An Evidence-Based Analysis and Possibilities for Equity

Published August 2025

Glossary

Affirmative action refers to a set of policies intended to combat discrimination and uphold equal opportunity in employment, public contracting, and education. The term first explicitly appeared in government documents in President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Executive Order 10925, which required federally funded programs to take “affirmative action” to ensure that hiring and employment practices did not have racial bias.¹ As education researchers Liliana Garces and OiYan Poon explained, “the explicit articulation of affirmative action during this time started from a perspective of non-discrimination (the obligation of avoiding discrimination) that then developed, within the employment context starting in early 1970s, into an affirmative duty to rectify past discrimination (i.e., compensatory treatment). These early affirmative action efforts were grounded in the need to address racial inequities created by racial segregation policies and other exclusionary laws.”² In education, affirmative action practices allowed admissions staff to positively affirm and recognize student talents within their socioeconomic contexts and consider racially marginalized backgrounds as one potential “plus” factor in the individualized evaluation of applications. As reviewed in this Brief, legal and political attacks on affirmative action from the 1970s through 2016 resulted in admissions practices that were best described as “race-conscious admissions”³ or even “race-sensitive,” as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.⁴ Throughout this Brief, the terms “affirmative action” and “race-conscious admissions” are used interchangeably, especially in reference to practices after the 1978 Bakke case.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are colleges and universities first established by the 1890 Morrill Act,⁵ which mandated former Confederate states to create separate colleges and universities for Black students and provided these states with federal funds.⁶ Although HBCUs have been persistently underfunded, they “lead the nation in development and preparation of African American students at land-grant universities, and boast groundbreaking research led by some of the top African American scholars in agriculture and [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics].”⁷

Holistic review, also called “comprehensive review” at the University of California, is an approach to assessing application files in which admissions staff evaluate students’ talents and records of achievement within their local context of opportunities. Through holistic review practices, admissions officers seek to develop a fuller understanding of individual students and their various characteristics, such as their learning dispositions, intellectual interests, character (e.g., curiosity, creativity, empathy, and communication style), leadership potential, athletic talent, geography, and financial assets, among myriad other characteristics. Holistic approaches to individualized reviews of applications began to develop in earnest in the late 1990s after California banned affirmative action.⁸

Institutional priorities are short-term and long-term goals set by college and university administrative and fiduciary leaders (i.e., boards of trustees), determined to be important imperatives because they are aligned with the institutional mission and necessary for the institution’s sustainability and development. Examples of institutional priorities include athletic team interests, geographic diversity in incoming student cohorts, and gender balance goals.

The Ivy League is a collegiate athletic conference consisting of eight private universities in the Northeastern United States—Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. In admissions conversations, the term “Ivy League institutions” is commonly used in reference to these highly selective colleges and universities. “Ivy Plus” refers to these eight institutions in addition to peer institutions, such as Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Quotas are restrictive limits on the admission of specific groups of people. Historically, colleges and universities actively placed quotas on Jewish students from the early through mid-1900s. The discriminatory intent of such quotas was to maintain the high representation of wealthy white Protestant students at Ivy Plus institutions that claimed a reliance on the social, political, and financial capital such students purportedly possessed. Discriminatory quotas are antithetical to affirmative action, which is an anti-discrimination policy imperative.

Selective colleges and universities are postsecondary institutions that admit substantially fewer students for enrollment than the number of applicants. This Brief refers to institutions that are moderately selective (meaning they admit thirty percent to fifty percent of their applicants each year) and highly selective (which admit less than thirty percent of their applicants each year).

Introduction

“We need a culture shift about how we reevaluate the meaning of merit by measuring its democratic values rather than its testocratic machinery.”

– LANI GUINIER⁹

One of the most successful components of the social fabric of the United States is its higher education ecosystem, which is an expanding sector in knowledge production that benefits the public. U.S. higher education has served as a loosely organized research and development hub across intellectual disciplines (e.g., science, medicine, technology, engineering, arts, and social sciences), a foundational place of teaching and learning, and a generator of socioeconomic opportunity. Although some have pointed to declining public confidence in higher education and skepticism over the value of a college degree,¹⁰ compared to people whose highest degree is a high school diploma, college graduates are more likely to be employed and have higher earnings over a lifetime, are less likely to experience poverty or incarceration, tend to live healthier lives, and are more civically engaged.¹¹ Overall, the more college graduates there are, the more the public benefits civically and economically. Students who attend the most exclusive colleges and universities (i.e., the Ivy League and a handful of peer institutions known as the Ivy Plus) experience significant benefits in financial and social status. Unfortunately, the benefits of college enrollment and degree completion, especially at Ivy Plus institutions, are not shared fairly across society, and low-income students face concerning structural barriers to their enrollment at these institutions.¹² Because admissions officers serve as gatekeepers to these opportunities, the purpose of this Brief is to critically examine admissions systems and practice norms, and to illuminate possibilities for changes that expand opportunity, especially for talented Black students and low-income students who face persistent barriers.

Admissions in higher education is a relatively young professional field. It has evolved greatly over time and continues to experience significant changes, especially in response to political and legal developments in recent decades. In the period after World War II, higher education gradually began to transform its practices to increase equity and access for historically excluded populations. In the 1960s and 1970s,¹³ the Civil Rights Movement, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and student movements led to transformative changes in higher education, including the creation of affirmative action programs, Black studies programs, and federal programs (such as TRIO and Upward Bound) that strengthen and support pathways to college for historically excluded students.¹⁴ These democratic campaigns expanding college opportunity sparked legal and political attacks starting in the 1970s,¹⁵ creating headwinds that curtailed leadership for equity across the higher education sector. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2023 consolidated ruling in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina (UNC),¹⁶ higher education institutions face important questions about their role in a multi-racial democracy and how to comply with their anti-discrimination obligations and ensure equal opportunities for all students.

How should colleges and universities design and manage admissions practices to align with their public missions of advancing educational opportunity, social equity, and a diverse multi-racial democracy? For far too long, public debates over selective admissions practices have been incomplete and focused on narrowly defined notions of academic “merit” presumed to be easily measured by standardized tests—ideas and practices that rely on racist ideologies.¹⁷ In the SFFA v. Harvard/UNC cases, the plaintiff SFFA advanced the idea that participation in selective postsecondary education should be strictly reserved for applicants who meet narrow and incomplete academic performance measures, such as the SAT and ACT,ⁱ that are limited in their ability to reliably predict college student achievement—especially for Black and low-income students.¹⁸ Research has pointed out that scores on standardized tests like the SAT and ACT better reflect parental income, which is correlated with race, than academic talent.¹⁹ As further discussed below, it is important to recognize that there are racial and economic disparities in access to college preparatory coursework, test preparation, and other enrichment activities, and that these tests have been tools of race and class exclusion.

Lani Guinier, former Legal Defense Fund (LDF) attorney and Harvard Law School professor, defined the concept of democratic merit in her book The Tyranny of the Meritocracy. She argued that “if our society truly values education as a means to prepare citizens to participate in our democracy, to train workers, and to enable individuals to improve their lots—then we need a culture shift about how we reevaluate the meaning of merit by measuring its democratic values rather than its testocratic machinery.”²⁰ The rejection of “meritocracy” is an expansion on how society understands, identifies, evaluates, uplifts, and supports talent. It requires a recognition that even the “standardized” metrics of “academic merit” are “neither objectively true nor natural.”²¹

Photo: Lani Guinier, undated. (Source: LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute)

Still, in public debates over fairness and equity in admissions, there is a flawed presumption that evaluating academic “merit” has been, and continues to be, foundational to selective college admissions. Consequently, there is an over-emphasis on test scores and high school grade point average (GPA), which are often mistakenly assumed to be capable of accurately capturing a student’s academic performance, talent, and potential—referred to as “merit.” Although these two data points are routinely included in admissions review procedures, much more information is needed. A robust assessment of a student’s academic track record and capabilities requires, for example, a review of high school transcripts to identify intellectual rigor. Additionally, as part of their evaluation and selection systems, admissions offices at selective institutions require applicants and their respective high schools to submit application portfolios that include data and information beyond formal individual academic records. These organizational systems and practices reflect tensions regarding how “merit” is identified and rewarded.

Guinier’s concept of democratic merit differs from testocratic merit in two ways. First, there is a clear understanding that a college applicant’s merit is determined according to the unique mission and purpose of each postsecondary institution. For example, “merit” does not mean the same thing at the Juilliard performing arts school as it does at Caltech—two highly selective institutions with very different missions that therefore seek different student qualifications. Second, democratic merit assumes a public good purpose. Accordingly, Guinier contends that “admissions criteria should continuously be reassessed for the degree to which they help the institution and its constituents to make present and future contributions to . . . our democracy.”²²

Since the late 1800s, there has been a tension between the representation of higher education as a “vehicle for social mobility” and other less democratic interests that benefit children from the upper class, “whose goodwill remained indispensable to [the university’s] welfare.”²³ The contemporary public debate over admissions policies and practices is rooted in this tension between the touted public good mission, which was first articulated in the mid-twentieth century, and the historical legacy of reproducing a social, political, and economic hierarchy at the exclusion of those who are not wealthy, white men.

Today, the most selective institutions receive far more applicants across racial identities who exhibit high levels of academic merit than they have room for in their incoming classes.²⁴ At selective colleges and universities, institutional priorities in admissions go far beyond academic qualifications. For example, in the SFFA v. Harvard case, materials submitted to the Court by the university indicated that of the approximately 26,000 applicants for the class of 2019, about 3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, about 2,700 had perfect SAT verbal scores, more than 8,000 had a perfect converted GPA of 4.0 or higher, and nearly 1,000 had a perfect composite score on the SAT or ACT.²⁵ However, Harvard consistently admits only 2,000 applicants each year, for an incoming cohort of about 1,600 students.²⁶ In such a hyper-competitive situation, many more factors, considerations, and evaluation practices necessarily come into play, going far beyond test scores and GPA. From this overabundance of applicants demonstrating academic preparedness for their college’s curriculum, admissions offices set out to shape a class of students who can contribute toward their mission and varied institutional priorities.²⁷

Therefore, a robust examination of admissions systems must go beyond select data points like test scores and high school GPA. In addition to those metrics, high school transcripts (to assess the academic rigor of courses taken), personal statements, extracurricular records, and letters of recommendation are just a few of the data points included in the evaluation process designed and used by admissions offices to assess applicants and decide whether to invite them into the incoming class. This process is much like a research project with data collection and analytic procedures. To fully understand how selective admissions systems can become more equitable and better identify talented students across demographic lines without reproducing inequalities, researchers, advocates, and institutional leaders must account for the entirety of admissions structures and practices—the whole evaluation method and methodology of inquiry. Admissions and enrollment management systems and practices are much more than test scores (and whether to require scores or make them optional). They include numerous points and routines in decision-making that can reproduce or diminish inequities by race, class, and gender.

Emerging scholarship has pointed to the importance of strategically accounting for the totality of how selective admissions systems operate to achieve institutional priorities, going beyond the inclusion and assessment of test scores, academic transcripts, essays, and letters of recommendation.²⁸ A substantial amount of research has focused on standardized tests and their uses in admissions.²⁹ Much less research has been completed with a more holistic understanding of admissions that accounts for other application materials and evaluation design and practices for high-stakes decision-making.

This Brief offers a more comprehensive analysis of college admissions practices that is often missing in public debates and provides a research-based representation of how admissions systems work overall, including a review of literature on admissions criteria. It concludes by identifying strategic opportunities for improving equity in admissions systems. Although talent, creativity, curiosity, and potential are found across all demographics and places, opportunity is not found everywhere. Admissions systems and practices can and must do better in identifying and enrolling students who can offer vital contributions to the mission of higher education in a diverse democratic society.

