What that means, practically speaking, is that the most targeted and resource-heavy programs are poured into turning around the bottom 5% of schools in every state, including those with chronically bad graduation rates and those where certain subgroups of students languish below grade-level. 

On its face, that’s not a bad priority — though being identified as such has historically meant being targeted with drastic policy changes, including state takeovers. But in many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled the traditional school landscape: Suddenly, math and reading scores plummeted across the board for students in every school, and chronic absenteeism soared. Four years later, the U.S. education system is still trying to claw its way back to pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

It’s no longer just the bottom 5 percent of schools in each state that are in trouble — it’s the majority of them. Recognizing this, Illinois developed a universal model of continuous school improvement to ensure that every school in the state — not just those identified for support by being the very worst — benefits from evidence-based improvement strategies. The goal of extending that type of focused support to every school, unique to Illinois, was developed in partnership with administrators, school boards, superintendents and principals. 

So when the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University announced it was planning a new state collaborative aimed at helping states identify, study and share their most effective school improvement policies, Illinois knew it would have something special to share.

The state is one of nine — along with Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Texas — participating in “States Leading States.” The goal of the initiative is ambitious: to work alongside state leaders to evaluate policies meant to solve their most pressing challenges and make those lessons rapidly accessible via a series of rolling policy reports to lawmakers and practitioners across the country.

“We are in a crisis moment in education,” said Scott Sargrad, director of States Leading States. “Now is really the time to double down on what works. And so in order to double down on what works, we need to know what works.”

The effort comes as the most recent math and reading scores for high schoolers plummet to record lows, chronic absenteeism soars and more and more students graduate without the skills necessary to be successful in college or the workplace. And it’s all occurring against the backdrop of a significantly diminished federal role in education under the Trump administration — both in terms of funding K-12 programs and prioritizing research to elevate best practices.

Take the myriad state efforts to boost reading scores by adopting policies better aligned to the science of reading. “It’s not totally clear what the best policy levers are to pull at the state level to actually get better teaching in the classroom, instructional coaching,” said Sargrad. “Is it tutoring? Is it high-quality instructional materials? Is it all of those things combined? We’re trying to figure out what the most effective state policies are on a bunch of pressing issues.” 

In addition to its continuous improvement plan, Illinois, for example, is in the process of developing a so-called “Comprehensive Numeracy Plan.” Modelled after a literacy program by the same name, the numeracy plan will establish a roadmap for strengthening math teaching and learning across the state, which right now, most states haven’t attempted. 

Harvard’s initiative is already garnering praise from both sides of the edu-political spectrum, with Margaret Spellings, former Education Secretary under President George W. Bush, and John B. King Jr., former Education Secretary under President Barack Obama, both backing the plan.

“At a time when too many students are not reading at grade level or able to do basic math and the gaps between highest and lowest performing students are growing, we need to make student achievement a priority again and develop evidence-based strategies that help all students succeed,” said Spellings, who is now the president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center. King, who is currently the Chancellor of the State University of New York, said the initiative “sets a powerful example for the country.” 

States Leading States plans to publish research reports and practical policy solutions, sharing what works and what doesn’t. Attracting the right mix of states was important, Sargrad said, since ensuring geographic, demographic and political diversity of states participating in the initiative increases the likelihood for other state education leaders to glimpse how these policy lifts might play out in their state or district.

During this first year of collaboration, states are focusing on a variety of K-12’s biggest challenges. With social media and cell phone bans top-of-mind right now, a handful of states are focusing their initial efforts on identifying the most effective policy: Ohio is preparing to implement a statewide bell-to-bell cell phone ban, while Illinois and Delaware school districts are testing alternative cellphone policies, like requiring students to use phone pouches or keep them turned off and stored by the teacher. 

The current federal landscape puts “an urgent responsibility” on states to collaborate, try new ideas, measure their impact and share what works, said Angélica Infante-Green, commissioner of elementary and secondary education for Rhode Island. Beyond the current federal government shutdown, which has, among other things, resulted in the near total layoff of staff at the Office of Special Education Programs, the current administration’s efforts to dismantle the entire Education Department portends dire consequences for the ability to identify which state policies are working.

Some of those states are focusing on more traditional academic metrics: To improve reading proficiency in sixth through eighth grade, Indiana is piloting an outcomes-based approach for improving middle school literacy. This is a newer type of education vendor contract that holds service providers and districts accountable for student progress through language that stipulates payment upon literacy improvement on test scores. 

