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 Conservative justices on Monday seemed open to ending decades of Supreme Court precedent allowing race-conscious admission decisions at colleges and universities, repeatedly expressing doubt that the institutions would ever concede an “endpoint” in their use of race to build diverse student bodies.

After  the affirmative-action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seemed seriously endangered. The question is how broad such a decision might be, and what it would mean for other elite colleges and flagship state universities that say relying on grades and test scores alone could result in a dramatic drop in Black and Hispanic students.

Overturning the court’s precedents that race can be one factor of many in making admission decisions would have “profound consequences” for “th“Whatever factors the government may use in deciding which jurors to sit, who you may marry, or which primary schools our children can attend, skin color is not one of them,”

It was the term’s most polarizing hearing so far, and the extensive debate represented an extraordinary time investment for the court in which, typically, arguments span an hour. The courtroom was packed for the UNC case, which was heard first, and at least four of the justices’ spouses — Jane Roberts, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, Ashley Kavanaugh and Patrick Jackson — were in attendance.“The negative consequences would have reverberations throughout just about every important institution in America,” she said, listing the military, medical and scientific ct. 31 challenged attorney Seth Waxman on Harvard's admission policies. (Video: The Washington Post)

But the court’s conservatives took the cases to revisit decades of Supreme Court decisions that tolerated a limited use of racial classifications, and seemed unsatisfied with assertions from lawyers representing the schools that the end was near for the use of race-conscious policies. Under repeated questioning, those lawyers conceded they could not provide a date-specific answer to the question: “When will it end?”

Patrick Strawbridge, representing Students for Fair Admissions, said allowing the use of race in higher education was an outlier among the court’s decisions that should be rejected