One year ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively outlawed the consideration of a college applicant’s racial status. Then came a wave of public statements from institutions describing their enduring and soon-to-be-redoubled commitments to supporting student diversity. But after that, things turned quiet.
It’s been 12 months of tight-lipped cautiousness throughout the admissions realm, which remains under threat of further lawsuits, from Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the organization responsible for bringing down race-conscious programs, as well as other watchdog groups. As the first enrollment cycle after the landmark decision winds down, college officials so far aren’t saying much, if anything, about the racial diversity of their freshman classes this fall. That’s because, in many cases, they just … don’t know yet.
“We have not pulled back the curtain on the data,” Monica C. Inzer, vice president for enrollment management at Hamilton College, in N.Y., told The Chronicle in late June. “We cannot see race and ethnicity in individual records or aggregate data for the class.”
Colleges say they’ve been flying blind when it comes to the racial and ethnic diversity of their incoming students. Many chose not to download applicants’ demographic information until they nailed down this fall’s freshman class. This year, that task has stretched far into the summer at the tail end of an especially turbulent admissions cycle complicated by the disastrous rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. For weeks, students have been sliding out of one college’s first-year class and into another’s as institutions continue to admit applicants from waitlists. And some students hampered by FAFSA challenges still aren’t sure where — or if — they will attend college.
But as the dust settles, all colleges will finally be able to say how they fared. Harvard College has indicated that it plans to publicly release its admissions data this summer, and several big-name colleges plan to do the same; others won’t do so until the fall semester begins. Ultimately, that information will appear in the Common Data Set and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
Sooner or later, the public will be able to see how many Black, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American, and white students enroll at a given college this fall. In the months ahead, the national discussion of admissions statistics and racial diversity will likely remain just as fraught as ever. But let’s not forget: One discrete set of numbers reveal only a part of a larger story about which students ended up where. And this year, that story has been especially complicated.
To understand this peculiar moment, let’s review a bit. In its 6-3 decision, the court didn’t explicitly weigh in about the suppression of demographic data; nor did it order colleges to shield students’ self-reported race and ethnicity from admissions officers who read applications. Nonetheless, admissions experts say that the vast majority of institutions opted to do so, in keeping with guidance from the U.S. Department of Education, which said colleges may continue to collect demographic information for various purposes, but that they should ensure such data “do not influence admissions decisions.” The department also noted that the court had criticized colleges’ practice of “adjusting their admissions priorities dynamically in response to demographic data on the race of students in the admitted class.”
The Common Application, which runs an online platform used by more than 1,000 colleges, continues to include an optional question about race and ethnicity on its first-year and transfer applications. But it now enables member institutions to “hide,” or suppress, an applicant’s race and ethnicity on the PDF of each application (colleges can also render invisible a student’s Social Security number, date of birth, gender, and testing information). And institutions may choose when they can view specific application data. Both the Common App and the Coalition for College declined to say how many colleges suppressed race-and-ethnicity data in their respective systems. Yet several enrollment leaders told The Chronicle that the vast majority took that step via the application platforms and information systems they use.
In a nation where admissions outcomes are deeply scrutinized and widely politicized, colleges have many reasons to fear litigation arising from their admissions practices. But risk tolerances vary from campus to campus, and not every institution handled demographic information the same way this year, according to several longtime enrollment insiders. Some colleges that had redacted race and ethnicity from each applicant’s file looked at aggregated demographic data throughout the cycle; other colleges first peeked at aggregate data only after sending out regular-decision admissions offers.
But Inzer, who’s retiring this month after 20 years leading Hamilton’s enrollment division, said the college decided to take what it saw as the most prudent tack. “We made a commitment in this first year that we were not going to look at the race or ethnicity data until we released our waitlist for first-year and transfer students,” she said. “We didn’t want to look at the aggregate data because we felt that might be perceived as crossing a line. It might be perceived that looking at that data would influence the types of decisions we are making.”
Inzer said that Hamilton would release its waitlist and consider its class all wrapped up by July 1, if not sooner. Then, the flip of a switch would unlock the race-and-ethnicity data for the freshman class of 2024 in the college’s database. And she’s eager to see the results.
Enrolling a class, small or large, has always involved some degree of suspense. Now, there’s even more of it.
Diversity is so important to universities. To not talk about it in a more consistent way — that did feel different.
Changes necessitated by the court’s ruling have rattled many admissions officers. They’re still responsible for hitting numerous targets, including diversity goals, but they don’t have the same tools in hand as before.
“It is incredibly unsettling,” said Angel B. Pérez. “The way we were all trained to do the job has changed.”
Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), recalled talking with a few enrollment leaders who retired last year because they were wary of working under new constraints on admissions offices. “They said ‘I can’t do that. I don’t want to be held responsible for the demographics of a class that I have no control over.’”
