The Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, issued in June 2023, ended race-conscious college admissions in the United States. By a 6–3 vote in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a companion case against the University of North Carolina, the Court held that using race as a factor in admissions violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause at public universities and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act at private ones.1Supreme Court of the United States. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College Because nearly every private college in the country accepts federal funding of some kind, the ruling reaches almost all of American higher education.
What Colleges Can No Longer Do
Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion drew clear lines around several practices that had been standard at selective schools for decades.
- Admissions officers can no longer treat race as a “plus factor” or tip in close cases. The holistic-review approach that Bakke and Grutter once permitted is now unconstitutional.
- Schools cannot aim for an entering class whose racial composition matches the general population, a prior class, or any target percentage. Tracking racial breakdowns during selection to maintain demographic consistency is prohibited.1Supreme Court of the United States. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College
- Readers cannot assume that a student of a particular race will bring a particular viewpoint or experience. That assumption is the kind of stereotyping the Court found impermissible.
- Quotas and set-asides remain prohibited, along with subtler versions where soft targets or historical enrollment numbers function as informal quotas.
These prohibitions apply to public universities under the Fourteenth Amendment and to private institutions under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination in any program receiving federal financial assistance.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S.C. Chapter 21, Subchapter V – Federally Assisted Programs
What Students Can Still Write About
The majority preserved one channel. Universities may still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race has affected their life, “be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”1Supreme Court of the United States. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College A student who writes about overcoming racial prejudice, or whose cultural heritage motivated them to pursue a particular field, can have that narrative count in their favor.
The critical distinction is that the benefit must attach to something specific about the person, not to the race itself. A student who demonstrates courage by confronting discrimination earns credit for the courage. A student who channeled cultural identity into a leadership role earns credit for the leadership. The Court essentially told admissions offices: you can value what race has done to shape this individual, but you cannot value the race.
The practical line is thin. A compelling personal essay about racial identity still helps. What an admissions reader cannot do is tally the racial demographics of the essay pool and use those narratives to hit diversity benchmarks. Any school that treats the essay pathway as a workaround risks the same litigation that brought Harvard and UNC to the Supreme Court.
Why the Programs Failed
Race-based classifications trigger strict scrutiny, the highest bar in constitutional law. To survive, a policy must serve a compelling interest and be narrowly tailored, with no broader reach than necessary. Harvard and UNC failed on both.
On the compelling-interest side, the Court found the universities’ stated goals too abstract. Objectives like “preparing students for a diverse workforce,” “fostering innovation,” and promoting “cross-racial understanding” struck the majority as so broad that no court could meaningfully determine whether they had been achieved. Without measurable benchmarks, the programs had no logical end point, violating a requirement Grutter v. Bollinger had established two decades earlier.1Supreme Court of the United States. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College
On narrow tailoring, the Court found that admissions committees tracked the racial composition of incoming classes and used that data to adjust outcomes, a practice functionally indistinguishable from racial balancing. Harvard’s process allowed readers to give a “substantial plus” based on race, and the racial composition of tentative admit pools was disclosed to the committee so it could ensure no “dramatic drop-off” from prior years. Neither university had a plan for when it would stop considering race.
The majority also found that the programs relied on racial stereotyping and produced zero-sum results. As the opinion put it: “a benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former at the expense of the latter.”1Supreme Court of the United States. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College
Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented sharply. She argued that the majority struck at the heart of Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher by treating racial diversity as an inherently unmeasurable goal, when the Court had accepted equally abstract compelling interests in other contexts. She also challenged the majority’s version of constitutional colorblindness, arguing that existing law already permits race-conscious measures in other settings.
What About Military Academies
In a footnote, the majority carved out military service academies, acknowledging that they might present “potentially distinct interests” tied to national security. Because those interests were not briefed in the Harvard and UNC cases, the Court declined to address them. That left West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy free to continue considering race for a time.
The exception did not last. Students for Fair Admissions sued West Point, and the case moved through the courts. In April 2025, the Department of Defense informed the court that the military academies had voluntarily removed race and ethnicity from admissions, complying with executive orders and updated agency policy. The Secretary of Defense directed that for the 2026 admissions cycle and all cycles after it, academies must “apply no consideration of race, ethnicity, or sex” and “offer admission based exclusively on merit.”3Students for Fair Admissions. SFFA West Point and USAFA Settlement Both sides agreed to dismiss the case in August 2025. The settlement requires the academies to ensure that no one with admissions authority can see an applicant’s race or ethnicity before a final decision, and bars them from tracking racial composition for admissions purposes.
The Court’s footnote technically left the door open. The executive branch closed it.
Does the Ruling Apply to Private Employers
If you work in human resources or run a corporate diversity program, the ruling does not apply to you directly. The SFFA decision interpreted the Equal Protection Clause (which constrains government actors) and Title VI (which constrains recipients of federal funding). Private employers are governed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a separate statute with its own case law. The Court did not address Title VII, and the ruling carries no formal precedential effect on employer diversity initiatives.4Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Fourteenth Amendment
The environment has shifted anyway. Advocacy groups have filed complaints against corporate diversity fellowships and hiring programs, borrowing the reasoning of the SFFA opinion even though it does not legally bind private employers. Companies have restructured some programs to emphasize socioeconomic disadvantage rather than race, and legal departments have increased scrutiny of initiatives that explicitly factor race into selection. A January 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to terminate DEI offices, equity programs, and related grants, and required agencies to identify federal contractors who had provided DEI training.5The White House. Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing That order targets federal agencies and their grantees rather than private employers broadly, but the chilling effect has been real.
How Colleges Have Adapted Since
The logistical response was quick. The Common Application, used by roughly 1,000 schools, rolled out a feature in August 2023 letting colleges hide applicants’ racial information from admissions teams. The platform still collects the data for its own research purposes, but participating schools can keep it away from reviewers during evaluation.
The deeper strategic shift has moved toward socioeconomic factors as a stand-in for the diversity that race-conscious programs previously produced. Multiple selective institutions have increased enrollment of students receiving Pell Grants. Some schools now weigh neighborhood disadvantage, first-generation college status, and family wealth when building incoming classes. The College Board previously developed an adversity score drawing on neighborhood and school-level data like poverty rates, crime statistics, and access to advanced coursework, though implementation has varied.
Early enrollment data from the first post-ruling cycle was mixed. Some research universities reported a slight increase in the share of Black students enrolled in 2024, but the number masked a more complicated picture: Black applications rose while admission rates did not. Gains appeared to reflect yield efforts rather than changes in who was admitted. Whether race-neutral strategies can produce the diversity that race-conscious ones did will only become clear over several more admissions cycles.