Alabama is requiring every district to offer summer reading and math camps for struggling students. The camps are a component of statewide efforts to improve reading and math proficiency, as mandated by the . For struggling third-grade readers, attending a summer reading camp is one option to avoid being held back and requires passing a second reading test to advance to the fourth grade. Some districts are already seeing significant improvement, including in DeKalb County, where math scores are at an all-time high. 

Meanwhile, Tennessee, Texas, and Rhode Island are taking on a host of challenges, from boosting access to career credentials, to implementing high-quality curriculum and addressing chronic absenteeism.

A key piece of the initiative involves equipping state agencies with the skills and personnel needed to conduct and use data analysis for continuous improvement — a boon for states in search of technical assistance in the wake of a 90 percent cut to the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. Each state will host a data project fellow from Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research to help organize data, analyze implementation, and build a community of researchers ready to share insights across state lines.

“We’re not a political action committee, we’re not an advocacy group. What we know how to do is measure the efficacy of policies, and when we find things that work, we’re going to try to make sure other states are aware of it,” Sargrad said. “There are a lot of things we can’t do right now, but one thing we can do is shine a spotlight on things that work. And we can do it well.”

But looks can be deceiving. Most weeks, this school sends students to work in high-rise offices, tech firms or a coding center it runs downtown.

In fact, the building’s past history as a neighborhood elementary school may be the only reminder of the big, comprehensive and often unsafe public high schools from which it’s often a refuge. 

Offering a dizzying array of internships, college courses and dual enrollment opportunities, Building 21 challenges nearly all of the conventional wisdom about what an urban public high school should do.

Unlike most urban high schools, Building 21 is small: Enrollment is capped at 400 students, with classes of just 25 or fewer.

It operates under a complex set of that stress the importance of relationships. When conflicts arise, teachers must help resolve them quickly, interfering as little as possible as students work things out. The school was among the first in Philadelphia to introduce so-called , an alternative to traditional — often harsh — school discipline. Instead of a lecture or suspension for misbehavior, students often find themselves deep in conversation about what happened, talking with teachers, counselors and classmates to get to the bottom of a conflict and resolve it. These practices, the school maintains, also teach problem-solving skills.

In operation for a decade, it also boasts something most Philadelphia schools don’t: a 94% graduation rate for the past two years. At last count, the district’s four-year graduation rate .

Nabeehah Parker, a 20-year veteran of the district, came to Building 21 in 2022 to run its partnership program. Her goal, she said, was to make it a place where students can have the same opportunities as students at selective schools.

To that end, the school offers a veritable revolving door of experts coming in to teach classes and students heading out for face-time with employers.

It features the kinds of risk-taking and experiences often reserved for students in elite schools. Yet it admits virtually anyone, with open-enrollment policies that match those of the city’s big neighborhood high schools.

Principal Ben Koch started out as a Spanish teacher here, building its world language program around a concept called “.” Instead of memorizing vocabulary lists and conjugating verbs, students act out stories in the language they’re learning. The audience responds to the actors in a kind of interactive linguistic improv. 

“I saw that just take off,” he said. Students took more risks, retained more vocabulary and learned to speak in full sentences. 

Simultaneously, he organized a class trip to Costa Rica, where students hiked the rainforest, ziplined, helped repaint an elementary school and worked at an elder care center. 

Closer to home, students learn bioscience through a mobile program sponsored by the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research and game design with a teacher who created a mobile app to help schools track inventory. In a cosmetology class, teacher Samantha Bromfield focuses on ensuring employable skills, believing that “everyone should know how to do a range of everything.”

The school’s open-admissions policy is a draw for many families, said Parker, the partnership coordinator. The opportunity for any student to attend, no matter their grades or behavioral record, is “something that parents are looking for.”

But it also means much of Building 21’s energy is spent getting students’ skills up to the level where they can reliably pursue their interests. 

That often takes the form of individualizing assignments and basically personalizing student performance levels. In an English class, all students are writing about topics they’re interested in, but one student may be tasked with writing a cogent essay based on a reading, while another may write one that does more with the reading, incorporating specific details or answering complex questions. 

“What we’re trying to find is that sweet spot where you’re not ignoring the truth of what ‘unfinished learning’ looks like in high school — and you want kids to find themselves and get engaged,” said co-founder Laura Shubilla.

If some of that isn’t sexy or new, she shrugs it off. A lot of what works in education, including systemic differentiated instruction, simply isn’t. “I would say probably we’re more intentional than innovative.” 