The Exclusionary Foundations and Evolution of Selective College Admissions

For the first 300 years of American higher education, admissions offices did not exist. Higher education institutions were first established in the American colonies in the 1600s to educate wealthy, white, male, colonial settlers so they could lead religious ministries, the political establishment, the military, and commerce—essentially to certify the reproduction of future leaders for a growing empire.³⁰ The imperialist project of the American colonies and the United States, including the founding and growth of its higher education institutions, relied on the expropriation of Indigenous land and life and the free labor and profit from the enslavement of African peoples.³¹ Participation in higher education was exclusively reserved for wealthy white men until Oberlin College began admitting Black students in 1835. The founding of women’s colleges, starting with the Georgia Female College (now Wesleyan College) a year later,³² and the first of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), starting with the African Institute (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania) in 1837,³³ created a higher education system strictly segregated by race and sex.

Given the explicit caste structure in higher education and the challenge of enrolling enough students to cover operational expenses, most of these early colleges and universities had no need for a selective and standardized admissions process or an office of admissions bureaucrats tasked with reviewing and enrolling students.³⁴ Until the early 1900s at most institutions, prospective students simply showed up at the gates of a college to meet with the president and registrar to enroll and begin their studies.³⁵ The function of selective admissions as known today is a relatively recent invention.

The oldest U.S. colleges and universities pioneered the development of admissions practices with criteria for including or excluding any individual or class of students. Prior to the 1900s, the most elitist institutions each created and administered their own entrance exam, which tested for Latin or Greek proficiency—languages that were common in the curricula of private schools but not public schools. Colleges made exceptions to their policies for private school graduates who struggled with these entrance tests, admitting wealthy students who could pay tuition and contribute toward institutional budgetary needs.³⁶ Academic standards for admissions fluctuated and changed year to year, as did the size of each incoming class.

As admissions practices at selective higher education institutions changed at the turn of the twentieth century, Milton C. Towner observed, “It became clear that the colleges must provide some officer who would guarantee to the faculty that applicants had jumped [academic entrance] hurdles.”³⁷ The admissions officer’s job also entailed traveling to recruit students to enroll and pay tuition to cover the costs of college operations—a marketing and sales function that remains central to the contemporary admissions profession.³⁸

The Rise of the Big Test

As President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, Charles Eliot brought more egalitarian ideals about who should enroll at the university. With a belief that “the university’s mission was to train an elite . . . drawn from all segments of society,” Eliot aimed to identify academic talent across economic classes, beyond the Greek and Latin proficiency that was prevalent solely among the upper class and graduates of exclusive Northeastern private high schools.³⁹ Although these ideas were met with significant resistance, in 1905 Harvard adopted a test designed by the College Entrance Examination Board, now known as the College Board.⁴⁰

Advocates for including test scores in college admissions believed it would be good for young men from the upper class to learn with, and gain exposure to, peers from less-privileged backgrounds.⁴¹ However, many among the ruling class—on whom Ivy League institutions relied for tuition dollars and donations—opposed opening the doors of their colleges to too many people different from them. The incorporation of a standardized test was a compromise between those who would reserve the wealthiest institutions for the ruling class and those who argued that the growing democratic nation required some pathways for social mobility.

The use of standardized tests served to prop up equal opportunity messaging in the creation of the myth of an American meritocracy. A powerful ideology baked into the nation’s culture, the merit myth claims that regardless of background, individuals can achieve the “American dream” solely through hard work. To believe in this myth as it relates to higher education access requires an ignorance of, or refusal to acknowledge, structural discrimination and the history of admissions and standardized testing. As award-winning journalist and Columbia Professor Nicholas Lemann explained in his book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, “The rhetoric that accompanied the birth of ETS [the Educational Testing Service] was one of mass opportunity and classlessness, yet the main purpose of the organization was to select the few and not to improve the lives of the many.”⁴²

In reality, the development of standardized tests was closely linked to eugenics. Eugenic ideas—or racism with a veneer of pseudoscience—became popularized in the 1800s and asserted a hierarchy of human intelligence and superiority by race, placing white people at the top of the order. In the 1920s, the College Board hired Carl Brigham, a eugenicist and psychologist at Princeton, to further develop the SAT, which he built on the foundations of his racist views.⁴³ Brigham’s book A Study of American Intelligence categorized intelligence by race and ethnicity.⁴⁴ Because the designs of standardized tests were grounded in racist ideologies, test score outcomes could restrict “study in the premier universities, and membership in the professions, to people who score well.”⁴⁵ The people who performed well on these tests were predominantly white and from higher economic classes—an outcome that served to reaffirm racist assumptions of white intelligence over others, while claiming that the system provided fair opportunity.

"The use of standardized tests served to prop up equal opportunity messaging in the creation of the myth of an American meritocracy. A powerful ideology baked into the nation’s culture, the merit myth claims that regardless of background, individuals can achieve the 'American dream' solely through hard work. To believe in this myth as it relates to higher education access requires an ignorance of, or refusal to acknowledge, structural discrimination and the history of admissions and standardized testing."

- OiYan Poon, PhD

The Dangerous Myth of Academic Merit

Although the College Board and ETS have tinkered with the SAT over the past century, race, class, and gender gaps remain. There are similarly obstinate gaps in ACT scores. Central to the design of both tests is norm-referenced methodology. As testing experts and legal scholars Jay Rosner and William Kidder demonstrate in their work, norm-referenced test design means that testing authorities routinely exclude questions from official exams if the minority of test takers, such as Black students, do well on them but the majority of test takers (i.e., white students) do not score highly. In other words, race and class disparities in test score outcomes are expected given their built-in “headwinds,” especially for Black students.⁴⁶

Research evidence pointing out the structural flaws of standardized tests supported the 2021 legal settlement that ended the University of California’s (UC) use of the SAT and ACT.⁴⁷ In a study of first-year UC undergraduates, researchers at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education found that test scores alone were a relatively poor predictor of first-year grades and academic performance, explaining only about sixteen percent of the variation in first-year grades.⁴⁸ Economist Jesse Rothstein also found that the “exclusion of student background characteristics from prediction models inflates the SAT’s apparent validity, as the SAT score appears to be a more effective measure of the demographic characteristics that predict UC FGPA (freshman grade point averages) than it is of variations in preparedness conditional on student background.”⁴⁹ Other research has also consistently found race and class biases in standardized tests.⁵⁰ Test scores do not predict with much certainty how well a student will do throughout their time in college or whether they will graduate.

Because of structurally inequitable test design methods, research has shown a high correlation between students’ SAT and ACT scores and their socioeconomic status⁵¹ and how racially segregated their elementary and high schools are.⁵² Consequently, colleges and universities that overly rely on these poor assessment tools of student academic readiness routinely run the risk of excluding talented students of diverse backgrounds from their campuses. In recognition of their tests’ limitations, the College Board and ACT encourage colleges and universities to consider a range of other criteria and data points in their admissions review procedures in order to build student bodies that align with their educational missions.⁵³ In their jointly submitted amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the SFFA cases, the College Board and ACT stated, “Any hint that standardized test scores on their own are the equivalent of ‘merit’ is unfounded.”⁵⁴ Additionally, they asserted that “just because one applicant has a higher test score does not necessarily mean they are more qualified for admission than an applicant with a lower score.”⁵⁵

Therefore, throughout the twentieth century, college admissions offices began coalescing around the identification and consideration of a broad range of student characteristics in addition to normalizing the use of the SAT, ACT, and other tests.

The Development of Individualized Holistic Admissions Review

With increasing threats to race-conscious admissions practices in the 1990s, the field of college admissions further developed practices for holistic review, which includes the consideration of myriad characteristics such as student learning dispositions, character (e.g., curiosity, creativity, empathy, and communication style), intellectual interests, athletic talent, leadership, geography, and financial assets.⁵⁶ However, like standardized tests, many of these non-academic considerations privilege white and wealthy students. The consideration of race in admissions decisions, prior to the 2023 SFFA v. Harvard/UNC Supreme Court ruling, allowed colleges and universities to both mitigate racial biases baked into admissions practices and affirm the diversity of talented students by evaluating a range of data from applicants.⁵⁷

Determining academic qualifications is only the first step in the process of reviewing application files in admissions. Standardized test scores, high school transcripts, and GPA are among the common data points used in this evaluation process. However, as discussed above, a substantial body of research has called into question the strength of test scores in predicting the academic performance of students in their first year of college, especially for Black students, other students of color, and low-income students.⁵⁸ Even leadership at the College Board has had to acknowledge the problem that the SAT is more strongly correlated to family income and social status than to college readiness, but the College Board has yet to address the problems presented by the test design approach.⁵⁹

As admissions practices expanded to most colleges and universities nationwide over the past century, the notion of “merit” changed several times, and in different periods admissions offices weighted exam scores more or less heavily in relationship to demonstrations of character or leadership.⁶⁰ The most selective colleges and universities (i.e., those with an admission rate of thirty percent or lower, representing about fifty out of approximately 2,000 accredited four-year institutions) have an overabundance of academically qualified applicants for the target enrollment number each year. Therefore, the most exclusive, and often most discussed, colleges and universities (e.g., Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) make admissions decisions based on criteria that go above and beyond typical metrics of academic qualifications. This consideration of a wide range of materials from applicants through the admissions process has evolved over time. Ongoing debates over these exclusive institutions can influence practices in the higher education sector more broadly, even though most postsecondary institutions, including many public universities, are not hyper-selective in admissions. Some researchers have found that when low-income students attend the most selective colleges and universities, they experience significant economic mobility; however, these institutions continue to make it harder for less-privileged students to gain admission.⁶¹

"The consideration of race in admissions decisions, prior to the 2023 SFFA v. Harvard/UNC Supreme Court ruling, allowed colleges and universities to both mitigate racial biases baked into admissions practices and affirm the diversity of talented students by evaluating a range of data from applicants."

- OiYan Poon, PhD

Some of these selective institutions implemented discriminatory quotas after the ruling class lost their battle against the use of standardized tests, to ensure continued exclusive access to the Ivy League for wealthy white Protestant men who attended private boarding schools. As Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other elite institutions incorporated standardized test scores in their admissions practices in the early 1900s, they saw a rapid increase in the enrollment of public school and especially Jewish students. With xenophobic antisemitism on the rise, these institutions each wrestled with what they deemed to be a “Jewish problem.”⁶² University leadership worried that, with more Jewish students, their institutions would lose esteem among the white Protestant upper class.⁶³ Starting with Columbia University in 1910, which created the first “office of admissions” in the nation, admissions deans individually and collectively developed strategies to apply antisemitic quotas and even featured the “Jewish problem” at the 1918 convening of the Association of New England Deans.⁶⁴ As Dr. Milton Winternitz, Dean of the Yale School of Medicine, stated in 1922, “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no Blacks at all.”⁶⁵ Antisemitic quotas were finally ended in the 1960s.⁶⁶

It is important to note that explicitly discriminatory quotas are different from the holistic, individualized consideration of student qualities and characteristics in admissions, which seeks to develop a fuller, multi-dimensional understanding of the talents a student brings to a learning environment. Although selective institutions have resisted expanding the sizes of their student cohorts, the number of applications from academically qualified students has increased exponentially. The most exclusive institutions have developed a complex apparatus of admissions criteria with an intention to balance various competing demands: to maintain longstanding relationships with the castes of students who have traditionally attended these institutions and to admit students from beyond the typical pipeline of private prep schools.

