296
Souter, J., dissenting
gument that the freshman admissions system operates this way. The present record obviously shows that nonminority applicants may achieve higher selection point totals than minority applicants owing to characteristics other than race, and the fact that the university admits "virtually every qualified under-represented minority applicant," App. to Pet. for Cert. 111a, may reflect nothing more than the likelihood that very few qualified minority applicants apply, Brief for Respondent Bollinger et al. 39, as well as the possibility that self-selection results in a strong minority applicant pool. It suffices for me, as it did for the District Court, that there are no Bakke-like set-asides and that consideration of an applicant's whole spectrum of ability is no more ruled out by giving 20 points for race than by giving the same points for athletic ability or socioeconomic disadvantage.
Any argument that the "tailoring" amounts to a set-aside, then, boils down to the claim that a plus factor of 20 points makes some observers suspicious, where a factor of 10 points might not. But suspicion does not carry petitioners' ultimate burden of persuasion in this constitutional challenge, Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Ed., 476 U. S. 267, 287-288 (1986) (plurality opinion of Powell, J.), and it surely does not warrant condemning the college's admissions scheme on this record. Because the District Court (correctly, in my view) did not believe that the specific point assignment was constitutionally troubling, it made only limited and general findings on other characteristics of the university's admissions practice, such as the conduct of individualized review by the Admissions Review Committee. 122 F. Supp. 2d 811, 829-830 (ED Mich. 2000). As the Court indicates, we know very little about the actual role of the review committee. Ante, at 274 ("The record does not reveal precisely how many applications are flagged for this individualized consideration [by the committee]"); see also ante, at 279-280 (O'Connor, J., concurring) ("The evidence in the record . . . reveals very little about how the review committee actually functions"). The point system cannot operate as a de facto set-aside if the
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