Princeton, N.J.

ON Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, the latest in a long line of conservative assaults on affirmative action that dates to the late 1970s. Nearly a decade has passed since the court, in Grutter v. Bollinger, approved the continued use of race as one factor in an individualized, “holistic” review of an applicant’s qualifications for higher education. Now even such limited consideration of race is being challenged.

Abigail Fisher, who is white, graduated from a Texas public high school in 2008 and barely missed out on automatic admission to the University of Texas at Austin under the Texas Top 10 Percent Law. When she was later denied admission after an evaluation that considered a candidate’s race, she sued, alleging racial discrimination.

Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action in higher education are not optimistic that it will survive. But they shouldn’t despair. A Supreme Court ruling against the university might put ethnic and racial diversity on college campuses on a firmer footing for the long term. It would spur Americans who care about racial inequality to seek alternatives to affirmative action by addressing the deeply entrenched disadvantages that lower-income and minority children face from the beginning of life.

Race-based affirmative action has been a woefully inadequate weapon in the arsenal against inequality. It treats the symptoms but not the root causes of an underlying social problem. It is limited to the more selective private and public colleges (those that accept fewer than half of all applicants), which together account for about 20 percent of all freshmen. By my estimate, between 10,000 and 15,000 black and Hispanic students enroll in selective colleges every year through race-conscious policies. This is about 1 percent of the entering freshman class nationwide and just 1 percent of all black and Hispanic 18-year-olds.