The U.S. Supreme Court effectively banned the consideration of race in admissions last summer, and a full picture of the decision’s impact on higher education won’t emerge for some time. But a new analysis of national data provides an early snapshot of the landmark ruling’s immediate aftermath.
For all the palpable angst and uncertainty associated with the decision, the high-school Class of 2024 didn’t seem to respond “in clear or pronounced ways” to it, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Common Application. The nonprofit organization, which operates the shared online application used by more than 1,000 colleges, analyzed data from more than 6 million domestic applicants over the last five years to answer a question: Did students in the 2023-24 cycle exhibit notably different tendencies than applicants in previous ones did?
Not so much. In general, applicants’ behavior in the current admissions cycle didn’t veer from recent trends. The Common Application found no significant changes in how this year’s high-school graduates self-reported their race and ethnicity on the platform, for instance. Nor did the analysis reveal “meaningful deviations” from recent years in terms of the number of applications submitted by students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, the percentage of applicants in all subgroups who applied to the most selective colleges (defined as those with admit rates below 25 percent), or the number of applications students sent to the nation’s most sought-after institutions.
An examination of the average diversity of Common App colleges’ applicant pools revealed no major changes from the 2022-23 cycle, with one possible exception: The most selective institutions “may be seeing a very slightly lower proportion” of Asian American students within their pools of especially high-achieving applicants. But, the report cautions, “this interpretation is difficult to substantiate given its small magnitude relative to the inherent noisiness” of the application’s year-to-year data.
The Common App also looked to see if more students chose to discuss their race and ethnicity in their admissions essays, a component of the application that seemed to take on greater importance after the court’s decision. In the majority’s opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that colleges may still consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
But that so-called carve-out wasn’t followed by an uptick in applicants writing about such issues, the Common Application found after conducting a “word search” of various terms and phrases “unambiguously tied to discussion of racial/ethnic identity” that students had included in their essays. Just 12 percent of underrepresented minority students used one or more of those terms in 2023-24, down from 16 percent in 2020-21. Researchers saw a similar decline in the use of such terms over the same time period among students who did not self-identify as an underrepresented minority, as well as those who did not disclose their race or ethnicity on the application.
Drilling more deeply into mentions of race in essays, the Common App saw a downward trend among all racial and ethnic subgroups since 2021-22, except for American Indian/Alaska Native students, among whom there was an increase in 2023-24.
Among high-achieving students (with ACT/SAT scores in the 95th percentile or grade-point averages in the top tier for their school), underrepresented minority students “may be discussing their racial/ethnic identity slightly more often” than other students with comparable academic credentials in 2023-24. Meanwhile, the recent decline in the use of racial/ethnic phrases among other subgroups of students, the report says, seems mostly driven by Asian American applicants.
An important note here: The Common App’s findings are descriptive; they aren’t meant to nail down causal effects of the court’s decision, one of many factors that might have influenced application behavior. And the results do not suggest that students and colleges weren’t affected by the decision, the report says: “Rather, these results suggest that the impacts are not clearly seen in these application metrics.”
Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research, and analytics at the Common Application, said the data are meant to provide a useful glimpse of the new race-neutral era of admissions. He admits that he was surprised by the not-so-dramatic findings: “Going into this, I felt like we were probably going to see one of maybe four or five things happening here. I didn’t think we would see as little as we saw on this front.”
One possible explanation concerns the timing of the court’s ruling. By the end of June of last year, many rising seniors, especially the high-achieving ones, had already done their research and settled on the list of colleges they would apply to months later. “A lot of these students were already on the tracks that they were on,” Kim said, “by the time the decision came out.”
But let’s not forget: Many applicants in the 2023-24 cycle likely knew little or nothing about the ruling and its implications. A recent survey of graduating high-school seniors by Niche, a college- and scholarship-search tool, found that a majority (55 percent) were unaware of the court’s decision. Just 15 percent said the decision was affecting them (though 22 percent of Asian American students, and 17 percent of underrepresented minority students, said the same).
“With that in mind,” Kim said, “it could be another year before we see students altering their behavior.” If, in fact, they do.
Though national numbers can tell you something important, each high school, small or large, has its own distinct story, culture, and nuances reflecting the college applicants it serves.
At the Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy, a public charter school serving women of color in New York City, this year’s 57 seniors applied to more colleges in total than any previous class had, said Cassie Magesis, dean of postsecondary success. The court’s decision — and the ensuing uncertainty about how it might shape admissions outcomes — led her to advise students to apply to more colleges than they might have otherwise.
“It was such a new thing,” Magesis said of the end of race-conscious admissions policies. “I would probably handle any new thing in the admissions process the same way. Like, alright, we’re gonna increase the sample size here and see where it gets us.”
But Magesis didn’t really see a shift in what the students she advises chose to write about in their admissions essays. Her school, known as BELA, has an ethnic-studies curriculum and a culture that empowers teenagers to share personal stories in whatever way they feel comfortable. “We tell students, ‘Stories are a big part of your power,’” Magesis said. “So, yeah, I encouraged our students, more so than any other year, to lean into sharing about themselves in ways that they felt powerful.”
Elsewhere, the prospect of writing about one’s race and ethnicity might have seemed daunting or unfamiliar — or perhaps like a mere admissions tactic — for some students of color. At BELA, Magesis said, “the mindset is, ‘This is who I am, this is my identity, and this is why I deserve to be at your school.’”
Magesis, who was still helping a handful of seniors weigh their options in mid-June, said her school was poised to send its highest-ever percentage of graduates to historically Black colleges this fall. Though many factors might explain that outcome, she said, students’ uncertainty about whether freshman classes at predominantly white colleges will be significantly less diverse this fall as a result of the court’s decision certainly played a role.
“Not knowing what the demographics of those incoming classes will look like is hard,” Magesis said. “And so an HBCU becomes really appealing, especially when being surrounded by faces that look like yours in your community is so important.”
While application trends are well worth examining, those numbers only begin to tell what will surely be a long, complex story about the repercussions of the court’s decision. And that story will begin in earnest when enrollment data for the freshman Class of 2024 at each and every campus finally come to light.
The Common Application’s analysis shows that white applicants comprised 38.3 percent of the applicant pools, on average, at the most selective colleges in 2023-24, down from about 45 percent in 2020-21. But as we know, the diversification of a given college’s applicant pool — in terms of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status — doesn’t necessarily mean that its incoming classes will reflect that diversity in equal measure. And the big question is whether such diversity will wane this fall.
“I would be glad to hear that the court’s decision did not seem to cause sweeping changes in where students chose to apply and how they chose to tell their stories,” said Emmi Harward, executive director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools. “Because the Supreme Court shouldn’t have that kind of impact on a teenager’s college process.”
But Harward, a former college counselor who has worked in admissions offices at two highly selective private colleges, said that wasn’t the “decision point” she was most concerned about.
“What most folks are waiting on pins and needles to see now is the demographic composition of entering classes — who colleges were able to offer admission to,” she said. “I think it’s actually helpful that there didn’t seem to be dramatic changes on the application side of the process — to have that as a relative constant to compare how things changed within admission offices, and how things were forced to change by the SCOTUS decision.”
These are still the early days in the race-neutral era. But the desire for some dash of clarity about what the future holds is intense.
“I don’t really know what this means for institutions,” Kim, the researcher at the Common App, said of the findings in the new report. “It doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what we should expect next, and that’s the frustrating part about this.”