The 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke endorsed the practice of individualized review of a range of information about prospective students.⁶⁷ Allan Bakke, a white man, had applied to the UC Davis Medical School twice and had been turned down both times for admission. He blamed the special admissions program at the school, which set aside sixteen seats in each incoming class of 100 students for qualified, disadvantaged “minority applicants,” intended to redress the harms of excluding people of color from the medical profession.⁶⁸ The case was decided with six separate opinions, none of which was a majority. The only holding was that “the State has a substantial interest that legitimately may be served by a properly devised admissions program involving the competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin.”⁶⁹

However, the opinion of the Court was influential. Therein, Justice Lewis Powell explained that the pursuit of the educational benefits of diversity is a compelling interest that can justify the narrowly tailored use of race in selecting applicants for admission to public universities. He pointed to Harvard’s admissions process as an example of a constitutional, narrowly tailored use of race. Justice Powell said that the following were not compelling interests: (1) combating the underrepresentation of certain minorities in medical schools and in the medical profession; (2) remedying societal racial discrimination; and (3) increasing the number of physicians who will work in underserved communities.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted the diversity rationale and the virtues of individualized holistic review in Grutter v. Bollinger. The Court also issued a ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger prohibiting the use of inflexible point systems to account for race. After Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (Fisher I, 2013) was remanded back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the case a second hearing and decided the case in 2016 (Fisher II). In the 4–3 ruling, the Court held that the race-conscious admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin was lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Notably, the majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy pointed out that holistic review practices allowed admissions staff to consider race in a contextual manner that “does not operate as a mechanical plus factor for underrepresented minorities” and that “the consideration of race, within the full context of the entire application, may be beneficial to any UT Austin applicant.”⁷⁰

In 2023, the longstanding attacks on affirmative action and race-conscious admissions culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC. In these cases, the Court held that the universities’ race-conscious, individualized, holistic admissions practices violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As LDF explained:

“This devastating decision overrules forty-five years of precedent established in prior Supreme Court decisions, including Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Grutter v. Bollinger, and Fisher v. University of Texas. However, the Court’s ruling still allows colleges to consider how race has affected a student’s life and their ability to contribute to the educational institution.”⁷¹

The opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts made almost no mention of holistic review.

Despite the SFFA ruling, colleges and universities that receive public dollars still have a responsibility to serve public interests. While the Court struck down Harvard’s and UNC’s limited consideration of race in admissions in SFFA, there remains a public obligation for postsecondary institutions—both individually and collectively as a field—to continue designing, experimenting with, and evaluating new innovations for equity. At most highly selective colleges and universities, holistic review practices remain prevalent in an effort to offer a fairer contextualized review of individual applicants.

Evolution of Legal Ideas

Implementing Holistic Review to Create a More Inclusive, and Less Biased, Admissions Process

In response to the end of affirmative action in California in the 1990s due to the Proposition 209 ballot measure, the UC system officially began practicing comprehensive review—another term for holistic admissions. UC President Richard Atkinson recognized that the inclusion of test scores in UC admissions practices unfairly advantaged more privileged and affluent students.⁷² No longer allowed to consider race or ethnicity in admissions decisions, the UC system implemented consistent training and norming of comprehensive review practices with the intention of evaluating applicants within the context of their social, economic, and educational opportunities.⁷³ Holistic review is now nearly universal at selective institutions, with about ninety-five percent of them using some form of the practice to consider students within their local contexts.⁷⁴ Although it is not as common at less-selective colleges and universities, which represent the majority of the higher education sector, if carefully designed and practiced, holistic review can improve diversity in admissions without compromising the academic or other talents and qualifications of incoming classes.⁷⁵

Through holistic review, admissions offices seek to engage in a robust analysis of all application data framed within applicants’ contexts of opportunity. In other words, it is an apples-to-apples comparison approach, recognizing the vast diversity of educational opportunities among students across the country and globally given their individual social, economic, and schooling conditions. Holistic admissions practices, when rigorously designed and consistently implemented across staff reviewers, can somewhat mitigate biases that are structurally embedded within each data point and piece of information included in application files, such as coursework and grades earned at different high schools.⁷⁶ Without robustly designed and normed practices in these reviews to validate evaluation outcomes, however, admissions practices can exacerbate equity gaps.

Holistic admissions practices at selective institutions can increase the enrollment of low-income students, women, and underrepresented students of color.⁷⁷ With the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, most colleges and universities that had previously required test scores in their admissions processes were forced to adopt test-optional policies.⁷⁸ This shift has increased the enrollment of Black students at moderately selective institutions (those with an admission rate of thirty percent to fifty percent) and increased application volume at highly selective institutions (those with an admission rate below thirty percent), with varied impacts on enrollment depending on the college or university.⁷⁹ Test-optional policies can therefore lead to a more racially diverse pool of applicants from which colleges and universities can select students for admission. Following the 2023 SFFA case, however, some highly selective institutions have returned to test score requirements. While the effects of test-required admissions practices without the consideration of race have not been studied nationally, the aforementioned 2021 legal settlement in the case Smith v. Regents of the University of California led the UC to end its use of standardized test scores in admissions. The plaintiffs in the case presented evidence showing the discriminatory effects of the use of standardized tests in admissions.⁸⁰

Although much public debate has focused on the effects of test-optional admissions, it is important to remember that there is a range of data and criteria used in admissions systems and practices. The general assumption is that strict academic standards should dominate highly selective admission practices. However, there are built-in race, class, and gender biases in the routine metrics of academic qualifications, as well as in myriad other student characteristics considered in admissions decisions. After assessing students’ academic and other qualifications, admissions practices winnow applicants down to admitted students by applying institutional priorities. Selective institutions routinely incorporate preferences for an incoming class to include the descendants of alumni (i.e., legacies), student athletes, representation from all fifty states and multiple international locations, a balance between genders, a pre-determined percentage of Pell recipients and first-generation students to signal a commitment to economic mobility, and a diversity of academic interests, among other characteristics above and beyond required academic qualifications.⁸¹

The remainder of this Brief will present a general, evidence-based discussion of how holistic admissions at selective four-year postsecondary educational institutions operate. A critical and comprehensive analysis of the mechanics and levers for change in college admissions can inform ideas for improving equity in admissions in this post-SFFA era. By mapping out the norms and systems of selective admissions practices, leaders for equity in higher education can identify strategic opportunities toward advancing democratic merit.

How Admissions Works

Funneling to Make the Class⁸²

Each admissions office seeks to contribute toward its respective school’s mission and institutional priorities—both long-term and short-term—generally set by their governance boards (e.g., board of trustees) and executive leadership (e.g., president, provost).⁸³ Although each institution has a unique mission and set of organizational objectives that create variations in the inner workings of admissions, there are generally shared norms in admissions practices across selective colleges and universities.

The typical admissions funnel includes five stages over the span of twelve to eighteen months to build a class, as illustrated by Figure 1. Predetermined institutional priorities, along with administrative norms and practices to meet procedural benchmarks, shape the outcomes of applicants at each stage and ultimately the characteristics of the enrolled class of students for the new academic year. Researchers have interrogated how some activities in each stage reproduce inequities by siphoning talented but socioeconomically marginalized students. Unequal outcomes compound across each stage, culminating in disparate demographic outcomes in enrolled classes. This is particularly true in the aftermath of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in the SFFA cases because colleges and universities may no longer consider race as a factor in this five-stage, high-stakes organizational decision-making process.

Figure 1: Five Stages of the Admissions Funnel

Stage 1

Applicant Recruitment

The first foundational step in building a class, at the top of the funnel, is recruitment for the applicant pool. Guided by institutional priorities for the year, the admissions team strategically targets their efforts, staff time, and budget toward stacking the applicant pool with students who possess desired qualities above and beyond academic qualifications. Because meeting tuition revenue goals tends to be a pressing imperative, even at public institutions due to limited and declining funding for higher education, admissions offices often strategically focus their recruitment efforts at wealthier high schools. This can disproportionately benefit students at high schools that have sent students to the institution in prior years. Such recruitment norms have race and class inequalities baked into them that generally devalue academically strong low-income students and students of color. For example, the funnel often begins with “list buys”—purchasing high school student contact lists filtered for characteristics such as test scores, geography, and geodemographics (i.e., economic wealth by geography)—that serve to reproduce and exacerbate racial inequalities in college opportunities and access.⁸⁴ Karina Salazar, an Assistant Professor at The University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, has called these practices “recruitment redlining.”⁸⁵

Using these list buys, admissions offices strategically plan their visits to target students who are likely to bring characteristics that meet institutional interests, such as academic qualifications, athletic talents, and financial assets. Each fall, admissions staff travel to their assigned regional territories to meet or reconnect with school counselors, foster relationships with schools, and meet promising students. The most fruitful high school visits often occur in wealthier (and whiter) communities, where counseling staff have the capacity to coordinate well-attended meetings with prospective students who then submit applications.⁸⁶ Admissions offices also use other activities and programs for recruitment, such as fly-in programs (i.e., college-sponsored campus visits for recruited students), that are intended to expand race, class, and geographic diversity among applicant pools.⁸⁷

Stage 2

Eligibility Review: Is the Applicant Academically Qualified?

The first cut of applicants from the funnel occurs at this stage. Once prospective students have filed their applications, admissions teams review them and remove incomplete application files. In this stage, they will also determine applicants’ academic eligibility for the institution’s educational curriculum. Several criteria and data points can be included in this stage of review to identify academically eligible students, such as high school transcripts, test scores (e.g., SAT, ACT, AP), academic awards, and other evidence of readiness to progress through and complete the specific institution’s curriculum.

Eligibility and Coursework

As good practice, postsecondary institutions review their eligibility criteria and their effects on students. For example, a review of the outcomes of the UC’s eligibility standards in the late 2000s led the university to end its SAT II subject test requirement. Because the UC was one of the last institutions requiring the SAT II, significant numbers of otherwise academically qualified students who had not taken the SAT II had been summarily eliminated from the applicant pool, reducing the racial and ethnic diversity of applicants.⁸⁸

Unfortunately, persistent structural inequalities and biases from prekindergarten through twelfth grade can remove academically talented students from contention for selective college admissions long before they submit application materials. When applicants have not completed high school coursework required by colleges and universities to meet admission eligibility standards (e.g., four years of math or three years of foreign language), admissions staff remove them from further consideration. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and low-income students often either attend high schools that do not offer advanced curricula or are not placed in these classes, which are commonly required for admissions consideration at selective colleges and universities.⁸⁹ For example, a 2020 UC report on the Standardized Testing Task Force named this misalignment between university admissions eligibility expectations and the completion of such courses by underrepresented students of color in the state as a key systemic barrier to equity in UC access.⁹⁰

Nationally, researchers from Just Equations and The Education Trust explored the structural inequity in math course-taking patterns for high-achieving Black and Latinx students. The students who had the opportunity to complete advanced high school math classes had better odds of attending college and higher “persistence rates, STEM credit-earning, and GPAs than their high-achieving underrepresented peers who did not.”⁹¹ The researchers explained that “even when Black and Latino students are interested in pursuing STEM fields, they are often denied the necessary prerequisite course-taking opportunities.”⁹² Successful completion of advanced math classes in high school is particularly important in admissions for prospective STEM college students. The racial disparities in advanced math course enrollment and completion in high school contribute toward pushing Black students out of the admissions funnel at this stage. While GPAs and academic performance through high school are more reliable metrics than test scores for predicting a student’s first-year college academic achievement,⁹³ racial biases can affect teachers’ assessments of students⁹⁴ and consequently impact students’ high school GPAs and course transcripts.⁹⁵

Eligibility and Tests

In addition to coursework, the submission of test scores can also be an eligibility requirement. Although standardized tests and other criteria routinely used in admissions are often deemed “race-neutral,” research has found a range of data points, metrics, and evaluation methods to be imbued with race, class, and gender biases.⁹⁶ As discussed in the previous section, the pandemic’s disruption and other circumstances have led many institutions to change their policies on test score requirements, acknowledging that test scores are not necessary for determining academic qualifications.

