Affirmative Action: One Year Later
What's changed in the world of higher education since the Supreme Court decision
(Standard disclaimer: All opinions shared in this piece are my own and are not intended to represent any current, past, or future employer)
In June 2023, the Supreme Court effectively outlawed the use of racial preferences in college admissions decisions when it ruled that race based affirmative action admissions structures at the University of North Carolina and Harvard1 were unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Right Act.
In full transparency, let me disclose my positionality here: I didn’t agree with the Supreme Court’s decision then and I still think the way that the justices framed how college admissions works reflects their limited understanding of how admissions works and their misperception of admissions as a zero sum game. I was in favor of affirmative action policies prior to the Supreme Court decision, but I also think consideration of race/ethnicity was never going to be a magic bullet or the best/only path to actually increasing access to highly selective schools. Affirmative action should always have been just one of multiple strategies to increase college access and degree attainment for traditionally excluded and underrepresented groups.
As I wrote at the time, this was both a significant development in higher education and one that would likely have a relatively small impact (if any) on most college admissions processes.
This is partially due to the fact that relatively few schools even had these now forbidden policies in place. Most colleges accept most of their applicants, most of the time. Some colleges, in anticipation of this decision, had already begun quietly moving away from affirmative action policies if they ever had them in place to begin with.
Additionally, at the time of the Supreme Court decision, affirmative action policies had already been banned in several states for years (including California, which enrolls more college students than any other state). Even in states where affirmative action policies were still allowable at the time of the Supreme Court decision, the vast majority of colleges simply didn’t have these kinds of policies in place.
I’ve also had questions about the likely actual impact of the decision because, well, affirmative action policies simply weren’t all that effective at actually increasing the enrollment of historically (and currently) excluded populations at highly selective universities2. According to researchers from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, “even with race-conscious affirmative action, diversity gains made at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities were incremental at best”.
Put even more bluntly: the highly selective colleges and universities that were the most likely to have affirmative action admissions policies already enrolled some of the smallest percentages of Black, Latino, and American Indian students compared to all other types of institutions.
My hunch at the time was that the real impact of the decision would likely come not from actual changes in admissions processes but rather in the following ways:
Some states (most likely red states with conservative leaning state legislators and/or college presidents and boards) would use the decision as a justification to dismantle financial aid programs, college access programs, and on-campus supports that explicitly or primarily serve non-White students
Some colleges and universities (both public and private), would end scholarship and institutional financial aid programs designed to help recruit non-White students, despite the fact that the Supreme Court decision didn’t apply to scholarships or financial aid programs.
Shifts in application behavior due to student perception that they are more or less likely to get admitted as a result of the decision (e.g. more White students applying to highly selective schools and more students of color opting to apply for less selective schools). It’s important to note here that more highly selective schools have begun requiring ACT or SAT scores again, which may also impact student’s application behavior.
The early data about related to college application and enrollment patterns for the 2024-2025 school year is starting to come in, which makes this a good time to see what we know so far about the real impact of the end of affirmative action.
It should be noted that we are still learning how the FAFSA challenges during the 2023-2024 admissions cycle impacted trends, so it may be complicated to tease out the impact of the affirmative action decision without also recognizing that FAFSA was a MUCH bigger challenge for most students and families.
Student Application Trends
While we still don’t have final enrollment numbers nationally, there have been some interesting early findings from the 2023-2024 admissions cycle:
According to a report from the Common App, application numbers overall look strong with a significant increase (11%) in applications from "underrepresented minority groups” to the 1000+ schools that use Common App. There was also a 5% increase in applications from first generation college students and a 4% increase in applications from lower income students.
The application growth was fastest among applicants identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native (15%), Latinx (12%) and Black or African American (10%).
It should be noted that the majority of the students from underrepresented minority groups applied to less selective colleges … but so did the majority of white students. This is partially a numbers game as there are far more less selective institutions than highly selective ones for students to apply to.
Asian students continue to be the outlier as they are more likely to apply to more selective institutions.
