Students for Fair Admissions on Thursday dismissed its lawsuit against Yale University, bringing another chapter in the race-conscious admissions saga to a close. The Ivy League institution hours later announced changes to its undergraduate-admissions process.
SFFA, which recently prevailed in its litigation against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, filed a lawsuit challenging Yale’s admissions policies back in 2021. That case was later stayed pending the outcome of the Harvard and UNC cases. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling against race-conscious admissions in June, Yale and SFFA discussed the university’s response to the decision, according to a joint stipulation of voluntary dismissal filed in a federal court in Connecticut.
Yale, the filing said, provided supporting documentation that it has updated its training materials to clarify that race may not be used as a factor in admissions; that it plans to “take technological steps” to hide “check box” data on race from admissions officers during the review process; that it will not run reports during the review cycle that would provide aggregate data regarding the racial composition of admitted students to date; and that it will not consider race as a factor in “calculating or awarding financial aid.”
The Context
Here’s background on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the practice nationwide.
But the latter will not represent a change in existing practice, Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Yale, told The Chronicle on Thursday. “That is not new policy — that is pre-existing policy,” he said. “We don’t look at race at all. We look at students’ family income and assets. Our formula is completely driven by those, and that’s the way it has been for decades.”
Still, the changes described in the filing provide a snapshot of how admissions practices are changing in an era of heightened scrutiny. In July, SFFA said it sent an email to 150 private and public institutions urging them to take four specific actions in light of the court’s ruling. One was to stop making check-box data about applicants’ race available to admissions officers.
Several institutions, including Harvard College, have said publicly that they plan to do exactly that. This spring, the Common Application, the online platform that more than a million students use each year to apply to college, announced that it would allow its 1,000-plus member institutions to hide information about students’ race and ethnicity starting in August. Applicants may still choose to answer those voluntary questions. Member colleges already can hide information about an applicant’s birthday, gender, Social Security number, and test scores.
In August, the Departments of Education and Justice issued a question-and-answer document about complying with the Supreme Court’s decision. But that widely anticipated federal guidance didn’t clarify whether colleges should redact information about race and ethnicity in all application materials that admissions officers see during evaluations. “In collecting and using data, institutions should ensure that the racial demographics of the applicant pool do not influence admissions decisions,” the guidance said. “The Court’s decision does not prohibit institutions from reviewing such data for other purposes, but institutions should consider steps that would prevent admissions officers who review student applications from using the data to make admissions decisions.”
The federal guidance didn’t mention financial aid and scholarships, and neither did the court’s opinion. But many admissions officials fear that future lawsuits will target race-conscious financial-aid policies.
There’s a lot of anxiety out there, and we really wanted to convey to folks that, obviously, the law has changed, but what we value has not.
Yale described several other changes to its admissions practices and recruitment strategies in a news release on Thursday. To bolster its holistic evaluations of applicants, the university said, the admissions office has updated its application questions for the 2023-24 cycle, adding a new option to its three short-answer essay prompts. One asks students to reflect on a time when they discussed an issue important to them with someone who held an opposing view. Another asks them to reflect on the importance of their membership in a particular community. And the third, new this year, asks them to “reflect on an element of your personal experience that you feel will enrich your college. How has it shaped you?”
Quinlan said he and his staff had just begun to discuss how to best evaluate what applicants might choose to share about their racial identity or experiences in a way that’s thoughtful — and that complies with the court’s ruling: “It’s going to be a lot of discussion, a lot of norming, and a lot of unlearning, which will not be easy.”
Starting this fall, Yale said, admissions officers will incorporate data from the Opportunity Atlas — an online mapping project that gauges economic mobility in specific neighborhoods at the census-tract level — into their evaluations of applicants. That data, the university said, would complement place-based and race-neutral data provided by the College Board’s Landscape tool, which Yale’s admissions staff has been using in its evaluations of applicants from under-resourced areas since 2017.
“In Landscape, you can see all the data around the neighborhood and the school, and the way that the test score, if the student has one, is put in context of test scores over time at the school, which is incredibly powerful,” Quinlan said. “So a student with a 29 on the ACT might be below our median score, but that 29 on the ACT could be the highest score by 10 points at the school. And that information is a huge indicator of promise and potential.”
The Opportunity Atlas, Quinlan said, will allow admissions officers to better understand the context of applicants who come from neighborhoods with relatively little socioeconomic mobility: “That’s another thing we can consider in our whole-person review process.”
Yale also said it would expand its outreach in several ways. The university plans to hire two new admissions officials who will engage regularly with college-access organizations and oversee outreach initiatives that include current students and alumni, for instance. The university plans to create new programs and events for students through the Small Town and Rural Students College Network, known as Stars. And Yale plans to build or bolster long-term initiatives to expand its pipeline of high-achieving students from diverse backgrounds, including the creation of an intensive college-preparatory summer program for underrepresented students.
“This is incredibly important and serious work,” Quinlan said. “There’s a lot of anxiety out there, and we really wanted to convey to folks that, obviously, the law has changed, but what we value has not. We’re going to redouble our efforts to get messages out there about affordability and diversity. We’re going to invest in new staff members and resources — plans that cross a lot of different dimensions. Honestly, things that have been in our sights for years, but now we are extremely motivated to accomplish.”
When asked if Yale is planning to assess whether to continue considering applicants’ legacy status in admissions, Quinlan said the question is part of an ongoing conversation: “We’re continuing throughout the year to look at admissions priorities and policies with university leadership, with stakeholders such as faculty and trustees. That’s what I’ll say about that.”
Ed Blum, founder of SFFA, did not immediately respond to the a request for comment late Thursday.