The court did not specifically mention the practice known as shaping the class, in which the ranks of provisionally admitted students are whittled down to a final list of lucky ones who end up receiving an acceptance. That late-in-the-game ritual has long allowed enrollment leaders to see the entire composition of a class — in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, geography, academic interests, and so on — and make adjustments as needed to satisfy an array of institutional wants and needs. But legal experts have advised colleges that the shaping phase should now be a race-blind endeavor.
“That’s a seismic shift,” said Pérez, who was previously vice president for enrollment and student success at Trinity College, in Connecticut. “Toward the end of the process, I would look not just at race and ethnicity, but at all the different demographics that make up an interesting, diverse class — and one that also meets institutional goals. So, I can’t imagine what it’s been like this year not being able to look at race and ethnicity while making a few of those decisions near the end. It must feel incredibly disempowering.”
Or, at least, disorienting. “Diversity is so important to universities,” said Todd Rinehart. “To not talk about it in a more consistent way — that did feel different.”
Rinehart, vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of Denver, looked at aggregate data for each round of admitted applicants — three early-admission options, plus regular decision — only after those decisions were officially out the door. “That information played no role in what we did in the next round,” he said. “So if I knew we were up or down in any cohort, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it in the regular-decision round, because everyone’s [racial and ethnic] identities were suppressed. There was nothing we could do to change or influence the results.”
Denver plans to release demographic information about its incoming class in September, as usual. Though Rinehart declined to share specific numbers, he said that the percentage of underrepresented minority students admitted during the 2023-24 cycle was similar to the previous one. The raw numbers are lower, he said, but the size of the overall class figures to be smaller, too.
The greatest impact that I have seen and heard is the psychological fear that this has created. It has paralyzed institutions.
Rinehart, like many enrollment leaders, describes the impact of the court’s decision on the racial makeup of its incoming class as difficult to gauge. Especially because Denver is 6 percent down in FAFSA submissions compared with last year, and 14 percent down in students who submitted both the FAFSA and the CSS Profile, an application colleges use to give institutional aid. And the university saw a drop in yield — the percentage of students who decide to enroll — among applicants who submitted one or both of the forms.
“Everyone’s going to be looking at their race-and-ethnicity numbers, and asking how the SCOTUS decision played out,” Rinehart said. “But my gut feeling is that our numbers were far more affected by the FAFSA crisis than they were by the Supreme Court decision.”
Several other enrollment leaders at less-selective colleges agree that, for many colleges, it would be difficult to isolate the impact of the court’s decision from other factors, such as the federal-aid fiasco, or, say, a recent shift in a given institution’s financial-aid strategies. But they all know that plenty of people will soon scrutinize their race-and-ethnicity numbers, looking for meanings in the wake of the court’s decision — and, in some cases, looking to sue.
Senior enrollment officials at highly selective colleges are keenly aware of that possibility. A half-dozen who had seen their admissions data told The Chronicle that the racial composition of their incoming classes will look essentially the same as last year. Those officials, who were not permitted to speak publicly about admissions outcomes, offered the same general explanation: The court’s decision had little impact on their processes because they had not previously been giving undue weight to race and ethnicity in their evaluations.
Edward Blum will be looking closely at admissions numbers in the months ahead. The conservative activist founded SFFA, which filed the lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that led to the Supreme Court’s precedent-shredding decision last summer. In a lengthy interview with The New York Times last July, he was asked how he planned to evaluate colleges’ compliance with the court’s ruling. “It’s going to be, I think, a school-by-school, case-by-case analysis,” Blum said. Though he anticipated that some colleges would adopt legally permissible policies that promote socioeconomic diversity, others, he said, “may do something that is a direct proxy for race.”
In short, SFFA isn’t fading into the sunset. In an April 3 email to SFFA members, Blum asked recipients to “encourage any student who was rejected from any public or private college or university to go to our website and ‘Tell Us Your Story.’”
Blum this week declined to comment on how his organization might evaluate the enrollment statistics that colleges share, but The Chronicle has confirmed that SFFA plans to monitor undergraduate admissions outcomes at approximately 100 colleges, as well as about 25 law schools and 25 medical schools.
On Thursday, Blum sent out a news release marking the approaching one-year anniversary — June 29 — of SFFA’s victory at the Supreme Court. “This organization is prepared to challenge any school,” it said, in part, “that illegally uses applicant essays or racial proxies as a substitute for racial classifications and preferences.”
Consider all that a boldface reminder that the next admissions lawsuit is probably right around the corner. In this context, colleges, especially highly selective ones, find themselves in a bind as they prepare to release admissions data: If the racial and ethnic diversity of their incoming class looks about the same, or better, than last year’s, that just might invite legal scrutiny. But if the numbers are down, would anyone feel like celebrating a freshman class that’s less diverse than the one before?
“We expect to see some form of challenge or litigation among institutions that are sustaining their levels with respect to students of color,” said Art Coleman, managing partner and co-founder of EducationCounsel LLC, a firm that advises colleges on admissions policies and practices. “By the same token, if a college sees real drops, then that’s another set of concerns. There is no clear win here without some risk component, and institutions have just got to be ready for that, depending on which way the data cuts.”
