How the Supreme Court Ruling Will Change Admissions

I spend a lot of time trying to explain college admission and enrollment management to people both inside and outside the academy, and in all my attempts to do so, I’ve found one simple phrase imparts insight more quickly and clearly than anything else. “There are two kinds of admissions offices in America,” I say. “There are those that have to deny students they want to admit and those who have to admit students they’d prefer to deny.”

This, of course, is hyperbole, and anyone who wanted to argue with it could point out that community colleges, for instance, have missions that celebrate their open access; they don’t want to deny students at all, and generally don’t. Many large, public flagship and land-grant universities have high admission rates that speak to access missions, even though there are still fairly strict requirements for admission. In 2021, for instance, first-year student-admit rates were over 80 percent at doctoral institutions that the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education classifies as having “very high research activity,” like Indiana, Iowa State, Michigan State, and Pennsylvania State Universities and the Universities of Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon, as well as my institution, Oregon State University, to name a few.

Now the Supreme Court has restricted some of the work admissions officers do, in its just-announced ruling in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard/University of North Carolina cases, and those people charged with reviewing student applications (whether first-year, transfer, or graduate students) will naturally want to know how this decision will affect them. As is often the case, the answer is, “it depends.”

If you work at a college where the main goal of the admissions office is to fill a class that has room to grow, the effects you feel will likely be on the margin. You’ll no longer be able to consider whether a student’s race or ethnicity might have affected opportunities to succeed; while the net effect on your enrollment will, at least in the short term, be negligible, the effect on those students who don’t get that small benefit of the doubt will be real, and potentially long-lasting.

Similarly, if you work at a public college in a state where such considerations are already outlawed, such as the University of California system or the University of Florida, it’s unlikely that your job will change much. Yet, again, the net effect on society and the students affected is real. California’s ban on the use of race or ethnicity in admissions in 1996 drastically cut the enrollment of students of color, and the system has not caught up since. This may be partially because the law sent a message — that the struggles people of color face because of their ethnicity is no longer meaningful — that was, in itself, a signal to students saying, “Don’t apply.”

At the other end of the spectrum, if you work at a college where you have to make fine distinctions between otherwise superbly qualified students, your life might change a lot. The Supreme Court says admission at your institution is a zero-sum game and thus, if you grant favor to one student, you are, by definition, disadvantaging another, based solely on skin color or heritage.

The court has just ruled that many diversity programs colleges use do not meet the requirements of “strict scrutiny” required under civil-rights law. Two interesting elements of the decision are the court’s perception that the inability to measure diversity’s benefits prove its meaninglessness, and the emphasis on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s previous statement that programs should have an end; she conveniently pulled 25 years out of her hat and dropped that in the middle of the Grutter v. Bollinger decision.

So what can we do?

First, we can rethink recruitment. There is nothing I can see that would prohibit specially targeted recruitment programs for students of color, although at some point we can probably expect a white student who was not allowed to participate in a fly-in program to sue over that. (The recent ruling goes a long way to making that student’s case.) Letting students from underrepresented backgrounds know they are welcome on our campuses is still critical.

Second, we can back away from the SAT. (I once wrote about how Covid might be the end of the SAT — now it might be this latest ruling.)

I’ve often wondered about the premise of the plaintiffs’ arguments in cases like the one just decided: that “qualified for admission” is simply a function of high-school GPA and test scores, or that the job of the admissions officer is just to skim the “most qualified” off the top of the applicant pool based on strict objective criteria, like in many other countries with nationalized high-school curricula. The reality, of course, is that admission has never operated this way. Shame on us for a) not making that point more vocally, and b) not explaining it more clearly.

But if we pull that premise out from underneath the argument (and backing away from standardized tests helps in this), suddenly the need to look deeper into the application becomes essential, given almost 40,000 high schools with what often seems like 40,000 different academic approaches and 40,000 different grading systems. The people who started the “you can’t compare the GPA at my kid’s school to the GPA at those people’s school” might find their aphorism comes back to bite them on the backside.

What to Know About Race-Conscious Admissions

In two closely watched cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional the consideration of race in admissions. Here’s a primer.

The colleges that went test optional during the pandemic seem to have discovered something, according to the data. Not requiring the SAT or ACT appears to have increased diversity. But time will tell whether this trend continues, or whether the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s foray back into required testing leads others to do so. (There’s also the possibility that test-optional schools will follow the University of California system and eliminate consideration of tests altogether.)

This decision should also change how we talk about our applicants and admitted students. In short, we should stop bragging about the “best and brightest,” as measured by high-school GPA, Advanced Placement courses, research opportunities, and other factors. Instead, we can celebrate other important characteristics, like curiosity, independence, and character.

We can also stop considering legacy status, even though the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t prohibit it. What’s worse than saying the children of alumni are naturally more qualified?

The law, and the decisions just released, are nuanced and complex, and scholars will be debating them for years — probably decades — to come. But admissions officers should remember that no one can legislate their perspectives, opinions, lived experiences, or the compassion and concern they bring to work every day.