Opinion of the Court
UNC’s admissions program operates similarly. The University frames the challenge it faces as “the admission and enrollment of underrepresented minorities,” Brief for University Respondents in No. 21–707, at 7, a metric that turns solely on whether a group’s “percentage enrollment within the undergraduate student body is lower than their percentage within the general population in North Carolina,” 567 F. Supp. 3d, at 591, n. 7; see also Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 21–707, at 79. The University “has not yet fully achieved its diversity-related educational goals,” it explains, in part due to its failure to obtain closer to proportional representation. Brief for University Respondents in No. 21–707, at 7; see also 567 F. Supp. 3d, at 594.
The problem with these approaches is well established. “[O]utright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.” Fisher I, 570 U. S., at 311 (internal quotation marks omitted). That is so, we have repeatedly explained, because “[a]t the heart of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection lies the simple command that the Government must treat citizens as individuals, not as simply components of a racial, religious, sexual or national class.” Miller, 515 U. S., at 911 (internal quotation marks omitted). By promising to terminate their use of race only when some rough percentage of various racial groups is admitted, respondents turn that principle on its head. Their admissions programs “effectively assure[] that race will always be relevant … and that the ultimate goal of eliminating” race as a criterion “will never be achieved.” Croson, 488 U. S., at 495 (internal
Asian students at Harvard varied significantly from 1980 to 1994—a 14-year period that ended nearly three decades ago. 4 App. in No. 20–1199, at 1770. But the relevance of that observation—handpicked and truncated as it is—is lost on us. And the dissent does not and cannot dispute that the share of black and Hispanic students at Harvard—“the primary beneficiaries” of its race-based admissions policy—has remained consistent for decades. 397 F. Supp. 3d, at 178; 4 App. in No. 20–1199, at 1770. For all the talk of holistic and contextual judgments, the racial preferences at issue here in fact operate like clockwork.