As a result, while the school gets a lot of visitors, it doesn’t often appear in the news. These days, one of the main things the school is known for in Philly — a district plagued with decrepit building conditions — is its three-month closure last spring after inspectors discovered . In May 2023, one day after it reopened, shut it down again, just hours after a big celebratory barbecue. 

“Four o’clock in the afternoon,” Shubilla recalled, “the ceiling fell in.”

A ‘backwards-mapped’ curriculum

The school offers four years of competency-based learning, in which mastering skills takes precedence over seat time. Since students progress at their own rate, each enjoys what amounts to an individualized education.

It turns the idea of grades on its head, offering students the opportunity to submit and re-submit work until it meets high standards. Assignments are graded on a 2- to 12- point scale. If a student hands in a writing assignment that’s adequate or only touches on a few competencies, it might earn an 8 or 9 or lower. If she wants to earn a 10 or 11, she can refer to a chart that lays out the skills associated with such a piece of writing: It must have a compelling hook and strong point of view, cite evidence and acknowledge other perspectives.

Earning a 10 or higher means it’s as good as something a college student — or at least a college-ready student — might produce.

“We did a lot of studying on what it takes to be successful in college and on a job,” said co-founder Chip Linehan, “and we sort of backwards-mapped from there.”

Hassan Durant, 17, a senior, said the curriculum is challenging but worth the effort. “It pushes us to think harder and more on a college-based level,” he said

Understanding how to move up the grading scale was difficult at first, but many students now welcome it.

“A lot of people that I know that feel like they should have scored higher go to the teachers and ask, ‘What can I revise? What can I work on? What can I fix and change to take this from an 8 and bring it up to at least a 10?’” Durant said.

After years of traditional learning and report cards, he said it was difficult to get his parents to understand the subtleties of competency.

He recalled telling his parents, “I’m not really failing, and I wouldn’t say I’m passing, but I am getting the work done and doing what I have to do so that I can pass.” 

Roots at Harvard, MIT

Co-founders Shubilla and Linehan created Building 21 after meeting at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 2011, where they studied with renowned scholar . 

Elmore pushed students to rethink everything. “His question was always, ‘Why does this thing called learning have to take place in this place called school?’” said Shubilla. If not, he would ask, what would you replace it with?

She and Linehan soon realized that they had similar answers: Both believed school should start with an “anchor learning site” connected to opportunities elsewhere.

So they designed a school that both brings in experts from outside and gently pushes students into workplaces. Linehan likes to think of it as making the school “as permeable as possible.” 

Elmore, who died in 2021, also pushed students to confront their biases. More broadly, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education urged teachers to confront bedrock views about their own authority and interact more patiently with students.

“Their saying was, ‘You can’t transform the sector until you transform yourself,’” Shubilla recalled.

Building 21 opened in 2014, and now operates two campuses, one here and another in nearby . Beyond that, its curriculum is open-sourced, readily accessible to other educators wanting to try their hand at competency-based learning. 

The school’s name is a sly nod to MIT’s fabled , which for 80 years served as coded shorthand for a center of innovation. After World War II, it became home to dozens of researchers and technologists, including MIT’s legendary , widely seen as the first group of computer hackers.

Mastering skills preoccupies much of the first two years here, but the final two take on a different cast, with juniors spending large chunks of the day connecting what they’re learning to their interests through internships and senior projects. 

Last spring, Durant, the senior, spent a lot of time downtown at , Building 21’s IT pathway program, to learn the Python computer language. He’s also in the middle of a paid “externship” with , an engineering software company that specializes in infrastructure. The company — one of 83 outside organizations that partner with the school — sponsors five such positions each spring and summer. 

Last fall, Durant was also enrolled in a public speaking class at La Salle University, one of three colleges where Building 21 students can sign up for dual-enrollment classes. Building 21 also runs three dual enrollment classes onsite through Harrisburg University.

Like many schools that emphasize project-based and competency-based learning, it puts seniors through “capstone” projects that often summarize their learning, scratch an itch or answer a nagging question.

In one case, a student who wanted to start a theater program visited stages at nearby schools and returned to Building 21 with a detailed proposal to create a homegrown initiative, complete with budget, staffing projections and recommendations.

Another surveyed the African-American history curriculum and came away with a keen observation: When it came to Black Americans, it relied heavily on “the oppression narrative” of slavery, racism and subjugation, Shubilla recalled. “And her question was: ‘Why is there not more Black joy in the curriculum?’” 

