A Time to Tear Down, a Time to Build Up

Everyone saw the wrecking ball coming. It loomed over higher education for decades, poised to demolish a specific set of ideas about educational equity and the benefits of racial diversity. And when it finally struck, in late June, many Americans felt its force in their gut.

Some despaired, others rejoiced. But many people felt as conflicted about the destruction as they did about the very thing that had just been destroyed.

After the U.S. Supreme Court effectively banned the consideration of an applicant’s racial status, one could appreciate the great symbolic weight of the decision while acknowledging the shortcomings of the policy it overturned. Colleges have long described race-conscious admissions as a crucial diversity tool, and much evidence confirms that it was.

Still, the tool was flawed; its impact, limited. While the share of Black, Latino and Latina, and Native American students increased in recent decades, members of those groups are now more underrepresented than they were in 2002, making up 40 percent of high-school graduates but just 20 percent of enrollment at selective colleges, one recent analysis found.

Such statistics reflect many realities, but one is a lack of institutional commitment to expanding access. It seems fair to ask: Why didn’t so-called elite colleges use that tool to achieve greater racial diversity while they still could? Rebuilding the admissions process will require many high-profile colleges to confront the ways they have undermined racial and socioeconomic equity all along.

A summer of uncertainty has given way to an anxious fall. College presidents, enrollment officials, high-school counselors, and applicants find themselves in a liminal zone between two eras. The next one might bring bold new commitments to enrolling and supporting more underrepresented students — or retrenchment amid intense fears of future lawsuits.

The story of the ruling’s aftermath has many levels. It’s about recruitment strategies, admission requirements, and legal compliance. It’s also about higher education’s role in alleviating and perpetuating societal inequities, what colleges can and can’t fix. And it’s about what institutional leaders value beneath all the platitudes.

But the story has deep emotional meanings, too. It’s as complex as the nation, as deep as any heart.

Aminah Augustin was in a test-prep class the morning the wrecking ball struck. The court’s decision left the rising high-school senior confused and frightened, with questions swarming in her head. Would she still be able to write her college-application essays about her experiences as a young Black woman? And, if so, would it help her chances — or harm them?

At the time, Augustin was attending a five-week summer camp at Princeton University sponsored by the Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, or LEDA. Nearly all the students came from low-income homes; most were underrepresented minorities. Augustin, who grew up in Irvington, N.J., a predominantly Black township near Newark, had seen the effects of poverty all her life. She knew that students in white, affluent school districts had benefited from opportunities she lacked. And she worried that the end of race-conscious admissions would rob her of one more.

“I’m very skeptical about myself,” she said in early July. “I started to doubt whether I would be able to get into a top university.”

This was how the court’s decision affected many underrepresented minority students: It piled new doubts on top of the existing ones. And some saw much more at stake than their personal aspirations.

Augustin, a deep thinker with a sharp wit, is devoted to her hometown. She aspires to earn a Ph.D. in psychology and counsel young people of color. And she plans to return to Irvington. “To rebuild it,” she said, “into a more healthy, successful community.”

But first Augustin would have to get into a highly selective college that could give her a substantial aid package. All of a sudden, this seemed like an even more daunting challenge. Her advisers at the camp told her that it was still OK to write about race in her college essays if she wished. But she wondered if doing so might backfire somehow, perhaps by making it more difficult to stand out from other Black applicants writing similar essays. “I don’t like being the guinea pig for this whole situation,” she said.

After the court’s decision, Augustin sought advice from Will Walker Jr., a leadership facilitator at the camp. He shared some tips and tried to reassure her.

Walker, who is Black, grew up in a low-income community in rural Louisiana. He suspects that race-conscious admissions policies helped him get into three high-profile institutions, opening doors to a career in higher education. He graduated from the University of Richmond in 2021, and then received a master’s degree in higher education and student affairs from Indiana University at Bloomington, in May. Walker, now studying student engagement, governance, and organizational change as a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia, is a true believer in higher ed who hopes to become a tenured professor, maybe a college president. And he wants to do diversity, equity, and inclusion work in some capacity — “if that’s something that still exists in five to seven years.”

Walker saw the court’s decision as one part of a broader demolition project. The recent backlash against DEI programs worried him. The scrutiny of support services for students of color made him anxious. He had even questioned his place in the field. And when he read what Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote about the U.S. Constitution requiring absolute color-blindness, he felt a flash of frustration.

“Some people in our country are like, ‘We don’t see race,’” Walker said. “But when I look in the mirror, I cannot unsee race. When you look at me on the street, you cannot unsee race, or all the assumptions, beliefs, and histories that come with it.”

Still, Walker found hope in what Justice Roberts wrote about how colleges were still free to consider an applicant’s reflections on “how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” Having expected the decision to erase race from admissions evaluations, he saw the carve-out as a small but meaningful victory for minority students.

But the more Walker reflected on it, the more complicated that victory seemed. The Supreme Court had removed the consideration of racial status from admissions — but not of racial experiences. Colleges, Justice Roberts wrote, must not give a “benefit” to an applicant who overcame racial discrimination unless it’s “tied to that student’s courage and determination.” And, he continued, they must not give a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture inspired them to pursue an achievement unless it’s “tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.”

With that, a 68-year-old white man rewrote the rules of admissions in a way that would affect underrepresented minority teenagers, who have long felt pressure to describe difficult experiences involving their racial identity. Walker remembered that pressure. Years ago, he wrote an undergraduate-admission essay about what he had experienced in his mostly white social-studies class, reading a textbook that neglected diverse perspectives. “It felt very glamorized,” he said of the essay, which he revised several times. “I took these really awful negative experiences and made them pretty for someone else to read. I was cleaning it up so it would be appealing to white admissions officers.”

The court’s ruling will make this exercise even more fraught for many nonwhite applicants. Some will just want to write about being dancers, sprinters, or debate champions. Some won’t want to describe race-related hardship or trauma, or wrap up their struggles in a tidy how-I-overcame-it-all-and-gained-a-valuable-insight moral. But if you believed that doing so might help your chances a little bit within an ultra-competitive applicant pool, wouldn’t you think twice? “The Supreme Court has essentially said your being a person of color doesn’t matter anymore,” Walker said. “So how do they feel valued now? How do they stand out? How do they convey that they are worthy and deserving of admission?”