Going one step further than “test-optional,” the UC system became “test-free.” In other words, even if an applicant were to send their test scores to a UC campus, the admissions office would not consider the scores. The 2020 UC Standardized Testing Task Force report found that underrepresented applicants benefited from a contextualized review of their standardized test scores and recommended that the UC end its use of tests in its admissions review and selection practices. The recommendation came in February 2020, six months before a court ordered the UC to stop using tests in admissions as Smith v. Regents of the University of California was being adjudicated.⁹⁷ In May 2021, the Smith plaintiffs successfully negotiated a settlement “broadening access to UC campuses for students across the State by eliminating consideration of the SAT and ACT from admissions and scholarship decisions” through at least 2025.⁹⁸ In fall 2023, the UC system announced that it had enrolled the largest number of Black, Latinx, and Native students in its history.⁹⁹ It continued to make gains in closing equity gaps in enrollment in fall 2024, helping reverse the dramatic decline in racial and ethnic diversity that immediately followed the implementation of Proposition 209 in 1998.¹⁰⁰

The implementation of test-free admissions is not isolated to the UC system. At least eighty-six selective colleges and universities have adopted test-free admissions policies. Admissions professionals at these institutions have observed that the exclusion of test scores has made it easier to identify talent among applicants of color, as they have had to examine other application materials with more intention through a robust, holistic review design.¹⁰¹

Most debates over admissions focus on this second stage and emphasize test score differences. Opponents of affirmative action have pointed to test score averages by racial demographic to claim that students admitted through a race-conscious admissions process were academically unqualified.¹⁰² However, students who proceed to subsequent stages of review have been deemed academically qualified. At selective colleges and universities, there remain many more academically qualified applicants than they choose to admit for enrollment. In the SFFA v. Harvard case, for example, a report submitted to the Court by Dr. David Card, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and expert witness for Harvard, revealed that for the class of 2019, more than 8,000 applicants “had perfect GPAs, approximately 3,500 applicants had perfect SAT math scores, and nearly 1,000 applicants had perfect ACT and/or SAT composite scores. In that pool, having strong academic credentials is not sufficient to make an applicant a strong candidate for admission.”¹⁰³ This is especially true at the most competitive institutions like Harvard, which routinely reject more than ninety-five percent of the academically strong applicants each year.¹⁰⁴

Stage 3

Holistic Reading: How Does Each Individual Applicant Contribute Toward Institutional Priorities?

In this stage, admissions teams review individual applicants to build a class cohort of students who will interact with each other in a shared campus educational environment. As some have explained, admissions offices work to admit and enroll classes, not individual students.¹⁰⁵ As with all stages in the admissions funnel, the college or university’s end goal in each cycle is to enroll a cohort of students who will collectively further the institution’s foundational mission and short-term priorities. Institutional missions serve as enduring values statements that define a college or university’s identity. For example, Tufts University identifies as “a student-centered research university dedicated to the creation and application of knowledge” that is “committed to providing transformative experiences for students and faculty in an inclusive and collaborative environment where creative scholars generate bold ideas, innovate in the face of complex challenges, and distinguish themselves as active citizens of the world.”¹⁰⁶

In the work to enroll incoming classes, admissions offices are tasked with bringing together cohorts of students that can contribute in the short term toward the institutional identity and mission. As noted in the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Fisher II, “Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.”¹⁰⁷ Other student characteristics can also play substantial roles in both meeting immediate priorities and contributing toward the institutional mission. For example, Tufts acquired the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2016.¹⁰⁸ Consequently, in the following years, the university likely needed to recruit, admit, and enroll more fine arts students than in years past—one of many strategic efforts to support the successful return on investment for this purchase.

With the mission and institutional priorities in mind, admissions offices ask questions such as the following to guide their decision-making: How will this individual applicant help the college or university get closer to meeting its long-term mission and more immediate goals? How and what will the student add to the campus learning environment? Will this student thrive on this campus, in relation to other students, faculty, and academic and other programs?¹⁰⁹

To answer these questions, admissions offices review all the data included in the application file through holistic admissions practices. There are at least three different approaches to holistic admissions practices.¹¹⁰ The “whole file” review approach directs admissions staff to assess applicants’ academic and other achievements by reading all materials in a file when making a decision. The “whole person” approach emphasizes understanding each individual applicant’s academic profile, who they are as a unique individual, and how they can contribute in distinctive ways to the campus environment. Finally, the “whole context” approach brings the first two methods together and assesses the applicant’s accomplishments and potential in relation to their socioeconomic circumstances—their specific context of opportunity. These circumstances may include home environment, school attended, and whether and how the student leveraged the opportunities available to them.¹¹¹ As with any methodological approach, biases can come into play unless they are interrogated and mitigated to the extent possible throughout the review process. This stage typically ends with an initial decision on an applicant: admit, turn down, or bubble (i.e., neither a recommendation to admit nor to turn down).

Beyond high school transcripts and test scores, data considered in holistic admissions can include a range of materials such as essays, letters of recommendation, lists of extracurricular activities, notes from interviews, information on “student interest” (e.g., campus visits and patterns of logging into the admissions portal), information about the student’s high school, socioeconomic information about the student’s home community, and, for a select group of the wealthiest colleges and universities, the student’s College Board CSS profile, which is a comprehensive and “onerous” form documenting their family’s economic status and other details.¹¹²

Each of these pieces of information and data points can be infused with race, class, and gender biases. Research using innovative machine learning and large-scale natural language processing methods is beginning to reveal the limitations of and biases in different materials that selective colleges and universities expect students to submit to their admission review processes.¹¹³ For example, to understand who a student is beyond the limitations of standardized test scores, these institutions often require applicants to submit personal essays, letters of recommendation, and lists of extracurricular activities. With personal statements or essays, one could hypothesize that class and identity—how students experience the social world—may shape what applicants write about and their writing style. Researchers have found that the content and style of submitted essays are highly correlated to both economic class and SAT scores, advantaging wealthier students.¹¹⁴ They have also found gender and race patterns in what applicants choose to write about in their essays. Women intending to study engineering—a highly gender-segregated discipline—often signal their gender identity in their essays, in anticipation of biases against women engineers.¹¹⁵ Similarly, doctoral candidate Aya Waller-Bey has described the racialized trauma narratives that many underrepresented students of color feel compelled to put on display in their college essays.¹¹⁶

Letters of recommendation written by school counselors and teachers have also been found to carry implicit race, class, gender, and other biases.¹¹⁷ For example, researchers determined that letters written for first-generation students were shorter than those for their peers, controlling for differences. Letters written for private school students were generally longer than those for other students and incorporated more details on students’ personal, academic, and athletic qualities, likely reflecting the counselors’ and teachers’ lower caseloads (and presumably more quality time with individual students) at private schools than at public schools. Letters written about Black and Latinx applicants overall contained fewer sentences about personal qualities than letters about white applicants, except for a high-achieving sample in the study whose letters contained slightly more sentences than their high-achieving white peers. For Asian American applicants, counselors wrote more about their academics and much less about their personal qualities than for other students.¹¹⁸ Letters written for white students were generally longer and included more information about extracurricular activities than for their peers.

Like letters of recommendation and essays, extracurricular activities are also coded by class and race. Participation in extracurriculars can be expensive and time-intensive. For many students, these costs can be prohibitive to their involvement. In a study exploring how extracurricular activities varied by race, socioeconomic status (SES), and school type, researchers found that white, Asian American, high-SES, and private school students reported more extracurricular activities than their peers.¹¹⁹ Although Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and lower-SES students reported fewer activities, they exhibited similar levels of leadership roles and honors/awards compared to their white, Asian American, and high-SES peers.¹²⁰ Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students were more likely to serve as leaders in culture- and identity-related activities. The most significant disparity was found in athletics participation, with white and high-SES students more likely than others to be athletes. A similar gap was found between applicants from private and public high schools. Student athletes, who are predominantly white and economically privileged, are particularly desirable for highly selective colleges and universities to include in their incoming classes.¹²¹

Data and materials required from college applicants can offer different insights into prospective students. At the same time, research has pointed out how each piece of information has been shaped by structural inequalities along race, class, and gender lines. Admissions staff should evaluate individual application files only after extensive staff training and continuous calibration for consistent scoring across readers, and in alignment with a framework of the institutional mission and priorities.¹²² Well-designed, evidence-based, holistic admissions practices can offer an approach to analyzing various data points and materials through the lens of an institution’s mission and priorities, in considering individual applicants for an incoming class. Recent research has called on college and university admissions teams to develop, test, and improve their approaches to holistic practices and center equity, acknowledging that there are no truly race-neutral data points or materials.¹²³

Stage 4

Shaping Admission Decisions

After admissions staff identify academically eligible and qualified applicants, chief admissions officers (such as the dean or vice president) shape the final contours of the class. In this fourth stage of the admissions process, institutional researchers or external consulting groups support admissions leaders in making final decisions about which slate of applicants to invite to enroll in the incoming class. The objective at this stage is to finalize the list of admitted students, starting with the students initially recommended for admission during the third stage, based on the institutional priorities for the upcoming academic and fiscal year. In this stage, students are moved in and out of the draft admitted class in order to meet the widest possible range of institutional priorities.¹²⁴ Individual student academic “merit”—whether an applicant is academically qualified—is no longer an issue in these later stages of decision-making, which instead focus on how well a student can help with institutional priorities.

Many common institutional priorities can advantage white and affluent applicants.¹²⁵ As mentioned in the previous section, highly selective colleges and universities often prioritize recruiting and admitting athletes. According to Kirsten Hextrum, an education professor and author of Special Admission: How College Sports Recruitment Favors White, Suburban Athletes, “[W]hite and middle-class athletes are overrepresented in college sports—suggesting intercollegiate athletics are not the NCAA’s promised ‘pathway of opportunity.’”¹²⁶ Additionally, admissions offices select incoming class cohorts to meet many other institutional priorities. This section highlights a sample of common priorities that have at least marginal research on their implications for racial inequities.

Geographic diversity is a common consideration in holistic admissions practices.¹²⁷ While geography can be a context consideration for holistic review, having an incoming class with students representing all fifty states as well as a range of U.S. territories and international locations can also help an institution advance its national and/or global reputation and market value. Moreover, for state universities, recruiting affluent out-of-state students can strengthen the institution’s financial position.¹²⁸ Geographic diversity can also include a desire to enroll students from rural communities to address the underrepresentation of these students in higher education and especially at highly selective institutions.¹²⁹ However, geography is racialized, which can affect college admissions outcomes. For example, a study of admissions practices published in 2024 found that geographic preferences for students from states with lower shares of Asian Americans (such as Montana and North Dakota) and preferences for legacy students both contributed to significantly lower odds for Asian American applicants, compared to similarly qualified white applicants, to attend highly selective institutions.¹³⁰

Another common institutional priority shaping admissions practices is achieving a binary gender balance.¹³¹ Colleges and universities may prioritize a binary gender balance in admissions for residential placement or other reasons, and they seek to maintain the number of men in their admitted classes to maximize other institutional priorities. Many colleges and universities are concerned about the diminishing numbers of men, relative to women, applying to and enrolling in higher education, especially at highly selective institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted how this “male enrollment crisis” has led to highly selective colleges and universities “giving men a leg up in admissions.”¹³² Researchers estimate that a randomized lottery with a minimum GPA threshold approach to selective admissions would reduce the number of men admitted to as low as thirty-three percent of a class,¹³³ suggesting that admission rates for men are not strictly based on the “merits” of their application files.

