College Admissions After the Supreme Court Ended Race-Conscious Policies

On June 29, 2023, Chief Justice John Roberts read from an opinion that ended a 45-year legal experiment. In Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, decided together with a parallel case against the University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court held that the race-conscious admissions programs at both schools violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Near the end of the majority opinion, though, came a paragraph that admissions offices across the country would read and reread for months. Nothing in the opinion, Roberts wrote, prohibits a university from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, "be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise." Then, a few lines later, came the warning attached to it: universities may not use essays or anything else to bring back by indirect means what the Court had just struck down. The whole post-2023 admissions world lives in the space between those two sentences.

In short: Since 2023, colleges cannot treat an applicant's race as a factor in admissions, but they may weigh what a student writes about how race shaped their experiences, judged as individual character or ability. Results have varied widely by school, with steep drops in Black and Hispanic enrollment at some selective colleges and little change at others, and the fight has moved to essays, legacy preferences, and what the federal government demands from universities.

What the Court held, in plain terms

The decision was 6 to 3 in the North Carolina case and 6 to 2 in the Harvard case, because Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who had been on Harvard's Board of Overseers, did not take part in it.

The majority made three main moves. First, it said the schools' stated goals, such as training future leaders and preparing students for a pluralistic society, were too vague for a court to measure, so there was no way to know when the programs would have succeeded and could end. Second, it said the programs used race as a negative for some applicants (because admissions is zero-sum) and relied on racial stereotypes. Third, it noted that the programs had no logical end point, a point that echoed the Court's own 2003 statement in Grutter v. Bollinger that it expected racial preferences to be unnecessary in about 25 years.

The Court did not formally announce that it was overruling Grutter, but the practical effect was the same, and Justice Clarence Thomas said in his concurrence that Grutter was, for all intents and purposes, overruled. In a footnote, the majority set aside the question of the military academies, which the government had argued presented distinct interests.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's principal dissent argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was written to help formerly enslaved people enter American life as equals, that ignoring race in a society still shaped by it entrenches inequality, and that the majority was rolling back decades of precedent. Justice Jackson's dissent focused on the generational gaps in health, wealth and wellbeing between Black and white Americans, arguing that a race-blind rule cannot erase the effects of a race-conscious history.

What schools may still consider

Here is roughly where the lines sit now, as most college counsel and the Education Department under the previous administration read the decision.

A college may not ask an applicant's race and then give it weight. Many schools now hide the race and ethnicity boxes from readers or remove them from applications entirely. Federal data collection still requires schools to report enrollment by race in the aggregate, so the information exists, but admissions readers are not supposed to see it when they decide.

A college may consider an applicant's own account of their life, including how race shaped it, as long as the credit goes to the individual's qualities. Roberts gave an example: a student who overcame racial discrimination might be credited for courage and determination; a student whose heritage or culture motivated them to take on a leadership role might be credited for that ability. The benefit has to be tied to the person, not to the category.

A college may pursue diversity by means that do not use race: recruiting in particular high schools and regions, weighting socioeconomic disadvantage, partnering with community colleges, ending or limiting preferences for children of alumni and donors, dropping or reshaping test requirements, and offering more generous financial aid.

There was already a long test run of these approaches. Nine states, including California after Proposition 209 in 1996 and Michigan after a 2006 ballot measure, had banned race-conscious admissions at public universities well before 2023. The University of California spent heavily for decades on outreach, partnerships and holistic review. The system's own officials told the Supreme Court that those efforts, while they helped, had not restored Black and Hispanic enrollment at its most selective campuses to the levels the state's population would suggest. That is an honest data point for both sides: race-neutral tools do something, but at the most selective schools they have not done everything.

What the enrollment numbers showed

The first class admitted entirely under the new rules entered in the fall of 2024. The results did not tell one simple story.

At some highly selective institutions, the drop was steep. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that the share of Black students in its entering class fell from about 13 percent to about 5 percent, and its Hispanic share also dropped. Several other selective colleges reported large declines in Black or Hispanic enrollment.

At other selective schools, the reported shares barely moved, or moved in ways that were hard to read because more students declined to report their race at all. Some institutions saw the share of Asian American students rise; others saw it fall. Year-to-year swings in small classes are noisy, so a single year at a single school proves little.

A few honest conclusions are possible. The effect depends heavily on how much a school relied on race before, how competitive it is, and how hard it pushed alternatives afterward. Schools that already recruited widely, invested in aid, and admitted many transfer students appear to have changed less. And the share of applicants choosing not to report race went up, which makes all of this harder to measure.

What Texas learned from the percent plan

One race-neutral tool gets mentioned so often that it deserves its own look. After a federal appeals court barred race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas in 1996, the state legislature passed a law in 1997 guaranteeing admission to public universities for students who graduated near the top of their high school class. The idea was simple: Texas high schools were highly segregated by race and income, so taking the top students from every school would bring in a diverse class without ever looking at an applicant's race.

It worked, partly. The plan sent students to the flagship campus in Austin from rural towns, border communities and urban neighbourhoods that had rarely sent anyone before, and many of them did well. But it had trade-offs. Its success depended on the very school segregation that most people would like to end. It left little room for holistic review at the flagship, which eventually led the legislature to cap the share of seats filled through the guarantee. And it could not be copied by private colleges or graduate schools, which do not admit from high school class ranks.

