What Really Happened After the Affirmative Action Ban
Plus, deep sea discoveries and moon base missions
The Supreme Court ruling banning race-based affirmative action is almost three years old, and almost nothing has played out as expected. Black and Hispanic enrollment dropped at the country’s most elite universities, but rose at the vast majority of colleges across the US. And in a twist nobody planned for, the end of race-based admissions may have quietly accelerated the rise of class-based affirmative action.
Plus, scientists have discovered what may be one of the world’s largest deep-sea coral reefs off the coast of Argentina, an ecosystem that is home to 40 species new to science. A golf ball-sized, bright blue octopus near the Galapagos Islands has just been confirmed as a brand new species. NASA has unveiled its renderings for a permanent moon base, with three missions targeting launch before the end of 2026. Additionally, researchers in the Czech Republic are racing to climate-proof the Saaz hop, the backbone of Czech pilsner, before droughts and heatwaves do the unthinkable.
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Transcript
Emma Varvaloucas: The Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action three years ago, and let’s just say some unexpected things happened next. Also this week, a massive deep sea coral reef discovered off the coast of Argentina that scientists didn’t know existed, NASA’s plan to build a permanent base on the moon, and the most important climate science story of the year: saving a crucial beer ingredient.
Welcome to the What Could Go Right Progress Report, where we dive into all the good news that you probably missed because it was buried under the barrage of bad news. Hey, if you’re new here, I’m Emma Varvaloucas, and I’m the executive director of The Progress Network. Let’s get into it.
First up, affirmative action, specifically race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
In case you’re not familiar, this was, for decades, the tool that elite colleges used to build diverse campuses, giving particular minority students a better shot of getting into schools that had historically shut them out, and those degrees led to better jobs and more money. But in 2023, the Supreme Court banned it, with the majority asserting that race conscious admissions violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Affirmative action was officially ruled unconstitutional. Headlines and the court’s three liberal justices in their dissent warned of a massive fallout in minority enrollment to come. So when I saw there was now halfway decent data out from the last two years, I wanted to dig into it. What actually happened to those college students?
Let’s start off with the not so good, and don’t worry, the good is coming. At the country’s 50 most selective schools—so think the Ivy League, Carnegie Mellon, NYU—Black and Hispanic enrollment dropped pretty significantly in the 2024 freshman class. We’re talking a net negative of about 2,700 students. In the 100 most selective schools, Black enrollment still suffered somewhat, but Hispanic representation actually improved.
All of this, by the way, comes from the most comprehensive analysis of enrollment trends I could find, which was done by James S. Murphy at the grassroots network called Class Action. His data covers more than 3,000 institutions across the US. On the other hand, White and Asian enrollment was basically flat.
Asian enrollment did tick up at Ivy Plus schools (that’s the Ivy League plus a small elite group like Stanford). But overall, not much changed, which is probably a surprise to critics of affirmative action, who expected that it would surge. Now, this general pattern seems to have continued into the 2025 class as well, although that data is somewhat limited.
To sum it all up, at the very top of the country’s prestige pyramid, Black and Hispanic students somewhat down, everyone else largely unchanged. Not ideal, but not a disaster either. But, and this is a big but, that is a sliver of American higher education. Like, a very tiny sliver. As Elle Woods once said... What, like it’s hard? Well, yeah, it actually is. 3 to 6% acceptance rate at the Ivies hard.
At all other types of four-year colleges in the country, which is, you know, most of them, minority enrollment went up, in some cases by a lot. Enrollment of Black students rose 50% at the University of Mississippi. Hispanic enrollment rose 35% at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 83% of public flagship universities saw diversity increase.
This is actually something that scholars predicted, and it’s called the cascade effect. The idea is that high-performing minority students who before the Supreme Court ruling might have ended up at, say, Rice or Vanderbilt, instead ended up at what were probably their safety schools, places like American University or Fordham.
Still good educations, but you can imagine the pissed off teenagers finding out that they didn’t get into their dream schools. Been there. But hey, these schools and a lot more like them saw big jumps in diversity, and that is a win for those campuses.
Now, before you fully exhale, the cascade effect does have a potential downside. Those “cascaded students” end up at schools with lower graduation rates and lower after college earnings on average. And if they didn’t attend those super elite universities, chances are that they missed out on what’s essentially a golden conveyor belt to the nation’s halls of power.
