Public Perspectives on Affirmative Action in Education: Insights from SFFA v. Harvard and Contribusting Realities

This paper explores how the 20222023 Supreme Court hearings and ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard reshaped public attitudes toward affirmative action in higher education. Firstly, the legal analysis, media discourse analysis, and survey data will be provided to highlight the tensions between diversity goals and perceptions of meritocracy. Secondly, our team will present a comprehensive description of our data analysis to further investigate public perspectives on affirmative action in higher education and its implications. We collected 6,579 comments from six YouTube videos, utilizing MDCOR for analysis and conducting text analysis on the data. The results of the analysis categorized the comments into seven topics, each of the topic will be examined in depth.