Today our Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to eliminate racial considerations in admissions decisions or affirmative action.

This will be celebrated by some and reviled by others even though it probably won't make a huge difference in terms of class makeup at most "elite" institutions. Given my leanings and who I follow, you can probably guess which views I'm seeing more of.

The cases that have generally been brought against institutions implementing affirmative action usually amount to "I was more qualified than the affirmative action candidate you took" with public cries of "you're lowering standards."

Could either of these claims hold water?

Let's look at the lowering standards side. Either the accepted candidate was set up and able to succeed in the school or they are not. If they weren't, well, that would have come clean long ago given that we've had affirmative action for a long time. So, it would appear that these candidates that "got in over me" are able to survive and thrive. This could be because intuitions like Harvard are much harder to get in than to graduate from but whatever. Doesn't sound like a standards issue.

If we want to talk about lowering standards however, how about athletes that "didn't come here to play school" or legacy admits - I can think of a couple of recent Presidents who were, well, let's say not high intellects but somehow attended our "elite" institutions. Personally, if you eliminate my Stuy grads from the equation, I've met as many dummies who went to the Harvards of the world as I've met geniuses. Well connected dummies who ran in the right circles and went to the right schools but dummies nonetheless.

What about "I'm more qualified?" Well, schools like Harvard or really any elite school can pretty much shape their incoming classes however they'd like. The pool of qualified applicants - students who will go through four years and graduate successfully - dwarfs the size of the accepted class. Just looking at Stuy numbers from when I was there, for every student Harvard accepted, I could point to dozens who would have fared just as well who were rejected. Now project that nationally. There's no doubt in my mind that affirmative action candidates would be easily in the qualified pool.

It made me remember something I read that Malcolm Gladwell once wrote or said. Something like that Harvard had so many qualified graduates that if they really cared about being fair, they should take all the qualified applicants and then select randomly. No athletes, no legacy, nothing special. Of course, that would never happen.

Now, I get that when you're qualified and aren't accepted you might want to cry out "unfair" and maybe it is, but it's not unfair because of an affirmative action candidate. It's unfair because it's arbitrary and tons of qualified applicants get turned away for no apparent reason not because of affirmative action.

The end result today is that colleges are free to keep those legacy admits, big donor admits, or whatever but heaven help you if you deign to consider anything to help balance the scales for marginalized groups or anything to try to help build equity in our country.

Now, I do have one issue with affirmative action. It can be a distracter. Distract from what? The big picture problem.

Affirmative action can help but the students that they can admit are qualified to be accepted to these elite institutions. That says that either they're from situations where they've had available to them some or all of the advantages that the rich white kids have had or that they've already rose above the challenges to make themselves viable candidates. If so, good on them and good for rewarding them but the issue has to be addressed much earlier.

We have so many issues that have to be resolved with education, poverty, health care, housing, all of which hits our vulnerable populations the hardest and until as a nation we decide to address those we're not truly going to have a fair equitable society. Unfortunately, a significant portion of our country doesn't want to solve these problems and injustices.

In the meantime, a handful of students who, well, quite frankly, deserved to be admitted to Harvard anyway, getting admissions as affirmative action is nice for them but its no game changer. It's feel good window dressing.

I'm not saying this to diminish the problems with today's ruling but we really have to attack the big problems and not just around the edges. It's like programs like Prep for Prep. Prep for Prep's mission is to "develop future leaders by creating access for young people of color to first-rate educational, leadership development and professional advancement opportunities." They identify individual students who they feel show promise and get them into elite private schools (and pay the tuition). Great for those kids but it's a small number and it doesn't do anything to fix any problems in the system as a whole.

So, that's my two cents. I'm as angered by today's ruling as the next person but to me it's a reminder that it's not about getting a few kids into "elite" institutions. It's about making the all the institutions "elite."