Augustin weighed such questions all summer. She filled a yellow spiral notebook with notes on what Walker and other counselors told her about applying to college, thoughts on specific institutions, and random reflections. The notebook’s ink-scrawled pages became a map to her own future — a future that now seemed even more uncertain.

Uncertainty gripped colleges, too. One crucial question was difficult to answer: How much damage would the court’s decision do to campus diversity?

Estimates varied. Amherst College and a few other super-selective small, private institutions projected that their enrollment of incoming Black and Latino/a students would drop by as much as 50 percent next year. A handful of other highly selective private and public institutions put their estimate in the 5- to 10-percent range, or lower. “This is a symbolic setback — it sends a message to our diverse applicants that there’s not a spot for them,” said an enrollment official at a flagship university who wasn’t permitted to speak publicly. “But, practically, I don’t see a lot of change in admissions numbers, because we’ve never done race for race’s sake in our evaluations.”

Some legal experts said the court had essentially ordered colleges to stop doing something that they hadn’t actually been doing. “Good holistic review has never involved check-the-box racial status — it’s always been about considering an applicant’s race in context,” said Art Coleman, managing partner and co-founder of EducationCounsel LLC, a firm that advises colleges on admissions policies and practices. “So the shift may not be as dramatic as some fear.”

One immediate outcome was striking: Colleges had very little to share publicly about their strategies for maintaining a diverse student body. “We’ve got plans,” a vice president for enrollment at a prominent private college told The Chronicle, “but we’re not going to broadcast them and put a target on our back.”

It would be hard to overstate just how deeply campus leaders fear becoming the target of the next admissions lawsuit, which is surely coming. Students for Fair Admissions, or SFFA, which prevailed in its legal challenge of race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a July email that it would “remain vigilant and continue to closely monitor potential changes in admissions procedures that will be implemented by colleges and universities throughout the nation.” Some general counsels have been reminding admissions officials that any emails they send could turn up in a lawsuit. “We’re doing a lot of walking down the hall to talk in person,” one enrollment official said. “Our lawyers are telling us that SFFA is just waiting to see which college to go after next.”

So, though highly selective colleges were tight-lipped about their admissions practices before, a new season of secrecy is underway. Some prominent institutions have forbidden enrollment leaders from speaking to journalists about the ruling’s implications or their strategic adjustments. “No comment” reigns.

But in private conversations, a handful of enrollment leaders shared similar appraisals of the challenges before them. They described the court’s ruling as narrow, covering only evaluations of applicants — and not, say, student recruitment and pre-college programs. So they planned to continue their targeted outreach to underrepresented minorities, a practice that many legal experts describe as relatively sound because it doesn’t confer a benefit to an individual student. “We’re going to keep calling Black students, keep calling Latino students, keep building the enrollment funnel as broad as we can for diversity,” one admissions dean said. Some said they were altering their recruitment programs to emphasize earlier contact with ninth and 10th graders.

Many colleges said they would cast wider nets for applicants of various backgrounds. Days after the Supreme Court handed a legal defeat to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the institution announced that it had hired “outreach officers” to recruit in under-resourced communities throughout the state. UNC also said it would cover tuition and fees for in-state students whose families make less than $80,000 a year. The University of Virginia announced that it would expand its admissions staff to focus on 40 in-state high schools from which it receives few applications.

Nathan Fuerst, vice president for enrollment planning and management at the University of Connecticut, said the university would double down on college-access efforts, such as the UConn Alliance Pathway program, a partnership between the university and in-state high schools with low college-attainment rates. The program identifies high-achieving seniors, many of whom are low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students. UConn provides them with support throughout the admissions process. In-person and virtual application events. Information about their potential for admission. Workshops that offer help completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. Eligible applicants receive an application fee waiver.

Fuerst, who analyzed the effectiveness of his institution’s recruitment and telecounseling practices a while back, said he has learned a key lesson. “It takes regular communication, support, and relationship-building that’s sustained over time to have the greatest impact. It can’t be a one-and-done.”

Many institutions have been trying to develop better ways of assessing underserved applicants’ achievements within the context of their socioeconomic backgrounds. Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Yale University, said his admissions staff will incorporate data from the Opportunity Atlas — an online mapping project that gauges economic mobility at the census-tract level — into their evaluations of applicants this fall. That will complement their use of Landscape, a free tool offered by the College Board that provides standardized data about applicants’ high schools and neighborhoods (including the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, the level of participation in Advanced Placement courses, median income, college-attendance rates, and crime levels). Landscape also tells colleges how applicants’ test scores compare with those of their classmates.

Recent research revealed that at colleges using such data, applicants from the most disadvantaged backgrounds were five percentage points more likely to receive an admission offer. But the study also found that the likelihood of such applicants enrolling at participating colleges did not change. UConn has used Landscape only for research purposes in the past, Fuerst said, but he expects that the institution will incorporate it into its evaluations of applicants going forward: “It’s not the be-all, end-all, but it provides colleges with an objective perspective of what a student’s environment looks like.”

Still, any tool a college adopts might prove controversial. Some enrollment officials expect questions from the public about how colleges are using the Opportunity Atlas and Landscape — and whether it’s fair. Meanwhile, some said their general counsels had expressed concerns about existing institutional financial-aid scholarships for minority students. “We’re not worried about the impact of this Supreme Court decision,” one admissions official said. “We’re worried about the impact of the next one — the one that could take away our ability to use aid in ways that help us enroll a diverse class.”

As officials at campuses throughout the nation gathered for closed-door meetings in the months after the ruling was released, a picture of a fraught new era emerged: It would require colleges to resolve the tension between the legal necessity of proceeding with caution and the moral imperative of serving an increasingly diverse nation of citizens. As one enrollment official put it: “Right now, there’s this disconnect between our general counsel saying, ‘We can’t get sued in the next admissions cycle,’ and the chancellor saying, ‘No, our goal in the next year is to stand up for diversity.’”

Balancing those competing interests will require plenty of resolve.

Maricela L. Martinez, vice president for enrollment at Occidental College, in Los Angeles, has been meeting regularly since last fall with senior leaders to discuss strategies. The small liberal-arts institution has a commitment to equity: Nearly half (47 percent) of this fall’s first-year class are domestic students of color, 17 percent are eligible for federal Pell Grants, and 14 percent are the first in their families to attend college. “We took this really seriously,” Martinez said. “And we have been trying to get creative.”