Not only did teachers listen, they spent the following summer staring down the student’s complaint and eventually concluded that she was right. They redesigned it. 

One teacher that teaching about racial trauma opens a wound for many students of color that teachers often fail to consider. So the school added more readings and projects built around “enlightenment and empowerment,” such as a study of the crusading journalist and others.

Taken together, the experiences resonate with students, who mature quickly as they approach graduation.

Aaliyah St. Fleur, 18, a senior, admitted that she wasn’t really focused on the big picture until last fall, when she met a group of Black women doctors from the University of Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital at a medical conference. She now wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse — or perhaps a gynecologist.

More importantly, she realized that if she wants to be a doctor, she has to get serious about school. 

“I was on my grades, but iffy about it,” she admitted. “But then once I did the trip, I was like, ‘OK, my GPA has to be higher.’”

Most schools might not sympathize with a student realizing in the spring of her junior year that she must focus to get into medical school, let alone college. But Parker, Shubilla and others said she’s got time to begin building a transcript that will help get her there. Likely it will take a big investment in dual-enrollment classes come this fall, when she begins her senior year. 

No one understands that better than Aaliyah, who knows that her time in high school is short. “I’m actually paying attention.”

So it’s perhaps piling on at this point to note that, a century ago, the profoundly antisemitic beliefs of Harvard’s leaders built the cradle that nurtured the much-reviled college admissions essay. Eliminating it now in 2024 would be a concrete and dramatic repudiation of Harvard’s troubled past — and makes even more sense in the wake of last summer’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. Which Harvard also lost.

But first, some history. In the summer of 1922, President Lawrence Lowell told Langdon Marvin, a Harvard Overseer, that “apart from the Jews.” the university’s admissions method was working well. As Jerome Karabel explained in The Chosen, the problem wasn’t the process but the outcome: Too many of the wrong type of men were getting in. By 1925, when 28% of the class was Jewish, Harvard’s leaders feared the environment was so poisoned that Anglo-Saxon Protestants would no longer enroll their sons.

Marvin suggested adopting a “character standard,” like the Rhodes scholarship used, to halt “.”  So in 1926, Harvard added a personal essay that could be scrutinized to assess the applicant’s fit. 

Given Harvard’s prominence and influence, the essay soon became a fixed feature of the application at other Ivies, and eventually, universally. The Jewish population quickly fell to a more manageable 15% where it stayed until the 1950s.

Around 1975 Harvard decided that Asian kids with great grades and elite test scores were the new problem. Thankfully, application readers — like at many other elite universities — could scrutinize prospective students’ essays for additional evidence. When the plaintiffs in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case reviewed 160,000 student files they discovered — who’d have guessed it? — that on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” the University’s application readers gave Asian student of any ethnic group.

In last summer’s affirmative action decision, the court ruled unconstitutional the use of racial preferences in college admissions, putting the personal statement back in the news. In its decision, the court pointed admissions officers to a narrow path they could walk in finding evidence of an applicants’ merit from her essay. But the court’s discussion only served to underline, a century later, the essay’s subjective and fundamentally discriminatory purpose.

As any parent of a high school senior can tell you, the admissions essay is a nightmare. With the rare exception of the University of Chicago, which puts its prompts to a student vote, the topics are solipsistic and encourage applicants to stretch their experiences to the limits of credibility. Since everyone knows they’re being scrutinized unfairly, writing the personal statement becomes a metacognitive exercise in guessing what College X wants, while being told to “be yourself.” Brilliant advice for stressed out 17-year-olds emerging from puberty and trying to define themselves, by acting just like their peers.

For some the process involves hiring “counselors” who “advise” the student on how best to tell their story. High schools devote class time to helping students prepare their essays. Time that might be spent discussing actual literature, which suggest just six percent of high school graduates can do really well.

Less advantaged children tell of the or oppression to catch the eye of the application reader. Perceval Everett’s 2001 dark satire Erasure — which just netted an Oscar for best adaptation — cleverly captures the zeitgeist.

Evidence that the three data points most predictive of a student’s success in college are their high school GPA, the challenge of their course load, and their standardized test scores. In a misguided effort to increase diversity, many colleges stopped requiring test scores, but seeing the results, are now reversing course.

