inquiry to examine the entire system.However one feels about the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, at the very least it has forced us to reconsider the status quo. I pray that policymakers take this opportunity instead of leaving the bones of the old system in place.Alex ChinSan FranciscoThe writer is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is pursuing a Ph.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University.Biden’s Dog Needs a New HomeA White House staff member walking Commander, one of the Biden family’s dogs, on the North Lawn of the White House earlier this year.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Emails Report List of Attacks by Biden’s Dog” (news article, July 26):I support Joe Biden’s presidency and think he is generally a thoughtful, kind man. But I am appalled to learn that Secret Service agents — or any employees at the White House — have to regularly contend with the risk of being bitten by the president’s German shepherd.No one deserves to face not just the physical harm and pain of dog bites but also the constant fear of proximity to such an aggressive pet. Keeping the dog, Commander, at the White House shows poor judgment.This situation hardly reflects the Bidens’ respect and caring for those sworn to serve them. It’s time for Commander to find a new home better suited to his needs.Cheryl AlisonWorcester, Mass.A Brit’s Struggles, After Brexit Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “The Disaster No One Wants to Talk About,” by Michelle Goldberg (column, July 23):I am a Brit, a fact I have been ashamed of since the Brexit vote in 2016, if not before.I voted to stay in the European Union. I was shocked at the result, and I was more shocked at the ignorance of others who voted.Our lives absolutely have changed since Brexit, but not for the better. My family is poorer, and we can no longer afford a holiday or many of the luxuries we previously could. As the economy suffers, with the rise in interest rates our mortgage is set to reach unspeakable sums. Package that with a near doubling in the cost of our weekly groceries, and we have big decisions that need to be made as a family.And still, despite this utter chaos, the widespread use of food banks, the regular striking of underpaid and underappreciated key workers, despite all of this, there are still enough people to shout loud in support of Brexit and the Conservative Party.We are a nation in blind denial. We are crashing. And yes, we are being pushed to breaking up into pieces not seen for centuries.As a family we miss the E.U., we mourn the E.U., and we grieve for the quality of life we once had but may never see again.Nevine MannRedruth, England More

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      How Affirmative Action Changed Their Lives

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      Stella Tan, Sydney Harper, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Liz O. Baylen, Lisa Chow and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell and Alyssa Moxley and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicTwo weeks ago, the United States Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful.Today, three people whose lives were changed by affirmative action discuss the complicated feelings they have about the policy.On today’s episodeSabrina Tavernise, a co-host of The Daily.Opponents of the ruling marching this month in Cambridge, Mass.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesBackground readingFor many of the Black, Hispanic and Native Americans whose lives were shaped by affirmative action, the moment has prompted a personal reckoning with its legacy.In earlier decisions, the court had endorsed taking account of race as one factor among many to promote educational diversity.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Sabrina Tavernise More

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      It’s Not America’s Unhappiest Birthday