Similarly, colleges and universities often have preferences for legacy applicants, or the progeny of alumni. Many researchers have found higher admission rates for legacy applicants, a majority of whom are white, than for their peers who are similarly qualified.¹³⁴ In the SFFA v. Harvard case, forty-three percent of white applicants admitted to Harvard were either legacies, athletes, children of faculty and staff, or placed on a dean’s interest list (often for fundraising or other interests), compared to less than sixteen percent of Black, Asian American, and Latinx students admitted.¹³⁵ Colorado was the first state to ban legacy preferences in public colleges and universities. Following the 2023 SFFA ruling, a growing number of states—including California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Virginia—passed restrictions on or at least held public hearings interrogating legacy preference practices in admissions.¹³⁶ In 2023, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon introduced a bill to end legacy practices, which was referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions that July.¹³⁷

Researchers and journalists examining selective college admissions practices have also found that, due to limits on institutional financial aid budgets, admissions leaders typically ask at this stage whether they can afford a certain cohort of students.¹³⁸ If there are too many students with financial need or too few students who can pay close to the full cost of tuition and fees, administrators will edit the class list to fit within the financial aid budget. This allows institutions that claim to meet the full financial needs of admitted students to continue doing so.

At the end of this stage, colleges and universities send notices of admission decisions to applicants, now placing the decision-making power back into the hands of students and their families. Schools send more offers of admission to students than they will enroll, expecting many students to choose other colleges or universities. No institution has a 100% enrollment yield rate from their admitted students. During this stage, admissions leaders often use analysis from algorithms and statistical models to predict the likelihood of an applicant enrolling in the institution, based on information like the student’s demonstrated interest from campus visits and how often they log into the institution’s online admissions portal.¹³⁹ This yield prediction can also be a factor in the institution’s admissions decisions because admissions professionals are ultimately working toward enrolling a class of students that will collectively contribute to their institutional priorities and objectives.¹⁴⁰

In balancing the tensions among these and other institutional priorities, many of which privilege white and affluent students, admissions teams had historically also been able to include racial diversity as an interest in their work. The consideration of race as one factor during this stage allowed colleges and universities to protect Black, Indigenous, and other underrepresented students of color from being removed from the final slate of admitted students. As a result of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, however, schools have overwhelmingly discontinued this practice, disadvantaging students who are neither white nor affluent.

Stage 5

Discounts and Yield Recruitment

Various approaches to managing enrollments have emerged for highly selective colleges and universities, which compete with each other for many of the same academically qualified students who can meet multiple institutional priorities. Colleges and universities can strategically target their recruitment efforts to yield a diverse incoming class. Beyond these commonly understood tactics, there are several other methods of enrolling a class to maximize institutional priorities. Like many other admissions practices discussed thus far, these practices are suffused with race and class biases that disproportionately privilege white and affluent students.

One such practice adopted by many of these institutions is early decision, or early action. Early decision allows colleges and universities to admit and enroll a sizeable portion of their incoming class by December of the preceding academic year. Students applying in this early stage typically commit to enrolling in the institution if admitted, without having clarity on their financial aid or scholarship offer. Though often marketed as a way for students to gain peace of mind regarding their college plans by the second half of their final year of high school, the practice is also a way for colleges and universities to manage their work in enrolling a class.¹⁴¹ Once they have admitted this first group of students to their incoming class, they can determine which institutional priorities need more attention in the subsequent rounds of admission decisions such as regular decision, when most low-income applicants, students of color, and first-generation students apply to college. Research has demonstrated that white and affluent students are more likely than their peers to enroll in highly selective institutions through early decision.¹⁴²

Another strategy to enroll the most desirable admitted students, including those who can afford to pay full tuition and fees and therefore contribute toward the institution’s budget goals, is to offer “tuition discounts” under the guise of “merit scholarships” to affluent students.¹⁴³ Researchers have found that public universities offer “merit scholarships” to out-of-state students to increase their tuition revenue through substantially higher out-of-state tuition and fees that remain above the costs of in-state tuition, and to wealthy in-state students to keep them and their tuition in-state.¹⁴⁴ Given declining public investments in and state allocations to public higher education over time, students who pay full or close-to-full tuition and fees, even with these nominal discounts and scholarships, contribute toward an institution’s financial goals. In this way, “merit scholarships” frame wealth as “merit.”

Implications of SFFA v. Harvard/UNC on the Admissions Funnel

Public scrutiny of admissions practices generally focuses on whether and why an individual is admitted to an incoming class, and especially on test scores and the holistic reading stage. However, the higher education admissions apparatus seeks to successfully enroll a class of students that will help the college or university meet its mission and a range of institutional priorities. There is, unfortunately, a dearth of public and research attention interrogating the admissions funnel that recognizes that decisions on whether to admit an individual applicant are primarily driven by the need to meet institutional priorities. Due to these priorities, race, class, and gender biases are baked into systemic norms at each stage, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Race, Class, And Gender Biases Baked into Each Stage

Prior to the SFFA ruling, colleges and universities could consider race as one of many factors throughout the five stages as they worked to admit and enroll a class of students that would collectively contribute toward their institution’s mission and organizational priorities. The consideration of racial diversity as an institutional priority allowed colleges and universities to use an important tool for enriching the educational environment. Contrary to Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC, there is robust research demonstrating both the educational benefits of diversity and evaluative methods to understand the relationships between racial diversity and educational outcomes.¹⁴⁵ Importantly, the consideration of race as one of many factors served as a limited counterbalance to the deleterious effects of racial inequities that are baked into wide-ranging institutional priorities and common admissions practices, which collectively create a thumb on the scale in favor of white and affluent applicants.

Although colleges and universities, other than some military service academies, no longer consider race even in limited and narrow ways, they are still obligated to identify and remedy systemic biases that disadvantage protected groups. This requires intentional examination of the admissions funnel and how these various priorities and practices shape college access outcomes. Institutional leaders must analyze data to diagnose and experiment with solving systemic problems that persistently reproduce race, class, and gender inequalities.¹⁴⁶ The next section presents recommendations for researchers, advocates, and institutional leaders, informed by this more comprehensive understanding of how admissions structures operate and can be changed to address systemic biases.

Post-SFFA Landscape

Strategic Opportunities for Race, Class, and Gender Equity in Admissions

Following the SFFA ruling, many college and university presidents assertively reiterated their institutional commitments to racial diversity and justice.¹⁴⁷ Their statements were supported by extensive research demonstrating the importance of diversity as a foundational element for robust teaching and learning environments.¹⁴⁸ These proclamations also aligned with LDF’s guidance for equal opportunity and diversity in higher education, published after the Supreme Court ruling:

Affirmative action in college admissions has been an important tool, but it is not the only vehicle to ensure that educational opportunities are equally open to all. The Supreme Court’s SFFA decision underscores the urgent and critical need to eliminate barriers and pursue policies that advance racial equity. Following centuries of racial subjugation and exclusion, no single program or policy alone will deliver equal opportunity. More than ever, colleges and universities must double down on comprehensive efforts to attract, embrace, and educate talented students from all backgrounds. They must act immediately to ensure all students feel welcomed and valued and to prevent declines in applications from students of color in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s SFFA decision. And they must support efforts to address structural inequality in the education system, from early childhood education through graduate school.¹⁴⁹

The SFFA ruling does not forbid colleges and universities from recognizing the value of diversity to their organizational missions and advancing it through lawful means. Moreover, educational institutions of all levels that receive federal financial assistance, such as through federal student loans, Pell Grants, and research grant dollars, are prohibited “from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin.”¹⁵⁰ LDF’s guidance explains:

Even in the absence of prior discrimination, all schools must act to ensure that their policies and practices do not unnecessarily limit opportunities for people on the basis of race or ethnicity or other protected characteristics, including disability, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. In addition, schools must ensure that their climates enable all students to access and benefit from educational opportunities on an equal basis. This responsibility extends to all aspects of a school’s programs and activities, and to all of those who carry out the school’s functions.¹⁵¹

In other words, postsecondary institutions are legally obligated to proactively prevent discrimination, including in admissions practices that unfairly favor white applicants.

In the closing of the SFFA ruling, Chief Justice Roberts stated that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”¹⁵² In response, some selective colleges and universities re-examined their essay prompts. Sarah Lawrence College directly asked applicants to reflect on the 2023 Supreme Court ruling. One of its three essay prompts read as follows:

In a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the applicant can contribute to the university.” Drawing upon examples from your life, a quality of your character, and/or a unique ability you possess, describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced or affected by the Court’s decision.¹⁵³

According to Sarah Lawrence College’s admissions dean, the essay prompt was a way for the school to convey the “intellectual rigor and thoughtfulness of our student body and that we are a community that values diversity and equity in education as part of its mission” and to assess applicants’ values and engagement with diversity.¹⁵⁴ Although this essay question offered an example of “resistant compliance,”¹⁵⁵ institutions must also undertake more intentional and robust examinations and make changes to admissions norms and systems, going beyond essay prompts, to address the problem of race, class, and gender disparities in higher education access.

Toward this goal, organizational leaders in higher education should intentionally diagnose, examine, and experiment with novel approaches in solving systemic biases that lead to race, class, and gender disparities in both college access and completion. Based on the analysis presented in this Brief, institutional leaders should examine their eligibility criteria, recruitment practices (including list-buying strategies and their “recruitment redlining” effects),¹⁵⁶ and strategies for identifying and measuring academic qualifications. They should also check for biases in their reading and evaluation practices and consider ending preferences for legacy and donor-connected applicants.

Institutional leaders can learn from the experiences of public universities in states with pre-existing affirmative action bans and build on their successes, trials, and errors. Prior to 2023, nine states had already ended affirmative action through ballot measures or legislative or administrative action.¹⁵⁷ Race-conscious admissions were already on the decline nationally prior to the SFFA ruling, and only a minority of institutions considered race as a factor in admissions decisions.¹⁵⁸

Recommendations

The remainder of this Brief presents recommendations for systemic changes and future research. The section begins by reviewing various initiatives that states and higher education institutions have attempted to advance diversity and diminish inequalities in higher education access. The section then focuses on recruitment strategies within the institutional priorities-driven admissions funnel. It concludes with a review and discussion of emerging ideas, practices, and strategic possibilities.

State and Higher Education Initiatives

Guaranteed Admissions: "Percent Plans"

Texas and California, among other state higher education systems, have designed and promoted guaranteed admissions programs (i.e., “percent plans”) that promise high-achieving high school students a place in a flagship or other public university if they submit application materials. Because racial segregation remains a problem in high schools, admitting the top students from each respective class across the state would theoretically result in an aggregate group of racially diverse first-year college students. However, research has shown some limitations of these programs, most notably that a significant number of students of color do not submit complete applications because the burden to navigate often-complex application systems remains on students.¹⁵⁹

Moreover, although the UC system guarantees admission to the top nine percent of the state’s high school graduates, some students may not be eligible for admission if they have not met academic eligibility requirements because their high schools did not provide them with adequate opportunities to successfully complete required coursework. For example, to be considered for admission at the UC, applicants must have completed a prescribed list of classes (called the A-G courses). Applicants without transcripts and records showing that they have completed minimally required coursework are typically removed from further consideration for admission in the second stage of the admissions funnel. The UC has found “disparities in access to and completion of A-G courses [that] account for a disproportionate lack of UC eligibility for students who are members of underrepresented groups.”¹⁶⁰ Further investigation is needed into structural inequities by geography, race, and class so that students across the state can meaningfully access and successfully complete coursework required by public universities.

More investigation is also needed to analyze and address similar systemic inequities. Examining baseline academic eligibility requirements for admissions may be a promising strategy. For example, in Smith v. Regents of the University of California, litigants procured a settlement by successfully pointing out the discriminatory effects of requiring students to submit scores from standardized tests with proven systemic race and class biases.¹⁶¹

Even without race-conscious admissions, colleges and universities must continue to dismantle barriers to opportunities for all students. Although guaranteed admissions plans are relatively well-known and widely discussed in higher education research and policy debates as a “race-neutral” approach with the potential to improve racial diversity in college-going, there are many other strategies that should be further explored.