What is a positive is that so far, another risk of the cascade effect, which is that the influx of super qualified students would completely push out students lower on the academic ladder, hasn’t happened. The number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program overall has stayed steady.
So, on the racial diversity front: mixed bag. Not great at the very top, but to the benefit of almost everywhere else.
Now, here’s where things get really surprising. With race off the table for college admissions, elite schools shifted their focus to socioeconomic background. In a sample of top 100 colleges, the Progressive Policy Institute, which does advocate for class-based admissions policies, found that the share of first-generation college students is rising. Yale and Dartmouth actually both set records for it in 2024, and the share of admitted students eligible for federal Pell Grants, which go to middle and low-income students, is also growing.
So in a weird, unintended, nobody fully planned this way, the end of race-based affirmative action may have accidentally accelerated the rise of class-based affirmative action. But the reality is, is that the full picture of the 2023 ban is going to take years to come into focus. If anything, this is a reminder that things are rarely as cut and dried as they seem, and there are often factors that come into play that shift outcomes in unanticipated ways.
Before we get into our shorter stories, here are some numbers to make you smile. 90%, the share of Gambians with access to electricity, up from 60% in 2018. 1,450, that’s the number of loggerhead sea turtle nests that have been counted so far in Florida as their nesting season heads into what people expect is going to be a record-breaking year.
64%, the share of US adults who say marijuana should be legalized, up from 31% in 2000. And eight, that’s the number of crested ibises that were just released into the wild in Japan. If you don’t know what a crested ibis is, it’s an endangered bird that had previously gone extinct in the country.
And here are our quick hits for today.
First up are two ocean discoveries that I am particularly excited to dive into. Pun intended. To start us off, scientists just discovered a deep sea cold water reef that might be one of the largest in the world. They found it off the coast of Argentina at a depth of 3,300 feet. And in case you’re thinking that that sounds like a great destination for your next dive, it’s a little outside normal human range, which is part of the reason why these deep sea reefs are just now being discovered.
Over two expeditions in 2025 and early 2026, biologist Erick Cordes and his team of scientists scouted this reef, which goes for an impressive 560 miles, using a remote operated vehicle. Think Mars Rover, but for the ocean. And to give you a sense of just how large the reef is, just one of the coral formations is 96 acres. That’s the size of the Mall of America. . . . I wonder if they have an Auntie Anne’s.
And this is where things get really exciting. Santiago Herrera, one of the biologists on the expedition, told Mongabay that this is one of the most vibrant and lush environments in the deep sea that he’d ever seen. He says, “When we go down into the deep, we know that food becomes increasingly scarce, and so that means that life becomes increasingly scarce.”
So you can imagine he probably spat out his water in shock after finding out just how much life there was there, including 40 new deep sea species. And the best part? The researchers aren’t just invading the privacy of these deep sea creatures. The reef is also showing some signs of damage, possibly from commercial fishing. So they’re not just down there for the sake of science, they’re also actively trying to restore the reef. Pretty epic when you think about it.
And for a bonus round of deep sea discoveries, a small blue organism was found floating around the waters near the Galapagos Islands. And no, it wasn’t a member of the Blue Man Group snorkeling.
It was a golf ball sized octopus, and scientists have just announced it as a brand new species. And you guys, if you can’t visualize the size of a golf ball so easily, this octopus is small enough to fit inside of your palm. It’s teensy weensy, and it’s blue, and it kind of looks like a grumpy old man crossed with a Powerpuff girl. You gotta look it up.
So to run it back, this little guy was actually first spotted in 2015 about 5,800 feet below the surface near Darwin Island in the Galapagos. When they found him, scientists on the ship could be heard laughing and saying, “Is that a cute little guy or what?” Which, same. And no, that is not a joke. You can literally hear it on the audio feed from the dive.
Okay, so you might have clocked that this all happened 11 years ago. So why are we talking about it now? Well, here’s why. In order to determine if an organism is a newly discovered species, scientists need to perform a complete autopsy, which let’s just say is destructive to the sample.
Those researchers only collected one specimen, and they didn’t want to cut it open, I mean, obviously, because it’s adorable. The scientists found a solution, though, which was to use CT scanning technology to get an in-depth view of its anatomy without having to tear it apart. So the tiny blue octopus is now a confirmed species, and its official name is the Microellidon galapagoensis.