In anticipation of the court’s decision, Occidental last year introduced the Cal Grant Promise program, meant to make the college more affordable for students from California. The new program covers tuition for every admitted applicant who qualifies for the state’s income-based Cal Grant. For many who qualify, grant aid will now cover most, if not all, of their room-and-board expenses at Occidental, Martinez said: “We knew we needed to do a better job of targeting first-generation students, and low-income and middle-class families, even in our own backyard.”

After the Supreme Court’s decision, Occidental announced a list of initial plans, which, though not earth-shattering, were fairly broad — a reminder that no single policy change alone is enough. First, the college said that it would stop considering applicants’ legacy status, though such considerations had played a small role at Occidental, Martinez said.

Occidental also announced a range of race-neutral approaches that could end up increasing diversity. The college plans to increase existing efforts to recruit veterans. Deepen its relationships with community colleges to attract more transfer students. Expand its fall fly-in program for low-income applicants. Lean more heavily into its existing partnerships with community-based organizations that serve first-generation and low-income students. Recruit in more parts of the country where the college isn’t well known. And send admissions officers to a greater number of Title I high schools, in which low-income students make up at least 40 percent of enrollment.

The college increased the admissions office’s recruitment and travel budget, but it will go only so far. “We’re not an institution with a billion-dollar endowment,” Martinez said. “So we need to do more with the resources we have, which means being more thoughtful and intentional with our outreach. It means sitting down in my office and saying, ‘OK, these are the states, these are the communities that we’re going to visit every single day we’re out there.’ We have to make sure that Title I schools are on our list, including schools that we’ve never visited.”

It’s easier said than done. Generally, well-resourced high schools, especially independent ones, make it easy for admissions officers to schedule visits. Where there’s a strong college-going culture, there’s a welcome mat for college reps. At some underserved schools, though, where counselors typically have huge caseloads and a full plate of duties, “it really takes time, it takes energy, and it takes persistence to make sure those schools are on your list to visit,” Martinez said, “and that’s what I’m expecting of my staff.” She knows many underserved schools want more colleges to come. And she believes it’s now even more crucial to connect with low-income students face to face.

Martinez was once such a student. She grew up in East Los Angeles, where her parents settled after emigrating from Mexico. Her father worked in a slaughterhouse, and her mother cleaned houses during the years when she attended Garfield High School, made famous by the film Stand and Deliver. Nearly all the students there were low-income, Latino/a teenagers just like her. She was a senior when the wrecking ball struck the Golden State. That was 1996, the year California voters approved Proposition 209, which barred race-conscious admissions at public institutions. “It was really a blow to us,” Martinez said of Latino students hoping to attend in-state universities. “We were very aware of how our communities were being targeted by those who wanted to limit our access to college, or at least that’s how it felt.”

Martinez said she didn’t get much guidance from her overburdened school counselor. But a Garfield graduate she knew encouraged her to consider colleges outside of California, so she did. An acceptance came from Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. A generous financial-aid package enabled her to enroll and earn a bachelor’s degree. “Life-changing,” she said. Later, she got a master’s degree from Harvard. She chose a career in admissions to help underrepresented students find a path to college, as someone once did for her. “My biggest fear now,” she said, “is that these students will see the court’s decision as a message that they are not welcome.”

Her job was to enroll a class, which is hard work. But now her job all but compelled her, and college officials everywhere, to try to restore faith in the idea that marginalized students are welcome — and wanted — in higher education. That’s harder work still.

Some especially difficult work fell to the people who each day look teenagers in the eye, fill their ears with advice, and help them get to college. People like Atalay Kesli, director of college counseling at Pioneer Charter School of Science Network, near Boston. He wasn’t sure how the court’s decision would affect his students, many of whom are immigrants like him.

Kesli, along with most high-school counselors and college advisers in the nation, got little in the way of practical guidance. Kesli wondered if anything would replace race and ethnicity in colleges’ holistic reviews. He wondered which factors might carry more weight than before. And he wondered how to help students reveal what admissions officers most want to see in applications.

“I am scared,” Kesli said one morning in mid-July. “Right now, we are in pitch blackness. I don’t know what colleges will do, how they’re going to adjust their practices, or how I’m going to help my students. I’m right in the middle between my students and their opportunities. And I don’t want them to miss any.”

Kesli’s schools are filled with determined high achievers, from Brazil, Haiti, North Africa — all over. He knows that many of them consider race and ethnicity to be important aspects of their identity. But he worried that Roberts’s guidance will lead students to write about race in one particular way, making it the new “athletic experiences” essay, often-trite compositions in which applicants describe overcoming adversity on the lacrosse field, or how becoming swim-team captain taught them about leadership. “I think of an admissions officer saying, ‘Oh, this is the 30th essay I’ve read about race today,’” Kesli said, “and then that application is just not going anywhere.”

To write or not to write about race was the same question confronting students. But it weighed especially heavily on counselors afraid of steering dozens or hundreds of applicants wrong. Some fretted about saying too much or too little in their recommendations. “If I know that a student’s race or racism has really affected them, then I can have a story to tell,” Kesli said. “But just because every student is Black or Hispanic, it might not help to mention that.”

But several weeks later, after meeting with the counselors he oversees, Kesli felt more confident. His staff planned to help students weave their personal backgrounds meaningfully into essays, revealing how their experiences had shaped their character. He would encourage students to share stories about experiences relating to their racial identities and involvement in diverse communities, enabling him to lace recommendation letters with anecdotes. And he would seek off-the-record guidance from visiting admissions reps, he said, “since colleges are not loud and clear about what will their evaluation process look like.”

Kesli expects that fewer of his students will get into big-name institutions this year. But he plans to advise the most competitive applicants to round out their college lists with a few highly selective colleges in faraway states. Maybe, he thought, admissions offices will put more stock in geographic diversity during this cycle, which could help his students.

Alicia Oglesby, associate director of college counseling at the Winchester Thurston School, in Pittsburgh, shares Kesli’s concern that some minority students will conclude that they have no chance of getting into highly selective colleges — and then they won’t even bother to apply. “But I’m not worried about my students — they get a lot of time and attention from our staff,” she said. “My fear is for all the students who don’t have access to a counselor.”