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, happy almost Independence Day. In the spirit of the holiday: Is America toast?Gail Collins: Well, gee, Bret, happy almost Independence Day back. Hope you’re not planning to celebrate by, um, shooting things off.Bret: Only my mouth. As usual.Gail: Seriously, please elaborate. If you’re thinking of the Supreme Court, I’m happy to join in any hand-wringing. But somehow I suspect you’ve got a different vision of doom.Bret: It won’t surprise you that I’ve been pretty happy with the court’s rulings this term, which I’m sure we’ll get to in a moment. But what I mean is the brokenness of almost every institution I can think of, a thought I’m borrowing from Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet magazine. Congress: broken. Public education: broken. The I.R.S.: broken. The Roman Catholic Church: broken. The immigration system: broken. Cities: broken. Civil discourse: broken. Families: broken. Race relations: broken.And the most broken thing of all: public trust. Trust in government, in news media, in police, in the scientific establishment. There’s a ton of scholarly research showing that when societies become low-trust, like in Lebanon or Brazil, they tend to fare poorly.Gail: I know that many very smart people are in the throes of despair, but I just can’t get there. People have been complaining about the schools since the beginning of time — and that’s a good thing; you certainly don’t want to be complacent about education.Bret: Did you know that The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1944 for reporting on how shockingly ignorant American college freshmen were about U.S. history? And them wuz the good ol’ days.Gail: The I.R.S. is broken only to the extent that Republicans in Congress are refusing to supply funding to make the tax system work.Bret: And because the agency runs with the sort of peerless efficiency we generally expect from federal bureaucracies.Gail: And let’s see — as a longtime fallen-away Catholic, I don’t think the church is going to fix itself until we have both women priests and married priests. But it’s not as if it’s more broken now than it was throughout my life.Bret: I defer to you on this one. Just trying to think of the last time I read a story about a Catholic priest that didn’t involve child molestation or an effort by the church hierarchy to cover it up.Gail: The cities: They aren’t broken — most of them just need a whole lot more federal aid for housing and public safety. And gee, federal gun laws that crack down on villains from buying weapons down South and illegally shipping them to gun-control states like New York.I could go on, but I don’t want to monopolize our civil discourse. Are you really so superpessimistic?Bret: It’s easy to get carried away with gloom, and America has a history of bouncing back from bouts of depression and disorder. But I find it really hard to feel any optimism when Donald Trump seems to be cruising to the Republican renomination and Joe Biden is generating excitement among Democrats the way a colonoscopy generates excitement among people turning 50: something your doctor says you must do but only because the potential alternative is lethal.Gail: Oh, gosh, Bret, now whenever I look at Joe Biden, I’m going to think “colonoscopy president.”You know I’m very sorry he decided to run again and put a damper on all the promising younger Democrats who might have been great options to replace him. But still, he’s been a good president. Our problem isn’t really on the Democratic side. The Trump-remodeled Republican Party is one thing I’d put on a list of national disasters.Bret: Don’t forget it’s also an international disaster.Gail: Know you’re as down on Donald as I am. Should we talk Supreme Court? The big decisions — affirmative action, gay rights, student loans. Am I right guessing you agreed with all three?Bret: Well, don’t forget the court striking down the independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, in which three conservative judges joined with three liberals to uphold the right of state judiciaries to have a say in how state legislatures draw congressional districts and conduct elections. Or the Counterman v. Colorado case, in which four conservative justices joined Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a 7-to-2 decision protecting free-speech rights. This may be a conservative court, but it’s not a MAGA court.Gail: Can see the Trump campaign calls …Bret: Regarding the cases you mentioned, I think even the Biden administration knew deep down that its effort to forgive billions in student loans without action from Congress was legally doubtful. And I don’t have to agree with a web designer’s religious beliefs about same-sex marriage to accept that she has a free-speech right not to participate in something she finds morally objectionable.Gail: How would you feel about a wedding dress designer who refused to take business from a mixed-race couple because her own moral beliefs are against Black people being able to marry white people?Bret: Well, obviously I’d find it abhorrent. But this current case is different, because it turned on whether a business owner could be obliged to design a website for a same-sex couple. That’s clearly a matter of speech, not the identity of the customer.Gail: This case comes out of Colorado, which has a very specific state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Once again our Supremes have made it clear that they’re only going to rule for stuff they like — to hell with details like legality.Bret: I don’t think either of us questions the right of the Supreme Court to overturn any state laws that violate fundamental constitutional rights, even if we don’t like the views of the people claiming those rights. As for the affirmative action case, I think it was one of the best decisions in the court’s history. I know you, um, dissent ….Gail: We had a big argument about that one last week. Having a diverse student body or workplace isn’t just a good goal; it’s critical to building and maintaining a truly free and equal society.Bret: Sure, provided diversity isn’t achieved by giving advantages to some racial groups at the expense of others. In the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases, Asian Americans were put at a significant disadvantage in the admissions process simply on account of their race.Gail: I’m still hopeful business leaders and school administrators will be able to work to the same end by concentrating on other factors — like, say, looking for applicants who have been able to overcome an impoverished upbringing.Bret: We agree on this. And as our colleague David French pointed out in a terrific column last week, Harvard could have long ago redesigned its admissions process to favor students on account of socioeconomic status rather than race and achieved roughly the same kind of diversity without putting race at the center of its admissions calculus.Gail: We’ll see. Still hate the idea that striving to have a student body or work force that’s racially diverse is some kind of mortal sin.Can we talk presidential politics for a minute? Feel kinda guilty for bringing it up, given that the nominating conventions are still more than a year away, but it does continue to fascinate me.Bret: By all means …Gail: I noticed that the proudly middle-middle-class governor Ron DeSantis got $1.25 million for his political memoir. Also that he just signed a bill allowing Florida roads to be built with a radioactive material.Bret: Phosphogypsum, a byproduct of making fertilizer, which is now kept in mountainous stacks across Florida. Used for construction in Europe, Australia and Japan, to no apparent ill effect. As for the memoir, Andrew Cuomo, a former New York governor, got $5.1 million for his book, shortly before he completely disgraced himself. I’d say the Florida governor’s advance is pretty modest, in the scheme of things.Gail: I retreat. For the moment. Anyhow, the DeSantis stories are just silly details in a race when the Republican front-runner keeps getting charged with major crimes. Now, this is supposed to be your flock, Bret. How do you keep focused?Bret: Gail, I read about the Republican Party the way I would about a former friend with whom I was once close but who tragically turned to a life of debauchery and crime in his demented old age.Gail: Is that why you’re feeling so down on everything, from the cities to religion?Bret: Might be. Hard to feel optimistic, politically, when you don’t really have a team to root for. But maybe you’re right and I’m too depressed about America. Still would much prefer to live here than in Britain, with its sky-high inflation. Or France, with its riots. Or Mexico, with its corruption and creeping authoritarianism. Or Canada, with its Justin Trudeau.So I’m back where we started. Happy Fourth of July!The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republican Presidential Candidates Hail the Affirmative Action Decision

