The Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling on Thursday effectively ending affirmative action policies in college and university admissions nationwide was hardly a surprise, given the court's aggressive rightward lurch in the past few years.

And based on the experience of four states where it was already prohibited for higher education to set race-based admissions quotas, there's little doubt that some of the worst predictions of critics of the ruling will result nationally. Minority students who have come up through substandard elementary and secondary schools will find it harder to climb out from that disadvantage into good universities. That will reverberate downstream in a less-diverse white-collar workforce. The data from California, Michigan, Nebraska and Washington state is clear.

This newspaper has long supported vibrant affirmative action policies for reasons laid out in, among many other instances, a 2015 editorial: Affirmative action policies are the nation's effort to compensate for a brutal legacy of racial discrimination ... [and] to give mostly racial minority students who may not have had a chance for a good education during their K-12 years a shot at something better through higher education.

In other words, affirmative action isn't merely a form of reparation for past racial disparities in society. It is also a recognition that those disparities are very much still in play today, and that they create special obstacles for minorities in accessing quality higher education. And that it is in society's interest to try to remove those obstacles.

Add to that the broader issue of this court, once again, casting aside generations of precedence for no reason except that one ideological faction suddenly has the votes — a grubby dynamic that is expected in legislative politics, but which a stable judiciary is supposed to be above — and there is plenty to criticize in this ruling.

All of that said: This is done. The lopsided Supreme Court vote — plus a public rejection today of the very concept of affirmative action that, according to polls, significantly outweighs support for it — means there's a little point in bemoaning the decision. America is now in the post-affirmative-action era, at least as it relates to college admissions.

So what does that mean going forward?

First of all, with the battle effectively over, it's useful to acknowledge what parts of the anti-affirmative-action position were legitimate, and how their arguments might help mitigate the impact of the decision. Justice Clarence Thomas' complex critique of affirmative action over the years — his acknowledgement that it helped him get an education he might not have gotten in its absence, but his sense that his accomplishments were always devalued because of it — is instructive.

To put as optimistic a spin on it as possible, the demise of the system of offering a hand up to those disadvantaged by substandard elementary and secondary schools could re-focus attention on why those disadvantages exist.

It could be argued that affirmative action was an attempt to correct at the back end of the educational process what should be corrected much earlier. It is perhaps naive to suggest that this ruling will drive society to re-think issues like property-tax-based education funding — which inevitably creates a vicious cycle of underfunded schools in poor communities — but it certainly highlights such topics.

While the practice of setting and meeting specific racial quotas is gone with the ruling, the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts makes clear that the court doesn't intend for university admissions offices to be barred from considering race in more case-by-case ways. He specifically left open the ability for schools to consider the "applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life."

That, at least, is something universities perhaps can work with. Life experience of all kinds, including experience tied to race, should be relevant to college admissions. It could be that the demise of race-based quotas will force America to find more nuanced ways to counter what are still the systemic effects of racism.

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