High court will hear challenge to affirmative action policy

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear a case concerning whether a state university can consider someone's race as part of the student's application.

The court said it would hear an appeal in the case of Abigail Fisher, who applied to and was rejected by the University of Texas in 2008. Fisher, who is white, maintains she was rejected, despite having higher grades than some accepted applicants, because of her race.

The case is a continuation of a number of lawsuits surrounding affirmative action in colleges and could knock down a 2003 decision by the Supreme Court that outlawed considering race as part of a point system in selecting applicants but upheld that other, less direct methods for considering race in selecting applicants were legal.

That 2003 case, Grutter v. Bollinger, was based on a challenge to the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action policies. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the school's affirmative action system was legal and did not qualify as an illegal quota system.

Then-President George W. Bush weighed in on the case in 2003, saying that Michigan's system was "fundamentally flawed."

"I strongly support diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity in higher education," Bush said in early 2003 according to CNN. "But the method used by the University of Michigan to achieve this important goal is fundamentally flawed."

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were slow to react to the Supreme Court's announcement on hearing Fisher's case.

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