Direct Admissions

Building on guaranteed admissions programs, some state systems have begun implementing direct admissions programs, which reduce the burdens of paperwork by proactively and automatically admitting top-performing students from their respective states.¹⁶² Idaho was the first state to launch direct admissions for public universities. Minnesota’s direct admissions program includes private institutions as well. Interest in this approach to simplifying and strengthening college pathways for talented students is growing nationwide. Emergent research has pointed to direct admissions as a promising strategy to increase college-going for low-income students, first-generation students, and underrepresented students of color, especially when these programs are coupled with financial aid.¹⁶³

Strategic Recruitment Efforts Within the Institution-Driven Admissions Funnel

Because affirmative action bans and the SFFA ruling did not prohibit recruitment efforts targeting academically qualified students to build a diverse pool of applicants, some public universities in states that barred race-conscious admissions have invested in strategic recruitment efforts. After California banned affirmative action by passing Proposition 209, community-led efforts to recruit and retain students of color in the UC system received some institutional investments to strategically target historically underrepresented communities.¹⁶⁴ Changes to strategic recruitment and other efforts to address racial disparities in college enrollments can shape the applicant pool in the first stage of the admissions funnel, and institutions can also implement strategic recruitment efforts for enrollment during the fifth stage.

Most importantly, higher education leaders should examine and reconsider their institutional priorities, which centrally drive decision-making throughout the various stages of admissions and enrollment management work. The durability of racial disparities, particularly in selective college admissions, points to the need for systemic changes beyond the debate around test scores. For example, some have argued that requiring test score submissions can help colleges and universities identify high-achieving low-income students and underrepresented students of color for admission, but researchers have found that test-optional policies “were linked with increases in Black student enrollment at moderately selective institutions, and some evidence that they were linked with increases in low-income student enrollment at highly selective institutions.”¹⁶⁵ But although test-optional policies have led to some increases in diversity both before and since 2020, enrollment demographics have not changed as substantially as anticipated.¹⁶⁶ With or without test scores, admissions teams recruit applicants and evaluate files and materials according to their college or university’s institutional priorities (such as athletics, a binary gender balance, and financial aid budget limits), which generally advantage white and wealthy students.

Emerging Ideas, Practices, and Strategic Possibilities

In addition to the above strategic possibilities, it is important to note that some have advocated for other admissions proposals, such as creating a randomized lottery of academically eligible students¹⁶⁷ or using novel algorithmic technologies and methods to improve predictions of students’ academic performance in college.¹⁶⁸ While these ideas seem intriguing at first glance, research examining lottery simulations has demonstrated that such approaches would exacerbate race, class, and gender inequities, primarily due to different application patterns by demographics.¹⁶⁹ For example, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and low-income students are less likely to apply to highly selective colleges and universities than comparably qualified white and Asian American students, decreasing their odds of admission.¹⁷⁰

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies, or predictive analytics, are increasingly discussed as strategic approaches with new possibilities in admissions work. Because one key task in the second stage of the admissions funnel is to predict the likelihood that an applicant will successfully complete a college’s academic curriculum, some admissions offices have begun exploring whether predictive analytics that rely on a student’s high school performance can offer reliable insights into their academic performance in college. Researchers caution that the use of AI without bias testing and human oversight can exacerbate racial biases, overestimating the academic performance of white and Asian American students and underestimating that of Black and Latinx students.¹⁷¹

Collecting and Analyzing Demographic Data

Enrollment demographic data for the fall 2024 semester—reflecting the first students admitted and enrolled following the SFFA ruling—are cause for concern, especially regarding the outcomes for Black students. Many highly selective colleges and universities reported significant one-year declines in the proportion of Black students in their first-year class cohorts. Carnegie Mellon University, Pomona College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, and Amherst College each reported that Black representation in their incoming classes in fall 2024 declined by over fifty percent from the previous year (fall 2023). While many of these highly selective institutions are reinstating test-required policies because they claim that considering test scores helps them diversify their classes, Professor Julie J. Park of the University of Maryland’s College of Education explained that “requiring standardized testing without race-conscious admissions is a totally different situation from the days when institutions could require tests but still consider race.”¹⁷²

As institutional leaders adapt their admissions and enrollment practices to the new legal environment and demographics fluctuate among enrollments, it is essential for colleges and universities to continue collecting disaggregated demographic data. Not only is it mandated by federal and state governments,¹⁷³ but it is also vital for systemic evaluation activities to assess and review organizational performance and inform strategic actions for meeting the institutional mission and priorities. Although the SFFA ruling did not bar demographic data collection and analysis to inform recruitment and enrollment strategies, some institutions, like MIT, have chosen to end the collection of demographic data for applications.¹⁷⁴ This shift prevents any awareness of race and ethnicity in the applicant pool for admission decisions, and it also prevents permissible approaches to strategic and targeted recruitment efforts to encourage enrollment after admission offers are sent.¹⁷⁵ Colleges and universities can and should continue to collect and analyze demographic data to inform their strategic recruitment efforts.¹⁷⁶

As both Education Reform Now¹⁷⁷ and Inside Higher Ed¹⁷⁸ have noted in their demographic-tracking tools, the actual numbers may be even worse than reported, as some of these institutions intentionally excluded certain student segments from the total number of enrolled students in their fall 2024 incoming classes. The strategic choice to make the denominator smaller allows their reported percentage of Black students to appear larger than it would be if they were to count all incoming first-year students in the data. Because raw data for fall 2024 will not be available through the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System until late 2026, demographic information on this first post-SFFA cohort currently relies on data reported by institutions.

Still, there may also be points of hope and possibility. Several selective institutions reported no change (e.g., Princeton, Duke, Caltech, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale) or slight increases (e.g., Bowdoin and Northwestern) in the percentage of Black students in their first-year cohort compared to fall 2023.¹⁷⁹ With the vision of a multi-racial democracy in mind, higher education leaders and researchers should study and learn from these institutions. What strategies did these institutions implement (e.g., targeted recruitment and community relationship-building and partnerships) that allowed their share of Black student enrollment to remain stable or increase? Will these results become trends beyond one-year data points? New research should explore these questions to document the effects of the Supreme Court’s SFFA ruling, and to illuminate new potential institutional strategies to dismantle discriminatory systemic biases and provide all students with equal opportunities in higher education.

Conclusion

Admissions practices and policy debates are situated within the political tensions and conflicts among the multiple purposes of higher education in the United States. On the one hand, the unwritten but understood social contract has pointed to the importance of higher education institutions to serve the public. Institutional autonomy and freedom have relied on public trust, which has endowed private colleges and universities with tax-free non-profit status and allowed both public and not-for-profit private institutions to benefit from federal and state appropriations, grants, and investments. On the other hand, highly selective institutions have historically practiced admissions policies to maintain a manufactured exclusivity, feeding into a problematic and anti-democratic culture of “meritocracy” propped up by the testing industry. Should enrollment in higher education—especially in highly exclusive institutions such as those in the Ivy League, which have been documented to lead to increased individual economic gains¹⁸⁰—be determined as an individual reward for achievements within an inequitable field of competition (i.e., private good logic for the benefit of select individuals)? Or should it be determined to meet the interests of an increasingly diverse democratic society and shared economic interests (i.e., public good logic for the benefit of the whole)? What is the proper balance between public and private interests?

To fulfill a social contract with the public, higher education must work toward meeting three complementary, and at times contradictory, objectives: to advance a vision of a diverse democracy, to support the economic well-being of the state, and to offer individuals opportunities for upward mobility.¹⁸¹ The private good frame of individual upward mobility based on narrow metrics of “merit” has generally displaced the shared public good benefits of higher education that are essential for sustaining a healthy, diverse democracy and a shared economy. Too much of the political and legal debate has focused on identifying fair approaches to evaluating individual “merit” to reward people with presumed mobility benefits. Entrenching higher education as a private good fundamentally exacerbates inequalities in who gains personal benefits and also who gets to participate in a shared democracy and economy.¹⁸² Civil rights leaders, advocates, and higher education leaders must recenter and reclaim the public mission of higher education so that more people and communities can collectively benefit from an expanded, diverse, democratic vision of civil society and the economy.

"Civil rights leaders, advocates, and higher education leaders must recenter and reclaim the public mission of higher education so that more people and communities can collectively benefit from an expanded, diverse, democratic vision of civil society and the economy."

- OiYan Poon, PhD

Numerous studies, articles, and books have presented compelling and evidenced arguments about the distracting myth of “merit” in college admissions and the harmful effects of this narrative frame on racial justice and economic equity. On a foundational level, leaders in higher education must decide whether they are seeking to meet narrow institutional priorities or broader public good missions, and better balance these demands. This critical self-reflective task is especially important for highly selective and wealthy institutions. Although there is no unified higher education system in the United States, the policies and actions of these elite institutions have historically influenced the direction of higher education and its ecosystem more generally.

The late Lani Guinier argued against the “tyranny of the meritocracy” and called on higher education leaders to take up a framework of “democratic merit” to guide the admissions process and whom they invite to participate in their educational programs.¹⁸³ While existing admissions systems and practices can and should be improved, transformative changes to dismantle race, class, and gender barriers in college access are limited by the foundation of institutional priorities guiding admissions practices. Changing how “merit” is measured is an insufficient project in the long run because the metrics that dominate public debates (such as test scores and GPAs) actually play limited roles in admissions systems and norms, as described throughout this Brief. The entire process of admissions, through each stage of the funnel, is overrun by factors that place underrepresented applicants at a competitive disadvantage or even give an outright preference to white and wealthy applicants.

The fundamental mission of higher education must be interrogated and shifted to prioritize what Guinier called “democratic merit.” With a clarified mission in mind, colleges and universities that earnestly assert that they are committed to serving the public good—contributing toward shared economies and supporting a diverse democracy—must ask themselves whether the institutional priorities guiding their admissions practices are advancing or diminishing their public commitments and missions. They must aim to improve their organizational norms and practices to evaluate applicants and admit cohorts of students in alignment with democratic merit.

There is no singular solution to mitigating race, class, and gender biases in college admissions, or to centering democratic merit. Few purportedly race-neutral strategies in college admissions have been able to achieve close to the levels of racial diversity in enrollments that would have resulted from race-conscious strategies.¹⁸⁴ Nonetheless, government and higher education leaders who value and prioritize their responsibilities in cultivating a healthy, racially diverse democratic society and uplifting social progress have a moral and fiscal obligation to lead with creativity and innovation toward closing race, class, and gender equity gaps in higher education participation. Civic leaders, state and federal elected officials, and administrative leaders can work to encourage and support higher education leaders and hold them accountable to these values and a vision of democratic merit.

