TODAY the Supreme Court ended Affirmative Action in College Decisions - VOTE

Idaho, Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Washington, California, and Michigan have already banned the use of RACE in college admissions for public colleges and universities. For example, UC schools banned RACE 25 years ago so schools like UCLA and UC Berkeley have focused more on grades, course rigor, and ECs, versus race and standardized test scores. This is why there is less diversity at top UC schools but more diversity at lesser UC schools like UC Riverside, or UC Santa Cruz which have more Black and Brown folk. At Top UCs, there are more Asians and Whites because they have come from more privileged backgrounds which means that they naturally have better access to better schools, tutoring/test-prep, and course rigor like APs/IBs and EC opportunities.

This does mean that all Ivies and Elites and private LACs in the Top 50 will accept fewer Blacks, Latinas, and Indigenous applicants because they will be held to a higher standard in the admissions rubric that these schools use to determine who gets in and who doesn't.

In anticipation of this, I feel that Harvard for example accepted a record amount of Asians this cycle approaching 30% of the class. This means that if they end up accepting 33% Asians next cycle, no one is going to be making a big deal out of it. I think they will not hold to accepting 15% Black, 13% Hispanic nor 3% Indigenous because then critics will say that they are using some shadow proxy for RACE as a criterion for allowing the same types of applicants into the school.

If T50 colleges want more diversity, they will start looking at picking students from underprivileged zip codes or school districts which will be a proxy for low income which is a proxy for race. So they will actively seek out top students from say East LA or the South Side of Chicago or the Bronx, NY. So if your name is Jaime Rodriguez from 246th Street in the South Bronx and you apply to Columbia University, they won't need to look at your race to determine that you are Latina and low income and probably first generation as to attend a 4-year college as well.

So I think there are contingency plans for all T50 schools but they won't be clear-cut across all institutions. So the administration of T50 schools will have to make up their own agenda on how far they are willing to go to poke at the Supreme Court Decision without stirring controversy.

No one applying to college this cycle or the next cycle has the luxury of sitting back and waiting to see how this plays out. This is a fast-moving train, and if you decide not to write about race in your essays or your own experiences as a "this or that" person of color, then that might hurt you more than you think.

If your race has marginalized your ability to gain access to a great high school or challenging AP courses or find impressive ECs to pursue, then I think that it is very important to state the facts in your personal account and use your voice to impress upon the fact that you do deserve a chance to attend your dream school or list of colleges of choice rather than settling for whatever the fallout is from this new national policy.

I think all colleges will be scrambling to change their websites and marketing material to explain to their audience how they are going to implement this new LAW into their admissions practices. And many of them will purposely not be transparent about this because they don't have a plan in place and don't want to be overly optimistic that this will have no impact on your ability to be judged fairly based on your narrative.

I'm only a rising sophomore so I have a few years to see how things change, but you're right, many people don't have that. It's really unfortunate that some students may no longer have the opportunities they had due to this new ruling. I also don't understand why affirmative action was considered 'unconstitutional?' It provided more opportunities for marginalized groups, which seems like a good thing to me? I guess I'll have to read up more on it.

Remember a lot of Laws are logically harmful. Take for example the rollback on Roe v Wade. Poor women of color are disproportionately harmed by not having access to reproductive healthcare. This further marginalizes them because having to go through with full-term pregnancies when they are teens or young adults keeps them out of higher education and/or other lucrative career paths. But the Supreme Court repealed it nevertheless.