The court’s ruling prompted Oglesby, who is Black, to reflect on the admissions outcomes she has seen over the last decade while working at various schools. For the most part, she thinks, the colleges make decisions that seem reasonable to her. But now and then, they don’t. Like when students who have middling GPAs and SAT scores, don’t regularly show up for school, and demonstrate little interest in learning, have been admitted to prestigious institutions. “I have been shocked,” she says.

Many of those students came from wealthy families, she said. Most of them were white males.

“That’s the part that doesn’t get examined enough,” Oglesby said. “Often, folks who are so upset after they don’t get admitted, their eyes immediately get directed to Black and Latino applicants, to first-gen applicants. There’s an underlying belief that those students don’t deserve to be in certain spaces. But they’re not the ones who are often beneficiaries of special treatment, like legacy students, in admissions. We need to really examine our thoughts on who belongs on a college campus and why. We need to ask why we are constantly looking at certain policies and practices and not others.”

Though some students despaired when the wrecking ball struck, others welcomed the end of race-conscious admissions.

Nataly Delcid, a Latina high-school senior, believes the practice perpetuated the harmful assumption that applicants checking the same box share common backgrounds and experiences. “It was a lazy way,” she said, “to figure out how to help disadvantaged students.”

Delcid, whose parents emigrated from Guatemala, grew up in Rhode Island and Texas. Money was scarce, and the prospect of enrolling at a selective four-year college once seemed far-fetched to her. But then, on her 16th birthday, she received an acceptance from Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. After settling in last fall at the prestigious private school, she considered what set her apart from many classmates.

It was, she concluded, her family’s lack of wealth: “I’ve never had a moment where I felt like my ethnicity alone posed a barrier to my education. It was always just money.” Many students Delcid met at Exeter were affluent, with private SAT tutors, independent college consultants, and family friends who hooked them up with internships. She met students of color from well-off families, with parents who attended Ivy League colleges. “I had trouble seeing how they should get the same advantage in admissions,” she said, “as students who live in very disadvantaged areas of Chicago, or white students in a rural part of the country at an underfunded school.”

Delcid’s mother runs a food stand; her father is unemployed. Though she had wanted to take a for-credit course on the neuroscience of financial decision making at Harvard last summer, she couldn’t afford to go. And this summer she worked part time as a barista, helped conduct social-epidemiology research, and studied for the SAT on her own while sharing an apartment with three other students. Sometimes when she checked Instagram, she saw photos posted by friends from Exeter who were trekking through Europe or enjoying New York City.

By late August, Delcid had drafted her personal statement for the Common App. It was about why she liked change, how moving from place to place had defined her. She didn’t discuss her ethnicity or her family’s financial instability, though she had mentioned the former in some of her supplemental essays.

Delcid’s father called her recently to ask if the Supreme Court’s ruling would hurt her chances of getting into a college on her list. “It probably will in some way,” she said. “But I don’t want to attend a college that won’t consider barriers I’ve faced without me just checking off a box. It may even feel good to get accepted somewhere independent of my race and ethnicity.”

The ruling left Sanjay K. Mitchell with a tangle of feelings. Mitchell — interim head of school at the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, in Washington, D.C. — previously spent 14 years as a college counselor at another charter school that serves Black students from the poorest sections of the city. He has long supported the goals of race-conscious admissions policies, which, he believes, benefited many of the high-achieving students he advised.

But Mitchell, who is Black, also agrees with Delcid’s critique of the practice. “There was this laziness to it,” he said. “Colleges, especially highly selective ones, had become too comfortable with relying on racial check boxes instead of doing the work that needs to be done to support equity and social mobility. A preponderance of the minority students at those colleges have been coming from private secondary schools.”

Alex Shieh, an Asian American college student who grew up in New England, long worried that race-conscious admissions policies would harm him. The lawsuits that SFFA filed against Harvard and UNC in 2014 spanned half of his life. He was in eighth grade when the Harvard case was heard in a federal courthouse in Boston, in 2018. He read news reports about how Asian American applicants at the university had received lower personal ratings on average than other students did. Some nights he and his parents discussed race-conscious admissions at the dinner table.

Shieh saw the practice as well intentioned but morally wrong. His maternal grandparents left South Korea in the 1960s to pursue doctoral degrees in the United States, and the abundance of opportunity, he said, persuaded them to become U.S. citizens and raise children here. He believed that colleges undermined those opportunities by counting race in their evaluations.

“It was startling and concerning,” Shieh said, “to think that when I applied to college, I was going to be stereotyped, and that people would know what race I am and make assumptions about me based on that.”

Shieh earned excellent grades and scored a 1580 out of a possible 1600 on the SAT, but he believed he had to prove that he wasn’t “nerdy or bookish.” So in his personal statement he tried to convey his outgoing personality, how he enjoys having in-depth discussions and respectful disagreements. He wanted to counter the stereotype that Asian Americans are followers, not leaders.

An acceptance from Brown University this spring made Shieh happy, but he said the debate over race-conscious admissions dampened his celebration — at least until the court issued its decision three months later. As Shieh tweeted praise for the ruling, other Asian Americans criticized it. But in his view, the sharply differing opinions among members of a large, diverse community only affirmed the problem with colleges putting stock in race per se in the first place. “There was this assumption that there’s this shared experience within races — that if you just check this box for your race, it means that you must have XYZ attributes,” he said. “But a check box can’t really capture nuance.”

One nuance of Shieh’s story: He graduated from Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass., among the nation’s most prestigious private schools. He knows he has opportunities many students lack, and he believes admissions offices should consider such disparities in their evaluations — something selective colleges have long done but now must try to assess more rigorously.

Shieh believed the admissions process will be fairer for his younger sister down the line. He was eager to get to Brown, where he was especially looking forward to joining a racially diverse community, “even though they achieved it through an imperfect system.”

Most everyone agreed the system, like so much else in admissions, was imperfect. But what would a more equitable process look like in a race-neutral world?

Youlonda Copeland-Morgan has heard the line many times. We would admit more underrepresented students if only we could find more who could handle the work. Admissions deans from selective colleges have been known to say such things at professional conferences.

“It’s an excuse,” Copeland-Morgan said. “If you’re saying that, you haven’t tried hard enough. There are many, many talented students across this nation.”