To the extent that colleges believe a student’s grades in English or history do not confirm his or her writing ability, they could require a graded essay from one of their junior year classes. It would be far more insightful – and less subjective than the recommendations that are the bane of many teachers’ existence. (And yes, Harvard also invented the recommendation letter as another way to ensure their students were “the right sort.”)

As we approach the 100^th anniversary of Harvard’s spawning of a racist tool to discriminate, while not appearing to do so, it would be a real sign of contrition were the leadership in Cambridge to announce they are jettisoning this shameful legacy. Apart from atoning for their own original sin, this would make it safe for other schools to follow Harvard’s example. As Harvard Law grad Joseph Welch once said, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

founded the International Charter School in Brooklyn and writes frequently on education.

But a survey by The 74 reveals the answer is more complex, that while some schools have revised their acceptance criteria based on the availability of rigorous courses, including calculus, others have not. 

Queries sent to 20 top-tier colleges and universities, many of which are recognized for their strong engineering programs, found that 11 do not require it while six strongly recommend or encourage it.

Calculus may not be a must, but it is still expected at many institutions.

looks for some applicants to complete the class if they have access to it. Likewise, , and strongly recommend or encourage at least some applicants to take the course in high school.

was alone among the 20 in still mandating calculus. In fact, the Ivy League school tells incoming freshmen that at least one of their two letters of recommendation must be from a math teacher and they are “strongly encouraged” to make that person their precalculus or calculus teacher.

Caltech dropped calculus, physics and chemistry from a list of required courses while widening students’ opportunity to showcase their abilities through other means, including the completion of online courses through the free .  

Ashley Pallie, Caltech’s executive director of undergraduate admissions, noted it was a significant shift for the STEM-intensive titan. The school had required a calculus course for decades, she said, despite pushback from applicants. 

“Every year, we would get lots of students who would write in and say, ‘I was on track to take it, but the teacher isn’t able to teach us here,’ or, ‘Not enough students signed up for the class,’ or, ‘The class isn’t offered at my high school,’” she said. “And the answer was always, ‘No. We need to have the course requirement.’ ”

But that changed when Pallie and two faculty members, who set admissions criteria, learned at a February conference on equity and college acceptance the extent to which the course is not available, particularly to low-income applicants, students of color and those living in rural areas. 

Pallie credited Melodie Baker, national policy director at , an organization that promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success, for sharing the information at that gathering. Calculus still has merit, Caltech faculty concluded, but should no longer be mandated. 

“So now it’s less about having taken the course and more about, ‘Can you showcase to us that you have proficiency and mastery?’” Pallie said. 

MIT follows a similar model; it wants incoming freshmen to have two semesters of calculus but allows them to place out of the requirement either through outside credits or by taking an Advanced Standing Examination.

Calculus is not required for admission to any school or college, including the College of Engineering and the Ross School of Business. 

And the same holds true at , , , and Johns Hopkins. 

The explanation is simple, according to one school’s spokesperson. 

“We recognize not all high schools have a calculus course available to students, so it is not required for admission to Johns Hopkins University,” said Jill Rosen.

Baker, of Just Equations, said colleges and universities should always seek to widen the opportunities for bright applicants so they can one day help solve the world’s most complex and enduring problems. 

“When math is used as it was intended, to cultivate and develop talent rather than rank and sort students, the future of STEM looks like a microcosm of the larger society,” she said. “It looks very different from what it looks like today: It looks well-represented.”

The doesn’t demand calculus for entry to any of its undergraduate programs. However, the school does prefer that students study the topic at some stage: It’s mandatory for some majors, though it can be taken at the college level. 

Still, a spokesperson for the five-college system said, “Anyone can get in without it.”

For other colleges, the answer is nuanced. Neither calculus nor precalculus is a requirement for first-year admissions at the , a spokesperson said. 

The vast U.C. system, which encompasses 10 campuses and some , does, however, note that those interested in STEM, data science and the social sciences are “strongly encouraged” to consider a math course sequence that prepares them for calculus — either during high school or in their first year at the university.

Sharon Veatch, school counseling department chair at the rural Housatonic Valley Regional High School in northwest Connecticut, follows college admissions criteria closely. Two of her former graduates are now at Harvard and a couple of others have recently graduated from Cornell. 

She said universities have become less focused on calculus in recent years: Their decision to admissions tests from consideration means they are looking at students more holistically, placing less emphasis on any one class. 

But, Veatch said, many top-ranked universities urge students to take the most rigorous course available. For those at her high school, that means Advanced Placement calculus. The campus hasn’t offered AP Statistics for years. 

