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Article snippet: Just a year ago, after the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions program by a single swing vote, the question seemed to be edging, at last, toward an answer: Colleges could, the justices ruled, consider race when deciding whom to let through their gates. “I thought this was settled,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, an economist at Georgetown University who studies affirmative action. “I thought it was done.” Only for the moment. A series of lawsuits and complaints have continued to challenge such practices, and last week, President Trump’s Justice Department joined the chorus, signaling that it would marshal lawyers to investigate and perhaps sue colleges over “intentional race-based discrimination” in admissions. Besieged in court, routed in eight states, accused of favoring blacks and Latinos at the expense of Asians and whites, affirmative action — a major legacy of the civil rights era — is once again the subject of uncomfortable scrutiny. But even without federal intervention, a look at affirmative action policies in 2017 shows that they have achieved their own kind of diversity, evolving from the explicitly race-based quotas of decades ago into a range of approaches that occasionally, not always, near the melting-pot ideal, often by giving preference to low-income students instead of minorities. “The reason a liberal like me is intrigued by Trump’s actions on affirmative action is that I think it could have the effe... Link to the full article to read more