That day, Queen’s University vice president for strategic admissions and communications Odde published an open letter on the university’s website saying admissions officers had “lost a critical tool in our toolkit by losing each student’s story – a defining element of each student’s identity.”
A year later, many of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities are rethinking all the ways they treat race as a factor, responding to the court’s vision of a racially post-racial America. But that vision has resonated far beyond academia: Programs aimed at diversifying corporations, public agencies and government contractors have faced legal attacks unleashed by the landmark decision, pushing American society as a whole into a new, race-neutral era.
While the change at a school like Harvard is dramatic, the principle of race-neutrality feels more subtle at a school like Queens, which accepts more applicants than it rejects. Odde said the ruling has brought about “more emotional than practical change” in her office, explaining that she turns a blind eye when students mention race in their applications. The Supreme Court held that students can talk about race as long as it is relevant to their experiences, such as overcoming racism.
Before the ruling, Oddi said that while they would evaluate an applicant’s identity “holistically,” including their race and ethnicity, they could “light up” certain aspects of the application. For example, if a student wrote that she was a mixed-race woman with a Filipino father, an admissions officer might note that the university doesn’t have many Filipinos among its applicants and say, “We’d like to see more Filipinos in our community,” Oddi said, hypothetically.
But today, she says, such conversations wouldn’t take place at Queen’s. In fact, Odde says she felt forbidden to act on students’ racial information at all. Instead of illuminating that aspect of their identity, she felt forced to erase it. And that instilled in her a sense of “sadness” — not necessarily for herself, but for students who might be discouraged from writing about their whole selves, including their race and ethnicity.
“I want to live in a world where people can both know fully and be fully known,” she said.
The true impact of the ruling may not become clear for some time, as universities release the racial makeup of their freshman class in the fall. Schools could do so this summer, after students have been accepted and committed to attending. Early research suggests the ruling’s impact may be relatively small: Only one-fifth of U.S. colleges and universities give significant weight to race in admissions decisions, according to a November 2023 Brookings Institution study.
A study by Common App, a nonprofit used by more than 1,000 member colleges and universities, found no significant changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of applicants for the 2023-2024 school year, nor any major deviations from previous trends in how students self-reported their race and ethnicity on forms or wrote about race and ethnicity in essays.
Zachary Bremer, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, said states that have banned affirmative action at public universities may best illustrate the ruling’s potential impact: California, Texas and Michigan, all of which have highly selective public universities, saw immediate and large declines in black and Hispanic enrollment at their flagship universities after state officials banned considering race in admissions decisions.
According to Bremer’s research, after California voters banned affirmative action at state universities in 1996, the University of California system saw a 12 percent drop in enrollment of underrepresented groups, with both the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses reporting declines of more than 40 percent. Over time, the most selective UC campuses adopted multiple strategies to increase diversity, in part due to the state’s growing Hispanic population. However, race-neutral alternatives saw much smaller increases in enrollment of underrepresented minorities than affirmative action.
It’s harder to predict what will happen at highly competitive private colleges, Breemer said. Public universities may look to the experience of those that have deployed a variety of strategies to stay diverse. Some have worked well, such as a holistic approach (where admissions officers consider many factors, including a student’s academic record, extracurricular success and personal characteristics), but some have not been particularly successful.
Still, some experts argue that schools can maintain diversity without affirmative action through strategies like increasing scholarships for low-income students, investing in pipeline programs, strengthening recruiting efforts, and initiatives like fly-ins to bring prospective students to campus. But these efforts are more expensive.
Administration officials say the impact of the ruling is made even more difficult to assess by another crisis in higher education: long delays in delivering financial aid to students. Disastrous technical glitches related to the new Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form could affect where and whether students, especially those from low-income families, attend college.
“There’s so much going on that influences this year’s data that I’m afraid we’re going to be misled,” said Kedra Ishop, vice president for enrollment management at the University of Southern California. “It’s going to be very hard to guess what this year will look like.”
Those delays have weighed on efforts to maintain campus diversity, perhaps even more than the Supreme Court decision, some admissions officials said.
“We’ve worked hard over the past year to reduce as much stress and pressure as possible on students and their families because these two major changes have happened in the space of just a few months,” Odde said. Perhaps the two variables work together to change the racial and ethnic demographics on campus.
Legal experts said the Supreme Court decision is likely to raise long-term questions for universities that must move toward race-neutral admissions systems.
“It’s hard to overestimate the impact of the major change that has happened, and frankly is still happening, because now a second- and third-generation set of questions has emerged,” said Art Coleman, co-founder and managing partner of the Education Counsel, which is advising colleges to comply with the Supreme Court decision.
“What does this mean for financial aid and scholarships? What does it mean for nonprofits that partner with institutions that may be focused on race? What does it mean for issues of sex and gender, beyond issues of race and national origin?,” Coleman said. “All of those questions that the court did not specifically address have ripple effects and implications.”
The University of Connecticut decided to block applicants’ self-reported race data to avoid any repercussions, said Vern Granger, director of undergraduate admissions. The university has long used a screening system that judged students based on their “whole picture,” but this year the race checkbox was not visible to viewers of applications. But viewers could still consider an applicant’s life experiences, including how race has affected them, he said. As stated in essays and recommendation letters.
“We had our general counsel come in and have several sessions with readers and have had a comprehensive review and expert opinion,” Granger said.
Odde, the Queens administrator, said his office has made similar operational changes, removing mentions of race from applications and instructing readers not to consider information about race if it is clearly stated in essays or lists of extracurricular activities.
But O’Dea said Queens has always achieved campus diversity without explicitly considering race. The university sends recruiters to all of Charlotte’s high schools and visits various public high schools outside the city to promote an “inclusive” message encouraging applicants to apply regardless of their background. About half of last year’s freshmen were white, while black and Hispanic made up about 14 percent each, O’Dea said. Another 5.5 percent were multiracial and 2 percent were Asian.
Odde said she is naturally optimistic and sees the Supreme Court’s decision as an opportunity to try new strategies to help schools attract new students. But as an administrator who has read tens of thousands of student applications over her career, she also feels a sense of loss.
“We can take that information from students who are ready, willing and interested in engaging with the topic of race and ethnicity and how their personal, racial and ethnic identities matter to them, but we can’t defend it,” Odde said.
This means she can’t see her students the way they want to.