The lesson for the post-SFFA era is not that percent plans are the answer. It's that every race-neutral tool carries its own design choices, and that the details, which high schools, how many seats, how much aid follows the admission, decide whether the tool helps the students it is meant to help.

The essay question

Because the Court left the door open for applicants to write about race, many colleges rewrote their supplemental essay prompts in the months after the decision. Prompts began asking students to describe a community they belong to, a challenge they faced, or how their background shaped their perspective.

This has produced two real worries from opposite directions. Critics of affirmative action argue that essay prompts can become a backdoor: a reader who learns an applicant's race from the essay and then rates it highly is doing what the Court forbade. The Court itself said exactly that kind of workaround would be unlawful, and organizations that brought the original lawsuits have said they will watch for it.

From the other side, many counselors worry that the essay rule puts an unfair burden on students of colour to narrate their pain on demand, and favors applicants who can afford coaching to produce polished personal stories. A teenager who has experienced discrimination but doesn't want to write about it for a stranger has every right to make that choice, and may lose a chance to have their full context considered.

Here is a reasonable reading: the essay rule is not a loophole, but it is also not a substitute for the old system. It lets colleges see applicants as whole people, which is valuable, and it does not by itself produce the enrollment numbers the old policies did.

Legacy preferences move to center stage

Once race was off the table, a lot of attention shifted to one of the oldest preferences in American admissions: the boost given to children of alumni. Critics on the left and the right pointed out that legacy preferences mostly benefit applicants from wealthy, disproportionately white families, and that it is hard to defend those while race-conscious policies are banned.

Some of the response has come from colleges themselves. Johns Hopkins, Amherst and others had already stopped giving legacy preferences before 2023, and Wesleyan announced it would end them shortly after the ruling. Some has come from states. Colorado was first to ban legacy preferences at public colleges, in 2021. Virginia and Maryland later passed bans of their own, and California passed a law that reaches private universities in the state as well.

This is one place where the coalition is genuinely broad. Plenty of conservatives who supported the SFFA outcome also oppose legacy and donor preferences, on the logic that admissions should reward individual merit. Progressives can make common cause here without agreeing on everything else, and in several states they have.

The federal pressure that followed

The legal fight did not end in 2023. In 2025 the Trump administration's Education Department issued guidance that read the SFFA decision far more broadly, suggesting that many diversity programs beyond admissions, in scholarships, campus programming and hiring, could be unlawful. Parts of that guidance were challenged in federal court, and judges blocked or set aside portions of it. The administration also pressed selective universities for more detailed admissions data broken down by race, to check whether schools were quietly continuing old practices. And in January 2025 the president revoked Executive Order 11246, the 1965 order that had required federal contractors, including many universities, to take affirmative steps on equal employment.

These moves have legal limits and are being litigated, so the status of any particular rule can change. The broader point is that the post-SFFA era has two layers: what the Constitution forbids, as the Court has defined it, and what an administration chooses to treat as forbidden by withholding funds or opening investigations. Those are not the same thing, and colleges are deciding how much risk to accept. Our courts page follows those challenges as they move.

The strongest case on the other side

It is worth taking seriously why many Americans, including many Asian American families, supported the SFFA outcome. Their argument goes like this: admissions is a scarce good, and any preference for one applicant is a penalty for another. Treating people by racial category, even for good reasons, keeps race at the center of public life and sorts individuals by groups they did not choose. Evidence at trial suggested that Asian American applicants to Harvard received lower "personal" ratings on average, which looked to many people like the kind of subjective penalty once used against Jewish applicants in the 1920s. Polls before and after the ruling found that a majority of Americans opposed considering race in admissions.

That case has real force, and progressives lose credibility when they dismiss it. The best answer is not to relitigate SFFA but to change the question. If the goal is opportunity, the biggest gaps open long before anyone applies to college: in school funding, in access to advanced courses, in housing that determines which schools children attend, in family wealth. A selective college admits a few thousand people a year. Public universities, community colleges and K-12 systems serve millions. Those are where the wins at scale are, and many of them do not depend on race-conscious rules at all.

What you can do

The admissions fight is now largely about state law, federal enforcement and public budgets, which means ordinary voters have more leverage than they think.

1. Ask your state legislators where they stand on legacy preferences and public university funding. Find your representatives with your address and get their phone numbers, contact forms and recent votes. A short call about a specific bill is worth more than a long general letter.
2. Weigh in when the Education Department proposes rules. Federal rules open for public comment are listed on the comment page, closing soonest first, grouped by issue, with guidance on how to write a comment that counts.
3. Support access before admissions. Groups that run college counseling, mentoring and scholarship programs for first-generation students are listed by state in the organizations directory, under education and civil rights causes.
4. Follow the cases. Challenges over admissions data, scholarships and campus programs are still moving through the courts. Watch for Supreme Court opinions and emergency orders on Court Watch.
5. Read the bigger education story. Admissions is one piece. Our education page gathers reporting on school funding, student debt and the federal role in public schools.