As you can imagine, we’ve been getting lots of questions about the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. The decision won’t come into play until next cycle, for the class of 2029, so we don’t know exactly how things will change. However, we believe that this will most likely not cause large changes in the way admissions are handled at top universities. We want to take some to time to explain our logic and hopefully give you some peace of mind.
Why We Think It Won’t Change Much
Most colleges these days use what’s referred to as ‘holistic admissions.” This means looking at a student’s profile, as a whole, and making a decision. That means a student may have subpar scores but still get into Harvard because of their extraordinary extracurriculars and accomplishments. A true holistic view of a student includes things like race, gender, income, sexuality, etc. and we don’t think schools are going to stop holistic admissions.
Let’s look at Harvard’s statement on the decision:
“Today, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Court held that Harvard College’s admissions system does not comply with the principles of the equal protection clause embodied in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Court also ruled that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.
“We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision” is maybe the sauciest line ever put into a press release by any institution of higher education. But what’s more important to note here is that Harvard is referring to the loophole that the Supreme Court left in the decision. Let’s continue:
“We affirm that:
Because the teaching, learning, research, and creativity that bring progress and change require debate and disagreement, diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence.
To prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience. No part of what makes us who we are could ever be irrelevant.
Harvard must always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed, a place where many will have the chance to live dreams their parents or grandparents could not have dreamed.”
Like we said, colleges and universities are better when they are more diverse. Harvard knows it, we know it, now you know it. We also think this won’t change much because Harvard (and other top-tier schools) are obsessed with their image and PR. They’re already a predominately white institution (PWI), and they already have a large Asian student population. They would simply look bad if they greatly reduced the number of BIPOC students in their population. Let’s take a look at the demographic breakdown of the Class of 2026 for some insight:
Almost 70% of Harvard’s student body is made up of Caucasian and Asian American students, the groups that Students for Fair Admissions claim are unfairly maligned. This brings us to our next point:
A Lot of People Just Can’t Get Into Harvard
You could fill an entire class at Harvard with just qualified Asian American students or just qualified white students. You could fill an entire class at Harvard with qualified students who experience homelessness. You could fill an entire class at Harvard with qualified students who are just legacies. You could fill an entire class at Harvard with qualified students from other countries. There are, at most, 2,000 spots in any given class year. There are, without a doubt, way more than 2,000 students who are qualified to go to Harvard.
Your 1600 SAT score and 4.0 GPA do not mean you should be auto-admitted to Harvard. You may be valedictorian, but so are 20,000 other students in the country. 20,000 more are salutatorians. Even if you have all of that and your dad went to Harvard, that doesn’t mean you should just get to waltz right on in. Harvard is looking for a variety of students and they’re looking for students with great, diverse backgrounds. Is your extracurricular profile robust and well-developed? Does it show that you built a niche in your academic passion? Have you worked a paid job? Does your application show that you are someone who handles massive amounts of pressure with aplomb? What about your essays? Were they good? Are you sure? Captain of varsity soccer, NHS treasurer, and Student Council president aren’t like magic spells that convince admissions officers to let you in. You need to be unique. You need to have depth.
So What’s Going to Happen?
One thing that we hope brings you some peace of mind is that colleges are, above everything else, reactionary. Whenever there is a societal ill or hot-button issue, colleges flock to their admissions questions to project a certain image on the world. They all want to be seen as on the right side of history, and you can see this in how colleges like Duke added questions about sexual orientation and gender after Obergefell v. Hodges, or how schools added questions about COVID after, well, COVID. Or how schools added questions about activism, social justice, and identity after George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Schools, for the most part, are very centrist (and maybe even a little to the right), but you wouldn’t glean that from their admissions questions. They want to seem hip. They want to seem with it!
So, we think the biggest change we will see has to do with that loophole that Harvard so prominently mentioned. Admissions can consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” We think this means Harvard (and other schools) will be adding new supplemental essays. Why? Because they love adding new essays that subtweet at the various issues going on in American society. Maybe they can’t consider race based on what box you check, but they can certainly give you options to expand upon your background.
Harvard already has a pretty loose supplement to begin with, and our only ??? is will they add an extra one or just add this as something you can write about. We think most top-tier colleges will do the same. Good thing we can help you with that.
The tl;dr is that while this decision sucks, especially in light of how much education has been bashed and battered in the last few years (cough, Florida, cough), we do not think this is cause for concern. Large swaths of undeserving, mediocre white men will not start taking over the Ivy League any more than they already have. We think the largest change will be additional supplemental essays – which we know is lightly annoying, but not anywhere near as annoying as this Supreme Court.
If you have questions about the admissions process, need help strategizing everything from your major to your college list, or need assistance with your supplemental essays, reach out to us today.