Endnotes

Liliana M. Garces & OiYan Poon, Asian Americans and Race-Conscious Admissions: Understanding the Conservative Opposition’s Strategy of Misinformation, Intimidation & Racial Division 7, UCLA C.R. Project (Nov. 1, 2018), https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/college-access/affirmative-action/asian-americans-and-race-conscious-admissions-understanding-the-conservative-opposition2019s-strategy-of-misinformation-intimidation-racial-division/RaceCon_GarcesPoon_AsianAmericansRaceConsciousAdmi.pdf.
Id.
Id. at 4 n.2.
Schuette v. Coal. to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rts, & Fight for Equal. By Any Means Necessary, 134 S.Ct. 1623, 1651 n.2 (2014) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
7 U.S.C. § 321.
Brandon C.M. Allen & Levon T. Esters, Historically Black Land-Grant Universities: Overcoming Barriers and Achieving Success, Rutgers Ctr. for Minority Serving Insts. (June 22, 2018), https://cmsi.gse.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/HBLGUs_0.pdf.
Id. at 5.
Education researcher Michael Bastedo and colleagues have created a typology of holistic review approaches. Michael Bastedo et al., What is Holistic Review in College Admissions?, Univ. of Mich. Ctr. for the Study of Higher & Postsecondary Educ. (Nov. 2017), https://websites.umich.edu/~bastedo/policybriefs/Bastedo-holisticreview.pdf.
Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America 2 (Beacon Press, 2015).
Courtney Brown, We can’t ignore a crisis of confidence in American higher education, Lumina Found. (Oct. 4, 2024), https://www.luminafoundation.org/news-and-views/we-cant-ignore-a-crisis-of-confidence-in-american-higher-education; Richard Fry, Dana Braga, & Kim Parker, Is College Worth It?, Pew Rsch. Ctr. (May 23, 2024),https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/05/23/is-college-worth-it-2/; Phillip Levine & Luke Pardue, Yes, College Is Worth It, Brookings Inst. (June 5, 2024), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/yes-college-is-worth-it/.
Ass’n of Pub. Land-Grant Univs., How Do College Graduates Benefit Society at Large?, https://www.aplu.org/our-work/4-policy-and-advocacy/publicuvalues/societal-benefits/ (last visited Mar. 26, 2025).
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Frank Fernandez & Liliana M. Garces, Chapter 1: The Influence of Repressive Legalism on Admissions of OiYan Poon & Michael N. Bastedo, Rethinking College Admissions: Research-Based Practice and Policy (Harv. Educ. Press 2023); prabhdeep Singh kehal, Daniel Hirschman, & Ellen Berrey, When Affirmative Action Disappears: Unexpected Patterns in Student Enrollments at Selective U.S. Institutions, 1990–2016, 7 Sociol. of Race & Ethnicity 543 (2021), https://doi-org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/10.1177/23326492211008640.
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Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181 (2023) (hereinafter “SFFA v. Harvard”).
Wayne Au, Meritocracy 2.0: High-Stakes, Standardized Testing as a Racial Project of Neoliberal Multiculturalism, 30 Educ. Pol’y 39 (2016), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0895904815614916.
William C. Kidder & Jay Rosner, How the SAT Creates Built-in-Headwinds: An Educational and Legal Analysis of Disparate Impact, 43 Santa Clara L. Rev. 131 (2002). See also SFFA v. Harvard.
Krista Mattern, Justine Padunzel, & Matt Harmston, ACT Composite Score by Family Income, ACT, Inc. (2016), https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/R1604-ACT-Composite-Score-by-Family-Income.pdf; Greg J. Duncan & Richard J. Murnane, Growing Income Inequality Threatens American Education, Kappan (Mar. 1, 2014), https://kappanonline.org/growing-income-inequality-threatens-american-education-duncan-murnane/.
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Id. at 29.
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John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education ch.1 (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019).
Craig S. Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities ch.5 (Bloomsbury Press 2013).
Emily A. Langdon, Women’s Colleges Then and Now: Access Then, Equity Now, 76 Peabody J. Educ. 5 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327930PJE7601_02.
James D. Anderson, Introduction: Race in American higher education: Historical perspectives on current conditions, to William A. Smith, Philip G. Altbach, & Kofi Lomotey (eds.), The racial crisis in American higher education: Continuing challenges for the twenty-first century (SUNY Press 2002).
Milton C. Towner, Some Admissions Problems, 9 J. Higher Ed. 190 (1938), https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1974749.pdf.
Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, & Jeff Strohl, The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America 54–55 (The New Press 2020).
Karabel, supra note xxiii, at 23.
Towner, supra note xxxiv.
Douglas H. Lee et al., Chapter x: More than marketing: Professional development and learning to integrate diversity, of OiYan Poon & Michael N. Bastedo, Rethinking College Admissions: Research-Based Practice and Policy (Harv. Educ. Press 2023).
Karabel, supra note xxiii, at 40.
Id. at 44.
Id.
Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy 344 (Macmillan 2000).
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Kidder & Rosner, supra note xviii.
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Saul Geiser & Roger Studley, UC and the SAT: Predictive Validity and Differential Impact of the SAT I and SAT II at the University of California, 8 Educ. Assessment 1 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326977EA0801_01.
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See, e.g., Ezekiel J. Dixon-RomÁN, Howard T. Everson, and John J. Mcardle, Race, Poverty and SAT Scores: Modeling the Influences of Family Income on Black and White High School Students’ SAT Performance, 115 Teachers Coll. Rec.: The Voice of Scholarship in Educ. 1 (2013), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016146811311500406; ACT, Inc., supra note xix; Roy Freedle, Correcting the SAT’s Ethnic and Social-Class Bias: A Method for Reestimating SAT Scores, 73 Harv. Educ. Rev. 1 (2008), https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.73.1.8465k88616hn4757.
Carnevale et al., supra note xxxv at 13–14; Dixon-RomÁN et al., supra note li; Maria V. Santelices & Mark Wilson, Unfair Treatment? The Case of Freedle, the SAT, and the Standardization Approach to Differential Item Functioning, 80 Harv. Educ. Rev. 106 (2010), https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.80.1.j94675w001329270.
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Paul Tough, The Inequality Machine ch.3 (Harper Collins 2019).
Br. of Amici Curiae Coll. Bd., Nat’l Ass’n for Coll. Admission Counseling, Am. Ass’n of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers, & ACT, Inc., in Supp. of Respondents at 5, SFFA v. Harvard, Nos. 20-1199 & 21-707 (Aug. 1, 2022).
Id. at 16.
Poon et al., supra note xxvii.
NAACP Legal Def. Fund, SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina FAQ: The Supreme Court’s AFfirmative Action Decision, Explained, https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/sffa-v-harvard-faq/ (last visited Mar. 31, 2025).
Rothstein, supra note l.
Tough, supra note liv, at 77.
Karabel, supra note xxiii, at 4.
Daniela Blei, How College Admissions Hurt Intergenerational Mobility, Stanford Soc. Innovation Rev. (2020), https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_college_admissions_hurt_intergenerational_mobility.
Karabel, supra note xxiii, at ch.4.
Id. at 86–87.
Id. at ch.2.
Paula Wasley Chicken Soup and Other Remedies, 37 Humans. (2016),https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/fall/feature/chicken-soup-and-other-remedies.
Carnevale et al., supra note xxxv, at 101.
Bastedo et al., supra note xxviii.
Regents of Univ. of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).
Id.
Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 579 U.S. ___ (2016).
NAACP Legal Def. Fund, supra note lviii. LDF long represented twenty-five Harvard student and alumni organizations of thousands of Black, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, and white students and alumni as amici curiae, or “friends of the court,” in the Harvard lawsuit.
Richard Atkinson, College Admissions and the SAT: A Personal Perspective, 18 Observer 15 (2005), http://rca.ucsd.edu/speeches/collegeadmissionsandthesat-apersonalperspective1.pdf
Bastedo et al., supra note xxviii.
Id.
Michael N. Bastedo et al.,Contextualized High School Performance: Evidence to Inform Equitable Holistic, Test-Optional, and Test-Free Admissions Policies, 9 AERA Open (2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/233285842311974.
Michael N. Bastedo, What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Holistic Review? Selective College Admissions and Its Effects on Low-SES Students, 89 J. Higher Educ. 782 (2017); Trisha Ross Anderson presentation at 2024 CERPP conference.
Bennett, supra note xxix.
It is important to recognize that the term “test-optional” can include a range of approaches, including test-flexible, test-optional, and test-free policies. Dominque K Baker & Akil Bello, In a Pandemic Test-Optional Admissions is Necessary but Insufficient (2020), Hack the Gates,https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/1e1bb38b-fdda-4ae1-93d8-f4102272ee48/downloads/Baker%26Bello-TestOptional_HTGreport.pdf?ver=1674240385449
Rosinger et al., Exploring the Relationship Between Test-Optional Admissions and Selectivity and Enrollment Outcomes During the Pandemic (Annenberg Brown Univ. EdWorkingPaper No. 34-982, 2024), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED656102.pdf
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Poon et al., supra note xxvii; Carnevale et al., supra note xxxv, at 101.
For this section, the author drew significantly from a research study funded by a Spencer Foundation research grant (#201900049) and published in a 2024 Journal of Higher Education refereed journal article (Poon et al., supra xxvii), in addition to reviewing other relevant extant research. The views expressed in this Brief are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation.
Poon et al., supra note xxvii.
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Smith v. Regents of Univ. of California, 4 Cal.4th 843 (1993).
Pub. Counsel, Milestone Settlement Between Students and University of California Eliminates Use of SAT and ACT Scores (May 14, 2021), https://publiccounsel.org/press-releases/milestone-settlement-in-higher-education-reached-between-students-and-university-of-california/.
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See for example the scientifically dubious works of law professor Richard Sander.
Report of David Card, supra note xxv, at 7.
Ivy League Acceptance Rates 2024: What You’re Up Against, Shemmassian Acad. Counsulting, https://www.shemmassianconsulting.com/blog/ivy-league-acceptance-rates (last visitied Apr. 9, 2025).
Stevens, supra note lxxxvi at Introduction.
Mission and Vision, Tufts Univ., https://www.tufts.edu/about/mission-vision (last visited Apr. 5, 2025).
Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 579 U.S. ___ (2016).
Sophie Lehrenbaum, Tufts to Acquire School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts Daily (Jan. 20, 2016), https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2016/01/tufts-acquire-school-museum-fine-arts.
Poon et al., supra note xxvii.
Bastedo et al., supra note xxviii.
Id.
Eric Hoover, The Most Onerous Form in College Admissions, Chronicle of Higher Educ. (Feb. 23, 2021), https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-most-onerous-form-in-college-admissions.
Brian Heseung Kim et al., supra note xciv; AJ Alvero et al., supra note xcvi.
AJ Alvero et al., supra note xcvi.
Sonia Giebel, Signaled or Suppressed? How Gender Informs Women’s Undergraduate Applications in Biology and Engineering, 8 Socius (2022), https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231221127537.
Aya M. Waller-Bey, A Big Problem with College Admissions Could Be About to Get Worse, Atlantic (June 7, 2023), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/affirmative-action-supreme-court-college-admissions-essays-trauma/674314/.
Brian Heseung Kim et al., supra note xciv.
As the Social Scientists’ amicus brief pointed out in SFFA v. Harvard, this bias outside of higher education may have contributed to the lower average Asian American personal score at Harvard, suggesting a need for race-conscious admissions practices to mitigate against precollegiate systemic biases.
Julie J. Park et al., supra note xcvi.
Stephanie Breen, Inequality in College Applications, Coll. Admissions Futures Co-Laborative (2023), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64778f09d3560d6606ec4a51/t/64b975c87a7fcf281c409a82/1689875912826/Extracurrics+Policy+Brief+Final+5.11.23.pdf.
Kirsten Hextrum, Special Admission: How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes (2021), https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/special-admission/9781978821200/.
Dr. Trisha Ross Anderson and the team at the Making Caring Common Project have been working with admissions offices to strengthen holistic review processes. Character Review in Admission Workshop, Making Caring Common Project, Harv. Graduate Sch. of Educ., https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/research-initiatives/character-review-in-admission (last visited Apr. 9, 2025).
Liliana M. Garces, The False Notion of “Race-Neutrality”: How Legal Battles in Higher Education Undermine Racial Equity, 52 Change 55 (2020).
Poon et al., supra note xxvii.
Id.
Hextrum, supra note cxxi, at 19.
Kelly Ochs Rosinger et al., The Role of Selective College Admissions Criteria in Interrupting or Reproducing Racial and Economic Inequities, 92 J. Higher Educ. 31 (2020), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221546.2020.1795504.
Crystal Han et al., Recruiting the Out-of-state University, Joyce Found. (Mar. 2019), https://emraresearch.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/joyce_report.pdf.
Jim Peterson, Rural Students: Breaking Down Barriers for Small-town Students, 247 J. Coll. Admission 28, 30, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1258862.
Joshua Grossman et al., The Disparate Impacts of College Admissions Policies on Asian American Applicants, 14 Sci. Reps. (Feb. 23, 2024), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55119-0
Rosinger, supra note cxxvii.
Katherine Mangan, The Male Enrollment Crisis, Chron. Higher Educ. (2022), https://www.chronicle.com/featured/student-success/student-centric-institution/male-enrollment-crisis#:~:text=Men%20make%20up%20just%20over,been%20building%20for%2040%20years.
Dominique J. Baker & Michael N. Bastedo, What If We Leave It Up to Chance? Admissions Lotteries and Equitable Access at Selective Colleges, 51 Am. Educ. Researcher, 134 (2021), https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211055494.
Grossman, supra note cxxx; Rosinger supra note cxxvii.
Peter Arcidiacono et al., Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard, 40 J. Lab. Econ. 153 (2022), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/713744.
Laura Spitalniak, A Look at 5 States Weighing Legacy Admissions Bans, Higher Ed Dive (Mar. 28. 2024), https://www.highereddive.com/news/5-states-weigh-legacy-admissions-bans/711428/.
Fair College Admissions for Students Act, S. 2524, 118th Cong. (2023).
Carnevale et al., supra note xxxv; Poon et al., supra note xxvii; Tough, supra note liv.
Carnevale et al., supra note xxxv.
Rosinger supra note cxxvii.
Carnevale et al., supra note xxxv.
Julie J. Park & M. Kevin Eagan, Who Goes Early?: A Multi-Level Analysis of Enrolling via Early Action and Early Decision Admissions, 113 Tchrs. Coll. Rec. 2345 (2011), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016146811111301108.
Sandy Baum et al., Tuition Discounting: Institutional Aid Patterns at Public and Private Colleges and Universities, 2000-01 to 2008-09, Coll. Bd. (Sept. 2010), https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=a9829549e1c2d1be0f1498601fa12e6c3254503b; Institute of Education Sciences, Crisis Point: How Enrollment Management and the Merit-Aid Arms Race Are Derailing Public Higher Education (2020),https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED604970.
Institute of Education Sciences, State University No More: Out-of-State Enrollment and the Growing Exclusion of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students at Public Flagship Universities (2017), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED587375.
See research by Liliana Garces and Uma Jayakumar, Nick Bowman, Julie J. Park, Sylvia Hurtado, Jeff Milem, and many others.
Andrew Gumbel, Won’t Lose the Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System (New Press 2024).
Colleen Flaherty, Presidents Break with Supreme Court on Affirmative Action, Inside Higher Ed (Oct. 17, 2023), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/diversity/socioeconomics/2023/10/17/survey-two-three-college-presidents-oppose-affirmative; Some examples of post-ruling college and university president public statements: Marc Tessier-Lavigne, President’s message regarding Supreme Court ruling on race-conscious university admissions, Stanford Rep. (June 29, 2023), https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/06/presidents-message-regarding-supreme-court-ruling-race-conscious-university-admissions; Anne F. Harris & Joseph Bagnoli, Jr., Response to Supreme Court Decision on Affirmative Action, Grinnell Coll. (June 29, 2023),https://www.grinnell.edu/messages/response-supreme-court-decision-affirmative-action.
Nicholas A. Bowman, Promoting Participation in a Diverse Democracy: A Meta-Analysis of College Diversity Experiences and Civic Engagement, 81 Rev. Educ. Rsch. 4 (2011), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654310383047; Nicholas A. Bowman, College Diversity Experiences and Cognitive Development: A Meta-Analysis, 80 Rev. Educ. Rsch. 4 (2010), https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654309352495; Nicholas A. Bowman & Kari E. Weaver, The Impact of Diversity Experiences on Undergraduate Student Outcomes, in Research Handbook on the Student Experience in Higher Education 296 (Chi Baik & Ella R. Kahu eds., 2023).
Legal Def. Fund et al., Affirmative Action in Higher Education 24 (Oct. 2023), https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023_09_29-Report.pdf.
Id.
Id.at 24–25.
SFFA v. Harvard, 600 U.S. at 230.
Liam Knox, Prompting Discussion or Tempting Litigation?, Inside Higher Ed (July 20, 2023), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2023/07/20/new-application-essay-prompt-cites-affirmative-action.
Id.
Lauren S. Foley, On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies (NYU Press 2023).
Salazar, supra note lxxxv.
California (1996), Washington (1998, rescinded in 2022), Florida (1999), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), Arizona (2010), New Hampshire (2012), Oklahoma (2012), and Idaho (2020) were the nine states that had banned affirmative action prior to 2023.
Daniel Hirschman & Ellen Berrey, The Partial Deinstitutionalization of Affirmative Action in U.S. Higher Education, 1988 to 2014, 4 Socio. Sci. 449, https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v4-18-449/.
Stella M. Flores & Catherine L. Horn, Texas Top Ten Percent Plan: How It Works, What Are Its Limits, and Recommendations to Consider, Educ. Testing Serv. (2015), https://escholarship.org/content/qt4hm2n74b/qt4hm2n74b.pdf.
Systemwide Acad. Senate, U.C., Report of the UC Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force 6 (Jan. 2020), https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/sttf/sttf-report.pdf.
See Smith v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 56 Cal. App. 4th 979 (1997).
Taylor Odle & Jennifer Delaney, Experimental Evidence on ‘Direct Admissions’ from Four States: Impacts on College Application and Enrollment, (Annenberg Inst., Working Paper No. 23 -834, 2025), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4548344.
Id.
OiYan Poon, Asian American Is Not a Color (Beacon Press, 2024); Kēhaulani Natsuko Vaughn & Theresa Jean Ambo, Trans-Indigenous Education: Indigeneity, Relationships, and Higher Education, 66 Compar. Educ. Rev. 508 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1086/720611.
Julie J. Park et al., Do Colleges Have to Go Back to the SAT?, Inside Higher Ed (Aug. 26, 2024), https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/08/26/do-colleges-have-go-back-sat-opinion; See also Aaron M. Pallas & Alex Chin, It’s Not (Really) About Diversity, Inside Higher Ed (May 13, 2024), https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/05/13/diversity-isnt-credible-reason-reinstate-tests-opinion.
Andrew S. Belasco et al., The Test-Optional Movement at America’s Selective Liberal Arts Colleges: A Boon for Equity or Something Else?, 37 Educ. Evaluation & Pol’y Analysis 206 (2015), https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373714537350; Bennett, supra note xxix; Kelly Rosinger et al., Exploring the Relationship Between Test-Optional Admissions, Selectivity, and Enrollment Outcomes During the Pandemic, Coll. Admissions Futures Co-Laborative (2024), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64778f09d3560d6606ec4a51/t/66a1786f03436b3fc819a2c5/1721858165574/CAFCoLab_TestOptional_WorkingPaper_2.pdf.
Marketplace Radio Report, Admission by Lottery: A Proposal to Reimagine College Acceptance, Marketplace (July 2, 2021), https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/02/admission-by-lottery-a-proposal-to-reimagine-college-acceptance/.
Ellen Evaristo, Balancing the Potentials and Pitfalls of AI in College Admissions, USC Rossier (Dec. 4, 2023), https://rossier.usc.edu/news-insights/news/balancing-potentials-and-pitfalls-ai-college-admissions.
Baker & Bastedo, supra note cxxxiii.
Id.; Julie J. Park, Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data (Harv. Educ. Press 2018).
Denisa Gándara, Inside the Black Box: Detecting and Mitigating Algorithmic Bias Across Racialized Groups in College Student-Success Prediction, AERA Open 10, https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241258741.
Id.
Higher Education Act, 79 Stat. 1219 (1965); Taylor Myers & Kim Dancy, The Case for IES Resources: DataLab Makes Accessing Education Data Quick and Easy, Inst. for Higher Educ. Pol’y (Mar. 19, 2025), https://www.ihep.org/new-federal-standards-for-race-and-ethnicity-data-will-change-how-students-are-counted/; Kristian Hernández, More States Are Pushing for Race and Ethnicity Data Equity, Ctr. for Pub. Integrity (Jan. 12, 2024), https://publicintegrity.org/politics/elections/who-counts/more-states-are-pushing-for-race-and-ethnicity-data-equity/.
Julie J. Park, A Year After the Supreme Court’s Historic Affirmative Action Ruling, MIT’s Drop in Student Diversity Provides a Cautionary Tale, Hechinger Rep. (Sept. 24, 2024), https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-a-year-after-the-supreme-courts-historic-affirmative-action-ruling-mits-drop-in-student-diversity-provides-a-cautionary-tale/.
It may be useful to understand targeted recruitment efforts similar to any other corporation’s efforts at target or segmented marketing and sales, because admissions and enrollment recruitment requires colleges and universities to engage in sales pitches. There is no one sales pitch (recruitment approach) that will be effective for all customers (students and families).
Park, supra note clxxiv.
James Murphy, Tracking the Impact of the SFFA Decision on College Admissions, Educ. Reform Now (Sept. 9, 2024), https://edreformnow.org/2024/09/09/tracking-the-impact-of-the-sffa-decision-on-college-admissions/.
Knox, supra note cliii.
Murphy, supra note clxxvii.
Raj Chetty et al., Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges (Nat’l Bureau of Econ. Rsch., Working Paper No. 31492, 2023), https://www.nber.org/papers/w31492.
David F. Labaree, Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals, 34 Am. Educ. Rsch. J. 39, https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312034001039.
Id.; Gumbel supra note cxlvi.
Guinier, supra note ix.
Liliana M. Garces, The False Notion of “Race-Neutrality”: How Legal Battles in Higher Education Undermine Racial Equity, 52 Change: Mag. Higher Learning 51, https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2020.1732778.