“In general, when I advise students, I say, ‘You need to max out on the curriculum,’” she said. “Because that’s what I’m being told.”

Maxing out, of course, means something different from one state to another as several are reassessing their mathematics offerings.

California has tried to broaden high school students’ opportunities by providing other academic pathways, not just those that lead to calculus. 

But there’s been a push and pull between , with the state recently backtracking on a key issue for college applicants: The faculty committee that sets admissions requirements for the U.C. system that data science could no longer be a substitute for Algebra II. The state Board of Education, which oversees K-12 and is looking at reframing math statewide, soon after removed its endorsement of data science as a substitute for that subject. 

, a crown jewel in higher education in that state, recommends four years of rigorous mathematics — including algebra, geometry and trigonometry.

“We also welcome additional mathematical preparation, including calculus and statistics,” its website advises.

Calculus is not necessary for entry to the University of Wisconsin. But spokesman John Lucas said direct admittance to the engineering program is highly selective, “so, it’s rare for a student to not have taken calculus.”

Georgia Tech is a bit more explicit. Laura Simmons, an admissions counselor there, said in an , that students should take the most challenging courses available to them. If that means seeking out a dual enrollment math class at the local college, they should choose wisely.

“We’re never going to pretend that college algebra is the same as a calculus class,” she said. 

The case has generated significant outrage. The right was outraged that Harvard wants to use (and did use) race as a factor in its admissions decisions. The left is outraged that the court has now prohibited colleges from righting the wrongs of the past. And admissions officers are outraged that the justices have gotten all up in their business.

I, too, felt a bubbling anger as I read the decision — but for a different reason. It seems to me Harvard’s admissions policies just aren’t that important in the big picture. While all colleges must comply with the court’s ruling, the main impact will fall on highly selective universities, both private and public, affecting perhaps tens of thousands of students, all of whom (no matter their race) are well-positioned to become productive citizens and workers regardless.

But another type of admissions policy surely does deserve our attention as Americans, one that affects tens of millions of kids every year. And the stakes are much higher, for these unexamined policies often determine whether a child will have a realistic chance at success and leave school with the basic skills necessary to enter community college or succeed at an entry-level job. 

What am I talking about? The selective admissions criteria of the top public elementary schools.

You might think public schools are open to everyone. Unfortunately, they’re not. I’ve spent the last five years looking at the admissions criteria and enrollment procedures for America’s top public elementary schools, and they operate under an archaic and discriminatory assignment system that sorts kids into schools based on government-drawn maps.

In theory, it’s supposed to ensure that kids get to attend the public school nearest their home. That’s often not the case, as powerful parents push for assignment to better public schools in wealthier parts of town.

More importantly, the policy empowers public elementary schools — under the cover of law — to turn children away because of where they live. The most coveted public schools have zones that cover the more expensive parts of town: those with large single-family homes on large lots. Then, because of the attendance zone, everybody bids up the real estate even further, inflating home prices by as much as $300,000. The inequalities of access then become insurmountable. The vast majority of American families are priced out of these homes, and out of these coveted schools. 

In my old neighborhood in Los Angeles, living on one side of the street or the other can determine whether a child attends a public school with 75% reading proficiency or 16%. Of course, test scores aren’t everything, and I don’t believe any parent should rely solely on them when judging a school’s quality. But we should all be skeptical of someone who pays $300,000 so their kids can attend a specific public school and then turns around and argues the school isn’t actually any better than the one down the street. (This is the argument that I heard from some of my old neighbors when I suggested that the elite public elementary school in the neighborhood, Mount Washington Elementary, should be opened up to some of the working-class Hispanic families who live just blocks away.)

The great irony is that selectivity is built into Harvard’s mission and value proposition. For Harvard and other elite universities, it is a critical component of the educational experience that they offer — not to mention a key selling point — that less than 5% of applicants are offered a seat.

But that’s not how it’s supposed to work in the public schools. Being “open to all” is essential to their very nature. Many states have written it into their state constitutions. And Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, pledged that the public schools would have to be “available to all on equal terms.” Public schools betray their sacred mission when they implement selective, discriminatory enrollment policies that benefit the wealthy and powerful.

Tragically, public schools’ selective admissions criteria have not generated the outrage or judicial scrutiny that they deserve, despite the harm they’ve done to the nation’s children and the country. It’s time to end geography-based school assignments and public elementary schools cherry-pick their students.