For 11 years Copeland-Morgan led the enrollment division at the University of California at Los Angeles, where, because of Prop. 209, she grappled with the same question all colleges now confront: How do you maintain or increase diversity without considering race in admissions? The answer, she believes, must begin with an honest assessment of how an institution’s policies, practices, and culture might be undermining its commitment to racial and socioeconomic equity.

Copeland-Morgan grew up in a family with little college know-how but many aspirations. Her mother, who didn’t finish high school, helped raise five children. Her father, the son of sharecroppers, worked construction jobs. After coming home covered in cement and dirt each evening, he would shower, change clothes, and watch the news on television. Each time he saw Yvonne Brathwaite Burke — the first Black woman to represent the West Coast in Congress — on the screen, he would tell his daughter, “Baby, one day you’re gonna be just like her.”

Copeland-Morgan and her family had moved from Louisiana to a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. She attended public schools and became the first in her family to enroll in college. And she carried her father’s encouragement through four-plus decades in the admissions field. “There are so many first-gen households where parents are dreaming about the life they want for their kids,” she said. And yet, for all that dreaming, many families don’t know much about applying to a highly selective four-year college — or what it takes to become a competitive applicant.

UCLA, Copeland-Morgan believed, must do more to help such families. After becoming the university’s associate vice chancellor for enrollment management, in 2012, she made enrolling more underrepresented students her top priority. Complying with Prop. 209, she believed, shouldn’t curb creativity: “I told people, ‘Look, we’ve got to be in the community. They have to view us as partners.’ People begin to trust you if they see you enough, not just because of your presence, but because you’ve shown support.”

Copeland-Morgan established UCLA’s Office of Strategic Partnerships and Community Engagement to cultivate relationships — with nonprofit groups, school superintendents, elected officials, small-business owners, and so on — that could help expand the university’s pipeline of prospective students, especially low-income and underrepresented minorities. She and her colleagues led an ambitious campaign to connect with high-achieving students, in L.A. and neighboring cities, and help them prepare for college. “Intrusive recruiting,” she called it. Representatives from UCLA partnered with public high schools in Los Angeles. Black churches, too. They showed up for community events and held information sessions at Starbucks in parts of the city that colleges tended to overlook. UCLA printed publications in multiple languages. Took out newspaper ads in Spanish. Revamped its website. Engaged with families, school counselors, teachers, and principals.

Copeland-Morgan and her colleagues emphasized high-touch communication — cards, emails, and phone calls — to build relationships with high-achieving teenagers over time. She gave families her business card, writing her cell number on the back. UCLA’s reps made a point of explaining how the admissions staff made decisions, why they valued course rigor and not just stellar grades. “If we weren’t telling these schools why their students weren’t getting into UCLA, how were they ever going to fix it?” she said. “We told students to take every Advanced Placement course they could, even if there were only two offered at their school. I would tell parents that if their kid didn’t take algebra in the eighth grade, then they won’t take calculus in high school. We wanted them to take those rigorous courses.”

Copeland-Morgan, who retired last fall, said her division’s outreach played a large role in helping UCLA bring in more underrepresented students. She oversaw the enrollment of the most racially diverse classes over all in UCLA’s history during her last two cycles. Still, she describes it as a limited victory. “It took 25 years to get back to the diversity numbers that we had pre-Proposition 209,” Copeland-Morgan said. “Yes, UCLA has shown significant progress, but its diversity pales in comparison to the diversity of the state of California.” In 2022-23, Black students accounted for 4 percent of first-year students at the university, according to the Common Data Set; the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 6.5 percent of all Californians are Black. Latino and Latina students made up 22 percent of undergraduates at UCLA that year; Latinos and Latinas account for about 40 percent of the state’s population.

Part of the story here is that no race-neutral strategy can fully replace race-conscious admissions as a tool for enrolling underrepresented students, as Zachary Bleemer’s research has shown. Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, found that in the years immediately after Prop. 209 took effect, the enrollment of underrepresented minority applicants fell by nearly half at UCLA and Berkeley. Many underrepresented students “cascaded” into less selective UC campuses, creating a two-tier system. Race-neutral admissions policies, such as holistic review, have since helped the system increase the enrollment of underrepresented students, he wrote, “though to a considerably lesser extent than race-based affirmative action.”

But another part of the story, as Bleemer sees it, is that outreach has limited impact. The University of California system has spent more than a half-billion dollars in outreach to underserved students, it said in its amicus brief in the admissions cases, but “still struggles to enroll a student body that encompasses the broad racial diversity of the state,” especially at Berkeley and UCLA. “The reason that the most selective campuses have relatively few Black and Hispanic students,” Bleemer said, “is primarily because they’re being rejected,” Bleemer said. “Money spent on outreach isn’t enough. The moral of the story is admissions policies.”

Ever-increasing selectivity is part of the story, too. Even as UCLA was doing more outreach throughout Los Angeles and California, it was attracting more and more applicants from other states and other countries. As applications kept soaring, its acceptance rate kept plummeting, from 18.6 percent in 2015 to 8.8 percent this year. UCLA, which accepted 12,779 students from a total of nearly 146,000 applicants for 2023-24, receives more applications than any other institution in the nation.

A college’s diversity goals are often in tension with other goals, such as the pursuit of students who display evidence of academic excellence, as defined by high-school grades and course rigor. “It’s clear that UCLA has been trying very hard to enroll more Black and Hispanic students,” Bleemer said. “But over the last 30 years, Berkeley and UCLA have very much doubled down on what private universities call excellence: They’re looking for excellence everywhere.”

Copeland-Morgan acknowledges that increasing selectivity can complicate the pursuit of greater diversity. She believes that colleges must improve their evaluations to better consider the context for an applicant’s achievements. What she espoused wasn’t just a sustained commitment to find more high-achieving students in underserved communities; it was a sustained commitment to helping more underrepresented students become highly competitive applicants.

“You’ve got to get more underrepresented students into the applicant pool, but, yes, you’ve got to get more of them admitted,” she said. “Enrollment folks have to constantly ask themselves: Where are the barriers for high-achieving minority students? And how can we help?”

What defined Copeland-Morgan, who’s widely respected in admissions, was her relentless questioning of norms, her skepticism of This Is How We’ve Always Done It. At UCLA, she spent a lot of time raising money for enrollment and scholarship programs. She turned down offers of one-year grants from donors. (“You can’t make substantial progress in one year when you’re trying to undo systemic racism and a lack of access to quality education,” she said.) She persuaded the development office to add an employee dedicated to helping meet the university’s financial-aid needs.

