Kellyanne Conway's Daughter Lashes Out at SCOTUS Ruling

Claudia Conway, daughter of Donald Trump's former counselor Kellyanne Conway, has lashed out at the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action.

On Thursday, the SCOTUS laid down one of the biggest reversals since overturning Roe v. Wade last year, striking down affirmative action admissions policies in colleges across the nation. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion that the universities' policies violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. SCOTUS' three liberal judges dissented.

The court ruled in favor of Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group that brought a pair of lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) over their admission policies. The students argued that the affirmative action practices at the two colleges discriminated against white and Asian American applicants while favoring Black and Latino students.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Harvard alum, recused herself from the case involving her alma mater but did participate in the UNC case. Jackson's recusal meant the verdict was 6-2 in the Harvard case and 6-3 in the UNC case.

The ruling has been both celebrated and decried by opposing political sides. There have also been criticisms that legacy admissions—or the admission of a student based on their familial relationship to an alumni member—remain untouched. Critics have argued continuing legacy admissions while striking down affirmative action will lead to an even wider gap between the privileged and everyone else.

Claudia Conway, 18, weighed in on the ruling on Thursday, sharing a series of tweets in which she expressed her outrage at the decision.

The outspoken teen wrote: "The SCOTUS ruling today is a disgrace, in my opinion. These are institutions that formerly discriminated against POC [People of Color] and now that BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] are getting the spots in higher education that they deserve (and have deserved for generations before them), it is stripped away?

"Your son Aidan's spot at Harvard was not 'taken' by a BIPOC applicant. Enough. If affirmative action is somehow 'unlawful,' then why are legacies still a thing? Wealth/geographic factors? Make it make sense."

Claudia Conway, whose father George Conway is a vocal Trump critic, suggested in a follow-up tweet that SCOTUS was dialing back on progress that the U.S. has made over the years.

"The way that SCOTUS is presently pushing us backwards in time IN FRONT OF OUR OWN EYES is HORRIFYING," she tweeted.

Claudia Conway, who recently launched a modeling page on Playboy's website, then reiterated her disapproval of continued legacy admissions.

"And all of those legacy kids ??? Hello ??? The mediocre white legacy kids ??????????????? Bye," she added in another tweet.

In a post that appears to have since been deleted, one Twitter user referred to the teen as a "little girl," adding that she "should listen to your mother and get a better understanding of the Constitution and Equal Rights!"

"I bet you that I can recite more of the Constitution and its 27 amendments [than] you can," Claudia Conway shot back, before ordering the detractor to "move along."

A report released last October by Education Reform Now, an education advocacy non-profit, said that 787 colleges and universities provided some type of legacy preference in 2020. However, colleges described as highly selective in their admissions processes were more prone to providing advantages for legacy students.

Of the 64 four-year colleges and universities that admit less than 25 percent of applications, 80 percent were found to provide advantages for legacy students.

However, private institutions were more prone to accept legacy students per the report, notably those in the northeastern part of the country.

A 2018 survey of American college admissions officers by Inside Higher Ed found that 42 percent of private schools confirmed that legacy status was taken into account in admissions, while that number was about 6 percent at public institutions.

Harvard, in the spotlight along with UNC due to these cases, had an approximate 33 percent acceptance rate for legacy between 2010 and 2015, according to PBS News Hour, among a 6 percent overall acceptance rate. That was about 5.7 times higher than the acceptance rate for non-legacy applicants.

A 2020 report published by the Wall Street Journal showed a slight decrease in a 16-year period, with 56 percent of the nation's top 250 institutions considering legacy applicants—down from 63 percent in 2004.

Proponents of affirmative action have warned that striking it down could have devastating impacts on access to education. Some have pointed to California as an example of what could come for colleges across America.

Residents in California first voted to ban colleges from using a race-based admission approach in 1996—a decision that was upheld again in 2020. Since Proposition 209 passed nearly three decades ago, enrollment numbers for African American and Latino students never recovered to pre-1996 levels.

Colleges had already been ordered to narrowly apply affirmative action. Earlier Supreme Court rulings have prohibited colleges from imposing quotas for how many students of certain backgrounds are admitted and have required schools to consider other factors, like test scores and extracurricular activities.

While the Supreme Court's ruling has faced criticism, recent polls indicate it may be a popular decision. June polls found a majority of Republicans and Democrats opposed affirmative action, preferring merit-based admissions processes instead. It's a strikingly different picture from last year's Roe v. Wade decision, when polls showed the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the decades-long protection of abortion rights ran contrary to the opinion of most Americans.