Application numbers rose the most for public institutions (16% increase) compared to private colleges (5%)
This could be related to the FAFSA debacle and some students looking to apply to lower cost institutions because they were anxious about financial aid availability.
One of the open questions following the affirmative action decision was whether it would make students more or less likely to self-report their race and/or ethnicity data (either in their admissions essays or in the optional question on the Common App that allows students to self-disclose their racial identity). According to the Common App, there were no reported changes in trends related to student self-report of data. However, colleges and universities could chose to suppress the answer to self-reported race question when reviewing student applications, which some highly selective institutions chose to do.
Overall the impact of the affirmative action decision does not appear to be as significant a driver in changing application trends as the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting large scale move toward test optional admissions policies was in the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 admissions cycles. As more highly selective institutions begin to reinstate test score requirements, there could continue to be shifts in application behaviors as students, especially students of color, with lower scores self-select into less selective institutions.
College Enrollment Trends
It’s still early in the fall and many high profile institutions haven’t released their enrollment data yet, so I’m hesitant to draw any big conclusions yet. That said, the early reports from high selective colleges are somewhat of a mixed bag:
Some schools, including Amherst, MIT, and Washington University in St. Louis reported declines in enrollment numbers for Black and Hispanic students. MIT, which is no longer test optional, dropped from a previous average of 11-13% Black students in their freshman class to around 5% this year. While this is a fairly large percentage decline, it translates to less than a 100 student difference because their class size is small.
Enrollment of Black students held steady at other schools, including Smith College, Yale, and Princeton. Again context matters: the overall number of students is still small. Smith College, for example, enrolled around 30 Black students in total.
Enrollment of Black students increased slightly at Sarah Lawrence.
Enrollment of Asian students declined at Smith, Yale, Princeton, and Tufts. This is interesting given that one of the arguments made by anti-affirmative action advocates is that affirmative action policies were harmful primarily to White and Asian students.
The University of California system (where affirmative action has been banned since 1996) enrolled their largest and most diverse class ever in 2024, with sizable enrollments of both Latino and Asian students.
All colleges and universities have to report demographic data about their enrolled students to the federal government, so we will eventually see concrete data about overall trends at the national level and by institutional type. The bigger question will still be how to determine if any shifts reported are a result of test optional policies, FAFSA challenges, and/or the end of affirmative action.
College Responses
While the Supreme Court decision might have had a small practical impact (in terms of the number of schools that had to revamp their admissions review process) there is no denying that there was a big impact when it comes to politics and public perception.
In a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, Angel B. Pérez the chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) explained that “The greatest impact that I have seen and heard is the psychological fear that this has created. It has paralyzed institutions. It has just frozen higher-education leaders and made them so much more cautious, and they’ve been overcorrecting. Some colleges have been taking away scholarships for students of color. The reality is, people are less willing to take risks than ever before, and that’s impacting the admissions process, the financial-aid process, the hiring process. I think this is only the beginning.”
There were some colleges that opted to change their application essay prompts to allow students more opportunity to self-disclose information about their identity3 . I was intrigued to see that Sarah Lawrence directly addressed the Supreme Court decision in one of their admissions essay prompts:
In a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, ‘Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the applicant can contribute to the university…Drawing upon examples from your life, a quality of your character, and/or a unique ability you possess, describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced or affected by the Court’s decision.
Other colleges were much more fearful about how to deal with the issue of race and chose to review applications “race blind” by suppressing student demographic information until after admissions decisions were made. This is at least in part due to the fact that the affirmative action decision is only one part of a larger political context of “anti woke” and anti-DEI legislation happening in some states. This, more than the Supreme Court decision, has caused real harm, including colleges eliminating whole departments dedicated to doing equity work, firing employees in roles that provided support services for students, canceling employee diversity trainings and other on campus events with an equity or diversity focus
Important to note: I believe every campus has people who care tremendously about diversity, equity, educational access and justice but colleges are often beholden to state laws that may force them to implement policies they disagree with. There are also more than a few college presidents who are political actors and not educators who are making some very bad decisions.
