Recently the Supreme Court has settled a large number of cases with 5 to 4 votes divided on ideological lines. Today they decided the outcome of a lawsuit filed by a group of Seattle parents called the Parents Involved in Community Schools, which aimed to stop pushing desegregation by lessening the extent race places in admissions programs.

This new decision does not overtly support segregation, or discrimination, but the view of the outcome depends largely on your political views. Some liberals believe that this will push economic discrimination. Here is the liberal view from a WSJ article

Justice Breyer, in his dissent, said the high court is undermining the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. Reading vast parts of his dissent from the bench, Justice Breyer offered a scathing criticism of the four justices who would have found the admissions policies unconstitutional.

“It reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion,” Justice Breyer wrote. “It distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public schools.”

And, in some cases, people claiming to be conservative are already quoting Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Think Progress cited a study which shows that desegregation was the most effective way to close the gap. When courts determine laws based on their ideological lines and rewrite history with a stroke of a pen the fruits from years of struggle are lost. Since there were 5 conservatives on the Supreme Court bench they got their way – right or wrong. Over time, if we continue to move in this direction, perhaps college financial aid opportunities may also shift.

As if sports scholarships were not already hyper-competitive, now some coaches are looking past high school recruits to sign up 8th graders. A University of Sothern California recruiter just offered Ryan Boatright a $188,000 scholarship:

The kid’s name is Ryan Boatright, he’s 14, 5-foot-10 and from Illinois, and still not sure which Aurora high school, East or West, he wants to attend. But he won’t have that problem with college. Ryan left Floyd’s basketball summer camp at USC last weekend with a promise to return in 2011.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer article referenced above also notes that in other countries athletes are routinely selected at a young age:

Developing athletic talent is not only cheaper, but a whole lot less chaotic when it’s run by the government, or by powerful clubs, such as the soccer teams in Europe. There, talents are identified even earlier than 14, catalogued, sent to academies, signed, trained and delivered to pros a few years later at fixed costs.

Yahoo! announced they were buying the Rivals.com college and high school sports news and recruiting network of websites in a deal rumored to be in the $100 million range. If the recruits keep getting younger, they may have bought on early in a growing high value market, but what does this do for the sports and kids? Will it affect their egos? How will they do in high school knowing they are sitting on a full ride? What happens if they change their minds?

Anyone who has served in the military knows 4 years is a long time. And the military is also recruiting early teenagers, using war video games and pizza parties:

Wardynski began developing the game after a similar recruiting crisis in 1999, when top Army officials were looking for a way to reach out to potential recruits with minimal cost. Wardynski wanted an economical way to counter pop-culture images of the military with a no-nonsense approach to being a soldier. The game, he decided, would provide a gateway to information and entertainment, targeting boys 14 and older.

What happens if this enterprising cataloging extends beyond sports and further into other markets? Might people resent their careers or miss what they were really meant to do? What happens to math and science when a kid who is a genius at them commits himself to another field before she knows what a square root is?

Sure we publish tips to help high school juniors and seniors write scholarship application essays and apply for college, but does an 8th grader know what she wants? How can a person know what they want of themselves when they have seen so little of the world and have just hit puberty?