Copeland-Morgan changed financial-aid policies that she believed worked against low-income students. UCLA stopped giving one-time scholarships (“They create problems and harm retention,” she said). Better to give students, say, $1,000 a year over four years, she thought, than $4,000 all at once. The university also stopped requiring scholarship recipients to maintain a minimum GPA that had been higher than the campus average; instead, recipients had to demonstrate satisfactory academic progress toward their degrees. And she worked closely with the housing director to increase the number of triple rooms in dorms, reducing costs for low-income students.

UCLA also worked to create a more welcoming campus for underrepresented students, emphasizing customer service, soliciting feedback from students and families. “There’s this huge weakness in higher education: Too often, we bring these students in and then we just let them go,” Copeland-Morgan said. “So many college presidents and trustee boards are only concerned about the front end — just the admission part. We can’t just say we want diversity and then not have the support systems, policies, and communities that allow our minority and first-gen students to be successful.”

Outreach, outreach, outreach.

Many people who work closely with underrepresented applicants have heard the word echoing before. But some are skeptical of colleges’ recent pledges to do more of it. Carlos Jiménez, chief executive of Peak Education — a nonprofit group that helps low-income applicants in Colorado Springs — is supportive of outreach but skeptical that doing more of it will offer much of a solution.

“The kids we serve aren’t sitting back and wishing that more colleges would visit their high schools and talk to them,” said Jiménez, a former admissions officer. “Their problem is so much more deep and broad than that. I would like to see colleges be more creative, to do things that are more systemically focused, that can impact communities, rather than just focused on the end point: How do we get a senior to apply?”

Mitchell, the head of school at Cesar Chavez, in Washington, agrees. “Sure, send your VP for enrollment to come and visit a low-income school,” Mitchell said. “But what happens after the visit? How are you sustaining those relationships? What happens when you’re shaping the class? It doesn’t matter which practices you put in place, or how many VPs you send out, or how many pipeline programs you build, if there’s not a mind-set shift.”

The shift Mitchell describes: Colleges must consider a high-achieving applicant from a low-income school to be just as academically competitive, capable, and deserving as a high-achieving applicant from a private school across town. And he echoes Copeland-Morgan’s insistence that institutions must do more to acknowledge that underrepresented students often need more support to thrive on predominantly white, affluent campuses.

“College leaders need to be willing,” Mitchell said, “to sit with their boards and faculty, and ask: ‘Who do we want to be? An institution that caters only to ready-made products? Or an institution that focuses on transforming any student into a brilliant scholar?’ Maybe it’s both.” Institutions, he said, need to show their commitment to what they truly believe. Otherwise, they’ll risk missing out on promising students from urban and rural areas because colleges think they don’t have the resources to support them. “Are they OK with losing that talent?”

Another word keeps echoing, too. Legacies, legacies, legacies.

In a moment of intense reckoning with racial and socioeconomic inequities in admissions, those preferences, which overwhelmingly favor white, affluent students, seem more out-of-place than ever. Virginia Tech recently announced that it would ditch legacy considerations, just as Wesleyan University, the University of Maryland at College Park, and a few other institutions have recently done.

But anyone hoping for a full-on anti-legacy revolution shouldn’t hold their breath. Several big-name private colleges and a handful of public universities said recently that they plan to continue the practice, as The Washington Post reported in late September. But even if all those institutions suddenly changed course next week, the mere act of flipping the legacy switch to Off wouldn’t make an institution more accessible to low-income applicants — and it wouldn’t ensure that legacy admits wouldn’t simply be replaced by a different mix of affluent students.

Matt McGann, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst and a first-gen college graduate, has thought about why people tend to fixate on legacy preferences as opposed to other inequities in admissions. Back in 2021, his institution announced that it would discontinue them. This fall, following the first cycle since the policy change took effect, 6 percent of students are legacies, down from 11 percent last year. A record 19 percent of all incoming students are the first in their families to attend college. And domestic students of color make up half of the class.

But there’s another crucial detail in that story. In 2021, Amherst increased its financial-aid budget — now more than $70 million a year — to help low- and middle-income students. “We paired our legacy change with a financial-aid enhancement, a very significant one, and yet all the focus was on the legacy change,” McGann said, describing the general reaction to the shift in policies. “But the financial-aid enhancement is at least as responsible for the success we’ve had in terms of advancing equity. I understand the reasons why it’s not as much of a story. A lot of stuff on the cost side is nuanced, it’s just confusing. But it’s really important. When you can help a student understand that they’re going to be able to afford it, and then actually deliver on a promise, that’s a big thing.”

Though most institutions don’t have Amherst’s resources (its endowment tops $3 billion), McGann’s observation applies broadly: You can’t talk seriously about diversity without talking about affordability.

A senior admissions official at a public flagship university recently told The Chronicle about how over the last several years his institution had identified specific enrollment barriers for underrepresented applicants. Those included requirements that they submit ACT/SAT scores, take at least three years of a foreign language in high school (preferably, four), and, for those pursuing specific majors, take calculus, if offered at their high school.

But adjusting those requirements didn’t help the university enroll more underrepresented students. And neither did more outreach. “It didn’t matter how much recruitment we did, the only thing that moved the needle was money going directly to students,” the official said. “We’ve been admitting more and more underrepresented students, but many of them aren’t coming, primarily because of concerns over cost.”

The impact of a key trend was plain to see. Though the institution’s total cost of attendance was increasing, the amount of its scholarships stayed the same, reducing their buying power. Surveys of Black applicants who had declined the university’s admission offers revealed one persistent problem. “They couldn’t afford the cost of room-and-board,” the official said. “So, it was like, great, we admitted this student to a prestigious university. But if we gap them significantly, what good did we really do?”

As colleges assess what would make a meaningful difference in promoting racial and socioeconomic equity, one word stands out. And it bears repeating.

Money, money, money.

Lana Avalos couldn’t forget the word if she tried.

The high-school senior in Plano, Tex., read about the court’s decision, and sometimes she has wondered if the upshot of the ruling would lower her odds of admission at prominent colleges. “But I’m not worried about that as much as I’m worried about how I’m going to afford it,” she said. “I think about it daily.”

