What To Do When The Law is Bad For Your Patients’ Health

Access to a good education has empirically been shown to significantly increase one's chances of enjoying good health. Conversely, a poor education virtually guarantees poor health outcomes. Yet, over the past half-century, the United States Supreme Court has steadily marched away from the guarantees of equal educational opportunity for underrepresented children, and thus marched deliberately towards widening already egregious health disparities. Most recently, in SFFA v. President and Fellows of Harvard College et al., the Supreme Court pronounced, “Today, the Court holds that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not tolerate this practice [admitting or rejecting applicants based in part on race] . . . ” explaining that the Court is unsure how to measure the benefits of affirmative action when framed as “whether leaders have been adequately ‘train[ed]’ or whether the exchange of ideas is ‘robust’ or whether ‘new knowledge’ is being developed.”

This presentation will propose measures of the harms caused by educational inequality, such as the facts that only 25.2% of college graduates are black or Latino, 29% of college professors are from underrepresented minority groups, and black and brown children in America attend public school districts whose budgets are $23 billion smaller than the budgets for predominately white public school districts. I will explore the multiple mechanisms that connect good education to good health, and the evidence that increases in morbidity and mortality are closely correlated to lack of educational attainment. With these data as a backdrop, this presentation will apply the tools of legal epidemiology to analyze recent Supreme Court decisions, such as the Harvard/UNC affirmative action case, to conclude that the current Court's educational law jurisprudence is bad for all Americans' health. Dean Matthew will conclude with proposed solutions.