An Evidence-Based Analysis and Possibilities for Equity

By OiYan Poon, PhD

Published August 2025

Introduction

The Exclusionary Foundations and Evolution of Selective College Admissions

The Rise of the Big Test

- OiYan Poon, PhD

The Dangerous Myth of Academic Merit

The Development of Individualized Holistic Admissions Review

- OiYan Poon, PhD

Evolution of Legal Ideas

1965

President Lyndon B. Johnson

Source: Library of Congress

1978

Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

“[I]t is not too much to say that the ‘nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure’ to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples."

Source: Library of Congress

2003

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Grutter v. Bollinger

“The Law School’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body is not prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause.”

Source: Library of Congress

2016

Justice Anthony Kennedy

Fisher v. UT Austin

Source: Library of Congress

2023

Chief Justice John Roberts

SFFA v. President and Fellows of Harvard College

“We have permitted race-based admissions only within the confines of narrow restrictions. University programs must comply with strict scrutiny, they may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and—at some point— they must end.”

Source: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

Implementing Holistic Review to Create a More Inclusive, and Less Biased, Admissions Process

How Admissions Works

Funneling to Make the Class82

Figure 1: Five Stages of the Admissions Funnel

Stage 1

Applicant Recruitment

Stage 2

Eligibility Review: Is the Applicant Academically Qualified?

Eligibility and Coursework

Eligibility and Tests

Stage 3

Holistic Reading: How Does Each Individual Applicant Contribute Toward Institutional Priorities?

Stage 4

Shaping Admission Decisions

Stage 5

Discounts and Yield Recruitment

​Implications of SFFA v. Harvard/UNC on the Admissions Funnel

Figure 2: Race, Class, And Gender Biases Baked into Each Stage

Post-SFFA Landscape

Strategic Opportunities for Race, Class, and Gender Equity in Admissions

Recommendations

State and Higher Education Initiatives

Guaranteed Admissions: "Percent Plans"

Direct Admissions

Strategic Recruitment Efforts Within the Institution-Driven Admissions Funnel

Emerging Ideas, Practices, and Strategic Possibilities

Collecting and Analyzing Demographic Data

Conclusion

"Civil rights leaders, advocates, and higher education leaders must recenter and reclaim the public mission of higher education so that more people and communities can collectively benefit from an expanded, diverse, democratic vision of civil society and the economy."

- OiYan Poon, PhD

Funneling to Make the Class⁸²

Implications of SFFA v. Harvard/UNC on the Admissions Funnel