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      The Republicans running for president applauded the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday to strike down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, a policy that for decades has stoked the conservative agenda.Former President Donald J. Trump called the decision a “great day for America” in a statement.“People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our country, are finally being rewarded,” he said, adding, “We’re going back to all merit-based — and that’s the way it should be!”Mr. Trump’s political organization, the MAGA War Room, cast him as a main catalyst for the court’s ruling to end affirmative action, saying on Twitter that “he delivered on his promise to appoint constitutional justices.”It also made an outlandish comparison between Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner who has been indicted twice since leaving the White House, and Abraham Lincoln, one of the party’s iconic forebears.“President Trump will end affirmative action like Lincoln ended slavery,” the group wrote on Twitter.Mr. Trump appointed three of the six justices who voted to reject affirmative action at colleges, the same conservative supermajority that delivered another seismic victory for conservatives a year ago when it overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president, who is now a 2024 rival, suggested in a statement on Thursday that he deserved a measure of credit for the court’s rightward shift and said that the “egregious” policy had “only served to perpetuate racism.”“I am honored to have played a role in appointing three of the justices that ensured today’s welcomed decision, and as president I will continue to appoint judges who will strictly apply the law rather than twisting it to serve woke and progressive ends,” he said.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief G.O.P. rival, also welcomed the court’s move.“College admissions should be based on merit and applicants should not be judged on their race or ethnicity,” he wrote on Twitter. “The Supreme Court has correctly upheld the Constitution and ended discrimination by colleges and universities.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is Black, said in a statement that race should not determine who gets certain opportunities.“We will not be judged solely by the color of our skin,” he said. “That’s what the ruling said today. But that is the story of America. That is a story of American progress, and we can all celebrate that today.”Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and onetime United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, said in a statement that the court’s ruling had reaffirmed how Americans value freedom and opportunity.“Picking winners and losers based on race is fundamentally wrong,” Ms. Haley said. “This decision will help every student — no matter their background — have a better opportunity to achieve the American Dream.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur who graduated from Harvard College, which was a defendant in the Supreme Court case, pledged to take further steps to end affirmative action. In a statement, he said would repeal a decades-old presidential executive order that requires federal contractors to adopt race-based hiring preferences.“I’m glad the U.S. Supreme Court finally laid to rest one of the worst failed experiments in American history: affirmative action,” he said. “Still, the ruling is likely to mark the beginning of a new era of ‘shadow’ racial balancing and quotas, where elite universities like Harvard and woke employers play games to suit their desires for preferences that benefit perceived ‘marginalized’ groups.” More