I know. I was sort of thinking that they’d go with something like Octo-Blussy. I don’t know, I think it could be the title of a good Bond movie starring the cutest villain ever. Or not.
Next up is a story that’s really shooting for the moon. As part of the Artemis program, NASA is on its way to building a permanent base on the moon, and they’ve just released the renderings of what it would look like.
If you’re thinking, “Didn’t NASA just send astronauts to the moon in April?” Yes, they did, and that was record-breaking for the furthest humans have ever traveled into space. And the astronauts got to see parts of the moon no one had ever seen before with the naked eye. So naturally, NASA was stoked, and they were like, “That was so fun. I wanna go back.” So much so that they’re spending $20 billion to construct a permanent base at the moon’s south pole that they’re hoping is going to be operational by 2032. I am curious what you guys make of this because part of me is like, yes, like imagine all the groundbreaking scientific research, and then the other part of me is like, what’s next? A Starbucks and an Equinox?
But let’s forget what I think for a second. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced in a news conference recently that they’re planning three moon-based missions, mostly to drop off equipment, and which are all targeted to launch before the end of 2026. That is a very ambitious mission on a very ambitious timeline.
In fact, some experts are saying that the timeline is so ambitious that it’s a little, how do I put this? Delulu. But for ambition bordering on delusion, who better to go to for the first mission than the king of free same-day delivery, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself. Like some of the more eccentric billionaires, Bezos has a space company called Blue Origin. They’re one of several private companies that NASA is partnering with on these moon missions to utilize their lunar landers and other equipment.
And like we’ve seen before in history, there’s nothing quite like a good old-fashioned space race, but this time, China is the main character. The US wants to get humans to the moon by 2028 to beat China’s target of 2030, and China is also working with Russia in order to get their own moon base going by 2035.
Who’s gonna win? With all of my love to NASA, I do feel like we’re kind of behind the eight ball here, and I don’t know, maybe it’s in China’s destiny. I mean, they did invent the Lunar New Year. Anyway, I’m taking bets, and I think we all need a bracket to look forward to after the World Cup. Am I right?
And last up, climate science, but make it delicious.
Researchers in the Czech Republic are working to save one of the country’s most prized exports from the effects of climate change. That export is beer, and this is serious. Listen up. This news should concern anyone who drinks and enjoys beers, which I imagine is most of you. The Czech Republic, which drinks more beer per capita than any other country in the world, is facing a serious climate problem. Aren’t we all.
Droughts and heatwaves have been hammering the central European nation in recent years, putting the country’s prized Saaz hop under real strain. The Saaz hop, if you’re not a beer connoisseur, is the signature ingredient, nay, the backbone of the world-famous Czech pilsners.
And if you’re thinking, “Who cares about the Saaz hop?” Well, that exact hop is one of the main ingredients in Pilsner Urquell and Stella Artois. And if we’ve got any Stella drinkers listening to this, what are you doing with your life? I’m sorry, I just don’t like Stella.
It’s not just Czech brewers who have climate change on their mind. Hops producers the world over are worried about the future of the crop, so hops researchers are hopping to it, including at the Czech Hop Research Institute—I love that that’s a thing—which is breeding new varieties of the famous hop that can handle hotter, drier summers without losing the flavor profile that the ingredient is famous for.
And side note, how fun would it be to be a beer scientist? I feel like a lot more people in my high school, if they had known that that was a legitimate career option, would’ve tried harder in science class.
And so far, the institute’s new varieties are showing drought resilience, so it’s proving to be successful on the farms and in the breweries. The proof is in the pint. Listen to this. Earlier in May, the institute’s top hops researcher debuted a new lager that is brewed with climate-resilient Saaz at a Prague pub, and an hour before the keg was even tapped, craft beer fans were already lined up. When he raised the first glass, the room applauded, and that says a lot in the Czech Republic, where beer culture is basically a religion.
So climate change, still a thing, but at least we’re gonna be able to drink our way through it. And that’s all for this week’s Progress Report. I hope these stories remind you that there is so much good going on out there in the world, so it’s important to shift our focus away sometimes from all the bad.
So if you got some value from this episode, maybe something you can bring up at your World Cup watch party, send it to a friend who could use some positive news. And make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on your preferred podcast platform and leave us a review. If you want even more stories like this delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.
The link is in the description. Got a good news story that you want to see us covering next week? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for watching, and see you next week on the Progress Report.
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