Examples of anti-equity decisions are seen at both selective and more open access institutions. This includes offices of diversity and inclusion shutting down at schools like Auburn University, Jacksonville State, the University of Alabama system, Florida Atlantic University, Iowa State University, and University of Kentucky along with many others (including basically every public institution in Texas).
I’ve mentioned before that my kid isn’t allowed to apply to any schools in Florida or Texas and now I fear the list of “no no” states is just getting longer.
Academic programs have also been eliminated, including the gender studies program at New College of Florida, or curriculum changed to reflect a desire to avoid controversial ideas like “hey, maybe slavery was bad”. LGBTQ+ services and departments have also been targeted in multiple states… and, yes, it is all the states you are thinking of.
All of this will make it challenging to say if shifts in application behavior, enrollment trends and graduation rates are related to the affirmative action decision or to the overt messages that some schools/states are sending that diversity and equity aren’t priorities anymore and that some students simply aren’t as welcomed and valued as others.
State Level Changes
As noted above there were some states who were ready and eager to use the Supreme Court decision as a cover to eliminate programs and policies that their conservative leaders didn’t like. States like Missouri clearly and willfully engaged in interpretative overreach to dismantle programs that weren’t actually subject to the Supreme Court decision.
On the same day as the Supreme Court decision was announced, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (a Trump loyalist who has a seemingly casual relationship with concepts like “being a decent human” and “the truth”), sent a letter telling colleges that “All Missouri programs that make admitting decisions by disfavoring individuals based on race—not just college admissions, but also scholarships, employment, law reviews, etc.—must immediately adopt race-blind standards.”
Missouri wasn’t the only state to use the decision to try to scale back financial aid programs, of course. Attorney generals in Iowa and Ohio have also indicated that their concern about race consideration in financial aid programs and urged schools to eliminate the practice.
I would argue that the overreach of state leaders and legislators will likely to do more to damage higher education, make educational access less equitable, and to persuade some students that they aren’t welcome on college campuses than the Supreme Court decision.
And now here is where I get a little (more) political: if you are someone who thinks access to high quality public and private higher education should be equitable, affordable, and supportive of students from diverse backgrounds … make sure your state legislators know that! Vote, pay attention to bills related to higher education, and call or send letters to your representatives when they are tackling things like higher education funding and DEI restrictions.
(and if you aren’t a person who thinks that stuff matters… I’m surprised you’re still reading because I’m probably not the higher ed expert for you)
Other Impacts
As I wrote about previously, this decision does have one bright spot: it has increased awareness of and attention to the still largely allowable practices of preferential admissions and financial aid for legacy applicants.
My, perhaps naïve, hope is that highly selective institutions will use this moment as an opportunity to think more broadly about how to reshape their admissions processes to account for the fact that there are still profound issues of structural racism and inequity built into the DNA of our K-12 education systems that directly shape which kinds of students are most likely to apply and be admitted. What that might look like and how test scores, family income, geography, public vs private school enrollment, and access to challenging classes factor in is a much bigger discussion that needs to continue to happen.
Let’s hope that the schools that claim to enroll the best and brightest students hold themselves accountable for having some hard internal conversations about real equity in access.
As always, feel free to drop a question or your thoughts on this issue in the comments and/or share this piece online if you found it useful. Thanks for reading!
Because of the two schools covered, this means the decision will be applied to both public and private colleges and universities. It does not, however, apply to military academies and you should definitely take a minute to think about why that might be the case.
If you are wondering what does actually help increase the enrollment of non-White students, one answer is money — specifically money spent at the state level. Research has found that when states increase their appropriations for higher education, outcomes like graduation rates, improve, especially for Black and Latinx students.
Identity broadly defined so this could include information about geographic, gender, sexual orientation, income, race/ethnicity, or even “intellectual heritage”
I'm Glad I'm not the only one with "you can not go to this college/state" ☺️