Big changes are coming to how elite colleges choose future students – and how those applicants vie for coveted seats.
A Supreme Court ruling Thursday concluded that Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the 14th amendment to the Constitution by considering students’ race as one of many factors in admissions decisions. This form of affirmative action, which is common at the country’s several hundred highly selective institutions, is no longer allowed.
Students of color say the decision is devastating and sharply changes their outlook on the admissions process. “It made me wonder immediately, how is this going to affect my senior year?” said Rikka Dimalanta, 17, who will be a senior this fall in Los Angeles. “If our identity as students isn’t going to be taken into account, what else am I supposed to put on my application?”
There are other ways for colleges to pursue diversity goals, however, and for students of color to access those institutions, including in some cases by bringing race into the conversation.
Here’s an early look at how college admissions could change.
For most colleges, business as usual
While this decision is historic, it’s important to note it won’t mean much for many colleges. Of the more than 1,000 institutions that use the Common Application, just 70 admit fewer than 25% of their applicants, CEO Jenny Rickard has said.
And plenty of schools are in one of the states that banned affirmative action in college admissions before this week’s ruling, including Arizona, California, Florida and Michigan. Arizona State University quickly declared Thursday that it was one of those institutions that won’t be affected. It “will have no impact on the diversity of the Arizona State University student body or ASU’s commitment to having a student body which reflects the population of the State of Arizona,” the university said.
Will affirmative action ruling matter?Thousands of college and universities already accept almost everyone
How the decision affects college admissions tests, essays
Even before the pandemic, a growing number of highly selective colleges began making standardized test scores an optional part of applications. One of the hopes was that it would lead to a more diverse student population. Then when the pandemic hit, test-optional policies became the default for logistical reasons: As of this past spring, submitting SAT or ACT scores was still optional at most schools.
Although studies have shown the shift away from these tests has meant only small changes in what the student body looks like at small, private institutions, experts predict the court’s affirmative action decision to cement the policies. And that could mean more emphasis on personal statements and essays – an area where race often comes up.
Observers have focused on one line in particular from the ruling: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
However, the justices also wrote – directly challenging the dissent – “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
“For any students my age – myself included – this decision doesn’t prevent us from talking about the way that race has impacted us,” said Aina Marzia, 17, a rising senior in El Paso, Texas, who was infuriated by the court’s decision. “It’s just that we don’t have a box to check for our application this fall.”
Anurima Bhargava, a civil rights lawyer who formerly served with the U.S. Department of Justice, urged future applicants not to shy away from highlighting their racial identity when applying to colleges.
“It’s not that diversity isn’t something that universities can pursue. It’s not that you can’t tell your own stories, stories of your racial experiences, about your identity or your background,” she said in a discussion Thursday hosted by Whiteboard Advisors, a research and consulting firm. “How universities are going to take account of that is still going to be a question for them, but it’s not that students can’t tell those kinds of stories.”
Jeff Selingo, a higher education journalist who spent a year behind the scenes with college admissions officers, said one next step for those gatekeepers is to deliberate what to make of students whose essays deal with race.
What to know:A breakdown of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision
What does this mean for legacy admissions?
Another item for college officials to deliberate: legacy admissions, the practice of giving preference to applicants whose family members attended the institution.
Richard Kahlenberg, a progressive scholar who served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Harvard and UNC cases, said he believes at least some elite colleges will abandon the practice now that they can no longer consider race in admissions.
“If our identity as students isn’t going to be taken into account, what else am I supposed to put on my application?”
Rikka Dimalanta, who will be a high school senior this fall in Los Angeles
Before, he said, affirmative action allowed them to achieve some racial diversity without necessarily ensuring their campuses were socioeconomically diverse as well. One study found more than half of Harvard’s students, however racially diverse, for example, came from the top 10% of the country’s income distribution. Another analysis found that 43% of Harvard’s white admits in 2019 were legacy students, recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff or on applicants affiliated with donors.
Before, he said, affirmative action allowed them to achieve racial diversity without necessarily ensuring their campuses were socioeconomically diverse as well. One study found more than half of Harvard’s students, for example, came from the top 10% of the country’s income distribution. Another analysis found that 43% of Harvard’s white admits in 2019 were legacy students, recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff or on applicants affiliated with donors.
Some highly selective universities, including in states that banned affirmative action, already had stopped practicing legacy admissions. They include the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles. Elsewhere, Texas A&M University and the University of Georgia also have ended the practice.