It’s been a year of many adjustments inside admissions offices. And it’s also been a season of fear.
Over the last 12 months, Pérez, at NACAC, has been traveling the country, listening to admissions officials’ concerns, and discussing what’s happened in the aftermath of the court’s decision. “The greatest impact that I have seen and heard is the psychological fear that this has created,” he said. “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.”
Admissions officials have found themselves in meeting after meeting with general counsels, who are more involved in discussions of admissions policies, staff-training sessions, you name it, than ever before. “Admissions leaders are in a really hard place right now,” Pérez said. “They want to be transparent with the public, with high-school counselors, about how the sausage is made. However, a big part of their job is to protect the institution. And so they need to ensure that they’re not putting their institution at risk of litigation.”
Amid all the angst and uncertainty, though, one can detect plenty of resolve. Over the last year, Coleman, at EducationCounsel, has spent quality time with more than a dozen admissions staff navigating the new legal landscape. “I have no hesitation in saying that the quality of decision-making, the precision of focus, the intentionality, and the rigor, have all been measurably enhanced in admissions,” he said.
Inzer, at Hamilton, shared a similar reflection. Though she disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision, she said, “it made us better.” Previously, admissions officers could see the box an applicant had checked to denote their race and ethnicity. “Because we couldn’t rely on that check-the-box data, it made us more thoughtful about what an inclusive selection process looks like.”
Inzer said her staff leaned harder into assessments of an applicant’s context: their family background, the resources available at their high school, whether their parents attended college, and the hardships — financial or otherwise — that they might have experienced.
We have a lot to learn, about who applied, who was admitted, and who visited.
Hamilton also introduced an optional essay question about the “backgrounds and perspectives” they would bring to the campus. Though some students who chose to answer the prompt discussed their race and ethnicity, Inzer said, many others did not. Instead, they wrote about what it was like to be a rural teenager. An adopted teenager. A teenager with a Jewish parent and a Catholic parent. A teenager who each night sits down at the dinner table with their mother, who supports Donald Trump, and their father, who supports President Biden.
Inzer expects to enroll a class in which 19 percent of students are eligible for a federal Pell Grant, and 17 percent are first-generation college students. Those numbers inform her cautious optimism that Hamilton will end up enrolling a racially diverse class. As in previous years, the college won’t release data on the incoming class until the fall semester begins.
Whatever those numbers look like, they won’t just mark the end of the current admissions cycle; they might also inform how the college approaches the next one. “We have a lot to learn, about who applied, who was admitted, and who visited,” Inzer said. “There’s a lot to study here that could help us on the recruitment side, and how we can continue to value this thing that’s so important, without breaking the law, and being true to the changing rules that we’ve been given.”
Anniversaries are a good time to reflect. One year after the decision that changed admissions, it’s worth taking stock of what the court, in fact, did not do.
It didn’t pull the plug on holistic review, in which colleges consider many facets of a student’s achievements and attributes. Nor did it banish race entirely from admissions decisions: As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the majority opinion, the ruling does not bar colleges “from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” Coleman, at EducationCounsel, said of that passage: “It expressly endorsed aspects of looking at a student’s racial identity and background, and went into more detail than any court in 45 years has gone about what is permissible with regard to race.”
The court didn’t make things easy for colleges there, however. The so-called carve-out for discussions of race in admissions essays is also a likely target for future litigation, as SFFA’s recent news release reminds colleges. Can your admissions office prove that it’s not using the information applicants share in essays as a way to replicate that racial check-box? Someone might soon demand to see documented proof.
The court didn’t explicitly mention financial-aid and scholarship policies. But many legal experts predict that the future will bring more and more challenges to them. In preliminary guidance to colleges last summer, EducationCounsel wrote that “having effectively eliminated the consideration of an applicant’s racial status as permissible in admission, the court’s ruling would suggest that any similar consideration of an applicant’s racial status in aid or scholarship decisions is, at a minimum, high risk of legal exposure.” The most dramatic effect of the court’s decision might well lie in the realm of financial aid — and not in admissions.
Finally, the court didn’t paint a full picture of higher education. In its rendering of admissions as an ultra-competitive “zero-sum game,” with hordes of applicants vying for an infinitesimal number of seats, the court described a small sliver of the admissions universe. For all the oxygen that the most selective colleges take up, they are outliers. What their race-and-ethnicity numbers look like this year might have little in common with numbers at other colleges, including those still scrambling to hit enrollment and revenue goals.
Most institutions didn’t consider race before the court’s decision. And most don’t have luxuries that small, wealthy colleges tend to enjoy. Generally, the institutions serving the bulk of the nation’s students aren’t talking about shaping the class, or scouring applications for small details that might help them make fine-grain distinctions among virtually identical applicants. No, the vast majority of colleges admit most of their applicants — they’re looking to enroll every qualified student they can.
And that’s something to remember as you’re waiting for Harvard, with its acceptance rate of 3.59 percent, to release more detailed admissions numbers.
