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The United States Supreme Court has ruled that race can no longer be considered a factor in college admissions.
The landmark decision overturns decades-old US policies on so-called 'affirmative action', also known as affirmative action.
The cases the court decided involved admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC).
With this action, the court banned 'affirmative action' that had long been used to increase the number of black, Hispanic and other underrepresented minority students on American campuses.
The ruling will force many colleges and universities to review their admissions policies as the justices ruled that this form of affirmative action violated the US Constitution's principles of equal treatment.
Speaking at the White House, Democratic President Joe Biden said he strongly disagreed with the decision.
Biden urged colleges not to abandon their commitment to diverse student enrollments.
Asked by a reporter if this is "a mock court," Biden responded by saying "this is not a normal court."
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that "many universities have long mistakenly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not the challenges faced, the skills developed or the lessons learned, but the color of their skin".
"Harvard's admissions process relies on the harmful stereotype that 'a black student can usually bring something a white student can't,'" Roberts wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative who has long called for an end to affirmative action, wrote that such programs were "manifestly unconstitutional."
"The self-proclaimed fairness of universities does not give them permission to discriminate on the basis of race," he said.
Among the liberal justices who dissented was Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote that the decision "overturned decades of precedent and significant progress."
She said the ruling "cements a superficial rule of color blindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society."
According to Harvard, about 40 percent of colleges and universities consider race in some way.
Blum's group in lawsuits filed in 2014 accused the University of North Carolina of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants and Harvard of bias against Asian American applicants.
Harvard and the University of North Carolina have said they use race only as one factor in a host of individualized admissions assessments without quotas — allowed under previous Supreme Court precedents — and that curbing its consideration would cause a drop in significantly in the enrollment of students from underrepresented groups.
Affirmative action had withstood Supreme Court scrutiny for decades.
The United States is a nation that has long struggled with issues of race, dating back to its history of black slavery that ended only after a civil war, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and in recent years the racial justice protests that followed police killings of African Americans. /REL
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