If you’re grasping for hope, look to the community college system in California. Once upon a time, this system was based on strict geographic assignment. But enrollment started declining in the 1970s and 1980s (much as it recently has in the K-12 system), and the state had to

consider major reforms. In 1987, the legislature finally ended the archaic geographic system with a law that created true open enrollment in the community colleges. Enrollment rebounded, and the community colleges are now regarded as one of the jewels of the state. The language of the law could serve as a model today:

“It is not in the best interests of the people of the State of California that attendance at a community college be restricted to a person’s district of residence. It is the intent of the Legislature in enacting this article to provide for the unrestricted enrollment and attendance of students at community colleges, thereby providing each resident of the state an equal opportunity to attend the community college of his or her choice.”

Someday, perhaps, our political leaders will have the courage to pass similar laws providing for true open enrollment in K-12 schools.

The parsing is part of a package of materials responding to the June in admissions. The education and justice departments — which argued in favor of maintaining racial preferences in admissions — said summer enrichment camps for students from groups underrepresented in college are also allowed, as well as “pathway” programs that guarantee high school graduates a spot in the freshman class. Awarding slots in those programs based on race, however, would “trigger … strict scrutiny” from courts in light of the ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

“This moment demands a sense of urgency,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “This moment demands the same courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice we saw from leaders at the height of the civil rights movement.”

The release of the resources — a and a question-and-answer — is the second formal action the administration has taken on admissions since the decision. Last month, the Education Department held a day-long summit on ways colleges and K-12 schools can continue to legally foster diversity. And in a few weeks, Cardona said, the department will issue a report on strategies colleges already use. 

Rep. Bobby Scott, ranking Democrat on the House education committee, welcomed the guidance, but wants the department to investigate racial disparities in K-12 schools in areas like discipline, and college practices like legacy admissions that have historically favored white students. Following the court’s decision, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston nonprofit, over such policies. 

“This is important because race-conscious admissions policies were able to provide a counterbalance to factors — such as inequitable K-12 schools, racially biased admissions tests, and developmental and legacy admissions — that have discriminatory impact against students of color,” Scott said in a statement. 

He argued that some Republican leaders have misinterpreted the court’s decision, pointing to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s , for example, that racial preferences in scholarships and employment would violate the law. 

Biden officials did not specifically discuss scholarships Monday, but the document suggests institutions review policies — such as application fees, standardized testing requirements, early decision deadlines and prerequisite courses, like calculus — that could prevent Black, Hispanic and low-income students from applying to a selective institution.

Universities can still collect race and ethnicity data to plan which geographic areas to target for recruitment, for example, or where to participate in college fairs, the Biden administration said, so long as the resulting information doesn’t influence admissions decisions

Universities don’t have to “unsee” the racial makeup of their applicants, a senior department official said on the call. Students may continue to discuss race in their admissions essays, and guidance counselors can discuss a student’s battles with discrimination in a letter of recommendation. 

“Although this decision changes the landscape for admissions and higher education, it should not be used as an excuse to turn away from long-standing efforts to make those institutions more inclusive,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. 

Richard Kahlenberg, a school integration expert who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions and is a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, said some higher education institutions have taken the court’s ruling seriously and are pursuing “authentic race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity.” Those “perfectly legal” strategies include increasing financial aid for low-income students and adopting plans like those in that accept a percentage of top students from every high school.

But he said he’s also hearing that some universities are taking the “much riskier route” of basing admissions decisions on what students say about race in their personal essays.

“If universities magically get similar racial numbers without announcing new race-neutral alternatives or showing an increase in socioeconomic diversity,” he said, “I think they’re putting a litigation target on their backs.”

Although the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in college admission decisions with its June 29 decision, the ruling will not affect tribal colleges and universities, administrators said.

The Supreme Court effectively ruled 6-3 in the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

The ruling means most colleges and universities can no longer consider race when it comes to the admission process.

However, that won’t affect tribal institutions.

“Nothing is going to change at tribal colleges, and tribal colleges are open-door institutions. They’ve always been open-door institutions. That’s going to stay their policy,” said president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium Carrie Billy, Diné. “They are place-based institutions, culturally grounded, chartered by their tribes or the federal government, but serving the local community, and they’re going to continue serving that community regardless of this decision.”

It’s difficult to compare Native student enrollment at tribal colleges and universities to mainstream institutions, Billy said.