In remarks denouncing the court’s ruling, President Joe Biden also said he is asking the federal Education Department “to analyze what practices help build a more inclusive and diverse student bodies and what practices hold that back, practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”
A shift to using affirmative action – in recruitment
The onus will be on colleges to recruit from a wide range of communities at the front end of the admissions process, said Forrest Stuart, the vice president of enrollment management at Lafayette College.
“This is really about building a diverse applicant pool,” Stuart said. “There’s nothing in the decision that I’ve seen that says you cannot ensure that the applicant pool is representative of all backgrounds.” Lafayette, a small private college in Pennsylvania where about a quarter of students are people of color, has under Stuart’s leadership partnered with community-based organizations to ensure students from underrepresented backgrounds put their names in the hat as well.
“It really helps because you’re then choosing from a broader base,” said Stuart, who expects this affirmative action-esque approach to recruitment to gain more popularity as colleges work to ensure diversity on campus without considering race in the actual admissions process. “If your net is cast wide enough and broad enough on the building of your applicant pool, I don’t think it’s going to be as difficult for us – at least at Lafayette.”
Biden also encouraged colleges to build a diverse class by factoring in applicants’ family’s income and where they grew up and to consider students’ experiences with hardship or discrimination, including racial discrimination.
Counselors: Colleges need to send a new message to students
Without proactive measures like diversifying applicant pools, educators worry, many students who would’ve applied in an affirmative action world will decide it’s not worth it.
At the American School Counselors Association, Executive Director Jill Cook has been fielding lots of questions. Many counselors are worried students of color will decide against applying to their reach or dream schools because they don’t think they’ll get in. What if some students choose not to apply at all, perceiving higher education to no longer be a welcoming place? (Legislation seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs at colleges can make the campuses seem even less inviting.)
There are also high school counselors who worry about the reverse – students overexerting themselves and applying to too many schools because they fear their chances of getting in are reduced after the court’s ruling.
David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said his group will continue to urge high school counselors to push students to meet with admissions officers at their schools of interest.
“Colleges are looking for a diverse group of students, and the decision should not discourage students at all from applying,” Hawkins said. “We will be swimming against the tide, and it can be discouraging. But we also want to ensure that students know it won’t change the fact that colleges are looking for them.”
Some students may take that message to the extreme.
Allen Koh, founder/CEO of Cardinal Education, an educational consulting firm in California catering to the very affluent, said he’s seen mostly white clients move to states like Montana and Wyoming to pursue a perceived geographic advantage based on what they see as a desire on the part of elite universities to boast student enrollment from all 50 states.
“Harvard calls these states ‘sparse country,’ and different universities call them different things,” he said. “But if you think about the sparse population that ‘sparse country’ implies, the pool of students you’re going after isn’t very large. So they actually get a significant advantage.”
Can anything really replace what the court struck down?
Probably not.
Education experts say universities will likely become less diverse as a result of the ruling, and while the court nonetheless acknowledged the importance of diversity in higher education and left the door open for schools to achieve it through other measures, such efforts could take years to see results – if at all.
“Those measures will be expensive and take years to bear fruit,” said Jennifer McAward, an associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. “In the meantime, we are likely to see a substantial drop in racial diversity at highly selective universities.”
Some point to California, where voters in 1996 passed a proposition prohibiting race-conscious college admissions. Despite numerous outreach efforts, University of California system officials have been unable to restore enrollment to levels of diversity representative of the state.
More:Ahead of Supreme Court affirmative action case ruling: Do Harvard, UNC discriminate?
“The shortfall is especially apparent at UC’s most selective campuses,” they wrote in an amicus brief filed to the Supreme Court last summer, “where African American, Native American and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.”
And even with race conscious admissions for years, Black enrollment in college has dropped nationwide over time.
At elite colleges, admissions will always feel ‘arbitrary’
According to Mitchell Chang, a UCLA chancellor and professor of higher education and organizational change and Asian American studies, the decision will do little to make college admissions seem more equitable.
“There’s always going to be this sense that it’s unfair,” he said, pointing to the Ivy League and other elite schools that admit fewer than 10% of their students and enroll classes of just a few hundred people. “If we remove race-conscious admissions, it’s not like these institutions are going to accept more students. The numbers and percentages of winners will remain the same.”
“Someone’s always going to be upset that they didn’t get admitted yet were highly qualified,” he continued, “because in many ways, when you’re trying to select between hyper-qualified people, the difference between getting in and rejected is almost arbitrary.”
Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aliaemily.