For all the recent changes in admissions, for all the angst that the limited consideration of race among a relatively small number of four-year institutions has caused for a half-century, the cost of college is still the major obstacle standing between underrepresented students and a postsecondary degree. A recent analysis by the Institute for College Access and Success found that the federal Pell Grant now covers just 26 percent of the cost of attendance at public colleges — the lowest level in the program’s 50-year history.

There’s more. A new analysis of federal data by the Institute for Higher Education Policy further illuminates the depth of the gap between what students must pay to attend college and what they can afford. That gap, known as “unmet need,” is much wider on average for nonwhite students than for white students. Students who received a Pell Grant at least once had a nearly $10,000 gap, on average; those who didn’t receive Pell Grants were able to cover their unmet need “with resources to spare.” One especially troubling finding: Students on the lowest rungs of the income ladder would need to contribute nearly 150 percent of the household income to attend a four-year college full time, IHEP’s analysis said, “even after accounting for grant and scholarship aid.”

This was the reality looming over Avalos, who couldn’t even count on a Pell Grant. She was born in Mexico and came to the United States legally with her parents. But she’s not a U.S. citizen. Her family’s immigration status — her parents are here on a temporary work visa — will prevent her from qualifying for state and federal aid even though she has lived in the country since she was a year old. When her college adviser explained this reality to her one day at school last spring, Avalos broke down and had to skip her next class. “I grew up thinking that if I study hard, do sports and extracurricular activities, I can qualify for enough scholarships to pay for college,” she said. “I thought all of that would be the deciding factor.”

Avalos, a history buff who aspires to become a lawyer, has stellar grades and a near-perfect SAT score. She plans to apply to a handful of wealthy private institutions that can meet her full financial need without loans, but all of them have low, if not infinitesimal, acceptance rates. “It’s daunting that I have to shoot for those kinds of colleges,” she said.

As summer faded, Avalos figured she would write her personal statement about how her culture shaped her, a topic her college adviser suggested. While working on her applications, she kept hunting for private scholarships but found that she was ineligible for most. Without substantial assistance, she said, her family wouldn’t be able to afford a four-year college.

The particulars of Avalos’s situation differ from those of most students who will soon apply to college. Still, many low- and middle-income applicants will end up in a similar circumstance, staring at an insurmountable gap on a financial-aid offer, weighing the possibilities of loans, if they can qualify for loans at all. They will do so in a land where people often tell teenagers that if they’re smart and work hard, the gates of higher education will swing open. A land in which laws, policies, rules, requirements, and many other circumstances beyond students’ control often constrain their opportunities — or shred them altogether.

What could fix Avalos’s problem? A sudden surge in the number of admissions officers visiting her high school this fall probably wouldn’t. Nor would all the highly selective colleges on her list dropping legacy preferences next week. Nor would the dozens of recently revamped supplemental-essay and short-answer questions about adversity, gratitude, leadership, and service. Nor would the renewed push to assess character in admissions. Nor would every single college on the continent dropping out of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings regime in a sudden show of principle. Nor would the Common Application’s direct-admission pilot program, through which qualified students receive automatic-admission offers out of the blue — but no guarantee of a sufficient financial-aid offer.

This summer, Avalos finished Wuthering Heights, relaxed as best she could, and tried not to dwell too much on the future. “I’ve done all that I can,” she said.

Grit. Resilience. Determination. Colleges say they value such qualities in applicants. Now, higher-ed leaders will need to display those qualities themselves if they want to achieve greater racial equity via race-neutral means.

It’ll be difficult. The Supreme Court razed 45 years of legal precedent, leaving uncertainty in its place. Recent federal guidance on complying with the ruling left questions unanswered. A Q&A document released jointly by the Departments of Education and Justice didn’t mention what, if any, implications the court’s decision has for scholarships targeting minority students. Though the court’s opinion didn’t mention aid or scholarships, many officials are eager for clarity on how to proceed with their financial-aid strategies.

But practical concerns point to fundamental questions. Will highly selective colleges embrace complacency in light of the court’s ruling? To what extent will they confront the damage their own policies and practices have done to the goal of achieving greater racial and socioeconomic diversity in higher education? The latter course will require such institutions to reckon with their very nature and purpose, as a recent report on reforming admissions makes clear: “The effects of systemic racism touch every element of college admission — a process that, at its origin, was not designed to promote equity.”

Gatekeeping is in the DNA of many of the nation’s most prominent institutions; exclusivity is in their bones. And their ever-increasing selectivity perpetuates inequities — and warps the nation’s understanding of who’s most deserving of a coveted spot. As Bleemer, the researcher at Yale, explains, the notion that the best-prepared applicants with the highest grades and test scores should have the greatest freedom of choice among well-resourced institutions is ingrained in our thinking about admissions. “The idea is that these are the kids who will gain the most from access to that education,” Bleemer said. “If anything, I keep finding that the opposite is true.”

Students may have the keenest sense of what’s really at stake in the race-neutral era. Many feel at a gut level what a majority of Supreme Court justices apparently did not: Diversity matters in education; many young people have a compelling interest in it; and they can explain how it has benefited them.

Avalos, the Mexican American high-school senior in Plano, Tex., attends a diverse public charter school where students participate in cultural celebrations — Hispanic Heritage Month, an Arab cultural festival, Chinese New Year. “The diversity at my school is the reason I feel so American and less of an immigrant,” she said, “and why I have allowed myself to feel so comfortable expressing my love for my culture, to get more in touch with it and value it more.”

Many applicants aren’t worried just about getting into college; they’re worried that the impact of the ruling will diminish the diversity and cultural vibrancy of the institutions they’ll soon call home, which could make those campuses feel less welcoming than before. “I fear that an environment that becomes less diverse might cause me to be less open,” Avalos said. “I fear that being so, so different from the majority of students would discourage me from putting myself out there, for fear of not being understood — or for fear of being the only one that’s not understood.”

Colleges move slowly. Anyone who expected institutions to announce an eye-popping 10-point plan to reinvent the admissions wheel within three months of the court’s ruling is delusional. “Right now, we’re just seeing the first wave of triage measures,” said David A. Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He expects to see more colleges experiment in the near future, perhaps by embracing different kinds of evaluations, such as portfolio assessment, that could give admissions officers a more nuanced picture of applicants: “There’s a real hunger to do things differently on a larger scale.”

