“We know there are many thousands of high school graduates in California who are good students — high GPA, good SAT reasoning scores, but, for whatever reason, fail to take the subject tests. That just basically antes them right out of the game,” says Mark Rashid, who chaired a UC system-wide faculty committee that is responsible for the school’s admission policy.

The Supreme Court case, along with the UC controversy, will likely renew questions about the best way to select a diverse group of candidates – either for employment or college admission – for a limited number of seats.

“We thought these problems were over in 2003 with the Supreme Court decisions in the University of Michigan cases. As you can see, this debate is far from over,” says Dr. Juan Gilbert, inventor of a patent-pending new software package called Applications Quest, designed to help administrators make fair selections without using race as a determining factor. (The owners of Cox, Matthews and Associates, the publishers of Diverse, have an ownership interest in the software program.)

“All of these cases suffer from a capacity issue. There are more qualified applicants than available positions. If you take race out of this debate, the capacity issues will still exist.”

While the two cases are not joined (one is not a lawsuit – yet), absent implementation of a fairer selection system, it is foreseeable that the unsettled issues of race, testing and selectivity in higher education admissions may be up for consideration in the near future. Hold on for the ride.