Debates over the racial consequences of merit-based admissions are back in the news. But unlike the conversations about specialized and gifted-and-talented high schools in New York City and elsewhere, these concerns aren’t coming from the political left — and the worry isn’t about Black and Latino students losing out.

Instead, Bo French, a Republican candidate for statewide office in Texas, ignited a national firestorm after sharing a photograph on social media depicting a large group of South Asian students celebrating a big football victory at the University of Texas at Austin, bemoaning that they were crowding out what were implied to be more “deserving” white non-immigrant applicants.

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The irony is that UT-Austin relies on precisely the sort of colorblind meritocratic academic-based criteria that Republicans and conservatives have long championed. Automatic admission based on high school class rank fills most of the spaces available to Texas residents. Yet Asian students make up nearly a quarter of UT undergraduates despite being just 7% of the Texas population.

In the weeks since French’s post sparked outrage, editorials and op-eds have rushed to draw broader conclusions about what his comments say about the political right — whether conservatives still believe in meritocracy, or whether some are growing uneasy about Asian academic competition.

There is at least some evidence that these concerns extend beyond political rhetoric: As The 74 reported in 2023, researchers studying affluent California school districts found that white enrollment fell as Asian enrollment rose, with academic competition emerging as one plausible explanation. But there is surprisingly little evidence about how common these views are among ordinary Americans.

To shed light rather than heat on this question, I conducted an experiment on two national surveys of 1,059 U.S. adults sponsored by Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics. First, I reminded respondents that a lot of people believe colleges should “rely strictly” on grades and test scores in admissions decisions, while others worry that strict adherence to these merit-based criteria would produce less diverse campuses. But here is where the experiment came in: Some respondents were told that merit-based criteria could result in campuses becoming mostly white, whereas others were told campuses would become mostly Asian.

Because participants had an equal chance of receiving either cue, the differences in their responses could be attributed to whether they thought merit-based admissions would make campuses more Asian or more white.

The figure below displays the responses from white Republicans, white Democrats and Black Americans (there were too few Black Republicans in the sample to analyze them separately).

Three findings stand out.

First, relatively few white Republicans agreed with French and other highly visible voices on the populist right. Just 28% said they would be concerned if merit-based admissions resulted in a mostly Asian campus, while 21% expressed concern about a mostly white one. In both cases, fewer than 3 in 10 were worried about the racial consequences of merit-based admissions policies. In short, the Bo Frenches of the world may be highly visible online, but they are hardly representative of Republicans generally.

Second, Black Americans were substantially more concerned about a mostly Asian outcome than were white Republicans. Nearly half of Black respondents expressed concern about a mostly Asian campus, compared with just 1 in 3 white Republicans. But Black respondents were even more concerned about a mostly white campus, as 58% expressed concern about that potential outcome. In other words, Black Americans showed relatively high concern about racial concentration regardless of which group benefited.

Third, the largest difference appeared among white Democrats. A majority (53%) expressed concern that relying strictly on grades and test scores could result in a mostly white campus. But only 26% expressed the same concern when the identical admissions policy was said to produce a mostly Asian campus. White Democrats were roughly twice as likely to worry about the racial outcome when the group benefiting was white rather than Asian.

That last result is especially striking because a mostly white outcome does not fit especially well with the real-world cases driving these debates. In New York City, for example, white students received 17% of offers to attend a specialized high school that required doing well on an admission exam, while making up about 16% of the public school system. Asian students received over half of these offers, while making up 19% overall. At UT, whites are nowhere near a majority, while Asian students are represented far above their share of the Texas population. In both cases, the striking overrepresentation is Asian, not white.

That is also why this issue is likely to grow more salient. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions ruling sharply limits universities’ ability to consider race directly in admissions decisions, while specialized public exam high schools continue to wrestle with racial disparities produced by academically selective systems. In September, allies of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — himself a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s specialized schools — again called for changes to the city’s exam school admissions policies because of the severe underrepresentation of Black and Latino students alongside high Asian enrollment.

The larger lesson is that race-neutral admissions rules are unlikely to take racial politics out of education. They may simply move the argument from the rules themselves to who benefits from them. So far, most white Republicans appear largely indifferent to whether merit-based admissions produce a mostly white or mostly Asian campus. Whether that principle holds as Asian academic success becomes more politically salient is an open question.