Throughout the nation, college presidents are rethinking their institutional priorities. Many dedicated enrollment leaders, such as Martinez, at Occidental, and McGann, at Amherst, are bringing their perspectives as first-generation graduates to the relentless challenge of enrolling and supporting more underrepresented applicants. Admissions officials at several colleges said the court’s decision had galvanized their institutions’ commitment to expanding access — and raising funds to bolster need-based financial aid.

Coleman, at EducationCounsel, has been constantly conferring with college officials about their plans for pursuing diversity goals within the legal confines of the ruling. “I am heartened by the robust energy I feel — it is palpable,” he said. “There’s a commitment to take some rational risks here and to stand behind a commitment to their values.”

Confronting immense challenges, such as college affordability, will also require large-scale approaches and complex strategies. Expanding outreach sounds good, but it’s an expensive, time-consuming proposition. Without sustained investment and commitment, many of those efforts are unlikely to add up to more than passing promises. Robust recruitment in underserved communities won’t matter much unless the colleges involved admit more students from those communities. And admitting more low-income students won’t mean much unless colleges find ways to offer them more robust need-based aid.

But let’s not forget: The admissions process churns within a complex system that bestows educational and economic advantages on some Americans while denying them to others. “We’ve been relying on race-conscious admissions policies or various substitutes for them to smooth over vast disparities in college preparation stemming from residential and school segregation, gaps in family income and wealth, and inequities in K-12 education,” a recent report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce said. “The transition from high school to college is far too late a point in life to expect to remedy the effects of such inequalities.”

Olufemi Ogundele, associate vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of California at Berkeley and a first-generation Nigerian American, recently described his institution’s extensive efforts to overhaul its admissions practices as a Band-Aid for inequities within the K-12 system. Still, even if colleges can’t fix those inequities, they shouldn’t see that as an excuse to throw up their hands.

As Ogundele wrote in The New York Times, admissions leaders should be questioning their processes: “How does your understanding of the educational environment inform how excellence is defined? Do your staff members receive regular bias training before they start to read applications, to ensure a fair review? How does your evaluation process humanize your applicants so different versions of excellence can emerge?”

The ruling, Ogundele wrote, compels colleges to do more than talk up diversity: “It’s time to construct, maintain, and defend equitable admissions systems.”

Colleges have always been businesses. Now they get to decide which kind they’re in — the business of tearing down, or the business of building up.

Their choices will have implications for students like Aminah Augustin, the high-school senior in New Jersey who intends to help revitalize her hometown. She filled up one yellow spiral notebook with thoughts on applying to college before starting on another. Her many scrawls gave her a sense of security.

Augustin contemplated what the ruling would mean for her. “More competition,” she said. “But it’s an unfair competition. I’ve always been competing with students who have more opportunities than me. But now I just feel like there’s no way for me to have a one-up. It’s going to be harder for me to keep up with the credentials that other students have, just because they had access to money — and I didn’t.”

Though some observers draw a distinction between race and class, Augustin understood that the two entwine in ways one can’t fully separate. The net worth of a typical white family is 10 times greater than that of a typical Black family, according to a 2020 analysis by the Brookings Institution. That gap, it said, resulted from “the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, echoed those findings in her forceful dissent in the admissions cases. “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations.”

Augustin recognized those gaps. While doing some research on educational attainment, she found Census data indicating that just 22 percent of people 25 or older living in her predominantly Black hometown of Irvington had a bachelor’s degree. In nearby Livingston, N.J., which is mostly white, nearly 73 percent did. “Being Black in a predominantly impoverished community really affects someone’s educational opportunities and how they turn out,” she said. “It’s not that there’s no drive in underrepresented communities, but the fact is they just don’t have the same level of access to higher education.”

Augustin knew that her high school doesn’t offer as many Advanced Placement courses as those in neighboring districts do. She had wanted to take AP Biology and AP Psychology, but those weren’t even options. Her school doesn’t offer test-prep courses found in most private schools. Although she had hoped to take a college-level psychology course during her senior year, she couldn’t find an affordable option close to where she lives: “In my community, it’s really hard to show your care for a subject. That’s where my insecurities come from — a lack of access and exposure to my career goals.”

Admissions officials have long considered applicants’ socioeconomic circumstances in their holistic evaluations. But drilling down on contextual details — the opportunities they’ve had or lacked — will become even more important now that colleges can no longer consider racial status.

As the summer wore on, Augustin channeled her doubts into motivation, volunteering at a day-care center, mentoring students at a summer camp. She felt invested in those pursuits, which she hoped would reveal her passion to the highly selective colleges on her list.

In a world obsessed with Getting In, an acceptance from a big-name institution is often seen as a gleaming trophy, a prize at the end of a grueling process. But for Augustin, an acceptance would represent just the beginning of a journey to economic security — to the life she wants to live right there in her hometown. She wants to help Black and Latino children overcome the trauma of crime, poverty, and family violence. Guide them to fulfilling summer activities. To support services they needed. To college. To hope.

The Supreme Court’s decision wouldn’t just make it harder for colleges to enroll underrepresented students. It would surely make it harder for such students to realize aspirations that could benefit minority communities, which need doctors, lawyers, and child psychologists like the one Augustin aspires to become. And the stakes are especially high for Black women, who hold more student debt than any other group of graduates, with an average of $38,000 in federal loans a year after completing a bachelor’s degree. An acceptance from a wealthy institution that can offer Augustin a generous amount of aid could greatly ease her path to graduate school and beyond; the lack of such an offer could make that path much more difficult.

After some reflection, Augustin decided to write her personal statement about her experiences as a Black woman exploring Judaism. She understood why some students of color might find it uncomfortable to discuss race, but, of course, not every student of color is the same. “Race has had a big impact on who I am — that’s my whole identity,” she said. “I didn’t want to be robbed of that opportunity.”

As summer waned, Augustin felt more confident than before about applying to college. “I’m gonna be fine,” she said. “I know I’m gonna get in.”

The wrecking ball kept coming. In September, SFFA filed a lawsuit challenging the United States Military Academy at West Point’s race-conscious admissions policies, one more potential blow to diversity strategies benefiting people of color.

But Augustin vowed to keep pushing herself toward a future she could see. A future in which she gets into an affordable college, earns a handful of degrees, and finds something in this damaged world to rebuild.