“TCUs are required to collect information based on a student’s enrollment in a federally recognized Indian tribe,” she said. “Only a handful of other institutions are required to collect this type of data, and no institutions except TCUs are required by the federal government to verify that they are only counting as ‘American Indian/Alaska Native’ those students who can document their enrollment status.”

Most, if not all, mainstream colleges and universities rely entirely on self-reporting when it comes to determining tribal identity of students. This means if a Native student doesn’t indicate they are a tribal citizen, then they are not counted as such. This policy can be flawed, Billy said.

Nonetheless, the high court’s decision will impact Native students attending mainstream institutions, which concerns Billy.

“Our concern is for those students, you know, our children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, parents, who attend other institutions of higher education and also for you know, just for all people of color, and underserved communities. Everyone deserves an equal access to affordable higher education,” she said. “So we’re very concerned about that.”

Data from 2016 from the American Indian Higher Education Consortium showed that tribal colleges and universities accounted for 67 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native student enrollment in higher education compared to mainstream universities that collected similar data.

Billy added that she has not heard much from Native students, which she attributes to the decision having been handed down during the summer, and she expects to hear more after the school year starts.

At the time of the decision, national Native organizations shared their disapproval. The American Indian Higher Education Consortium said the court essentially attempted to “slam doors of higher education shut” but promised that its advocacy on behalf of Native students would not stop.

“We were here before affirmative action, and we will be here – strong, resilient, and sovereign – after the Supreme Court’s decision this week,” a  from the organization said.

Fawn Sharp, National Congress of American Indian president, Quinault, echoed that sentiment, calling the decision “exceptionally disappointing.”

“While everyone deserves to be considered on their merits, it does more harm than good to ignore the fact that Native people were subject to genocide, colonization, and assimilation,” Sharp said in a June 30 . “Only when these realities are confronted head-on will meaningful progress be made, which is why the National Congress of American Indians will continue to fight to bring visibility to these issues and look for solutions to ensure future generations have access to the education so many of our past generations did not.”

The decision comes closely after a trend in the last couple of years in which universities or states adopted tuition waiver policies directed specifically at enrolled tribal citizens. Billy said these waivers are tailored specifically to Native Americans not as a racial group, but as a nod to the political relationship between the states and the tribes.

A number of states and higher education institutions have long offered some type of tuition waiver for Native students. Both the  and  university systems offer a waiver.

The University of Maine has had one in place since the 1930s, and more recently, the University of Arizona offered free tuition to Native students enrolled in a federally recognized tribe in Arizona. Oregon State University offers in-state tuition to any student of a federally recognized tribe.

“The tuition discounts that state governments enact are for members of either federally recognized tribes or state-recognized tribes in their state that’s, again, a political relationship. It’s not a race-based program,” Billy said. “So this decision should have no effect on them.”

Partnerships between public institutions and tribes are going to be important moving forward. Appearing on  in early July to discuss the decision, Julia Wakeford, policy director for the National Indian Education Association, said the ruling will show how serious colleges and universities are about ensuring diversity on their campuses.

“A number of these universities and colleges have come out saying that they stand by and will do whatever they can within the letter of the law, to make sure that there remains diversity on their campuses,” said Wakeford, who is Mvskoke and Yuchi.

This story was originally published at .

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that two prominent universities’ consideration of race in acceptances violated the U.S. Constitution, effectively reshaping the role of affirmative action in the college admissions process throughout higher education.

, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote that the admissions processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

“Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause,” Roberts wrote.

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“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” Roberts continued.

Because Harvard is a private institution and UNC is a public institution, this decision affects higher education across the board.

The three liberal Justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

Jackson recused herself from the Harvard portion of the decision.

Jackson participated in the debate of the UNC case but not the Harvard case because she is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and recently sat on the Harvard Board of Overseers, which is one of the two governing boards for Harvard University.

The decision stems from a 2014 lawsuit against Harvard College and a separate lawsuit against the University of North Carolina. The two suits sought to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, which is currently how universities use race-conscious admissions.

Harvard and UNC have argued that race is one of the many factors that the universities consider in admissions, along with socioeconomic status and extracurricular activities, and they make admission decisions within the guidelines set by Grutter.

Both suits were filed by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which is funded by Edward Blum, a conservative legal activist who has launched multiple lawsuits over what he sees as racial preferences in school admissions.

For the Harvard case, the group alleges that Harvard violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted compared to similarly qualified Black, Latino or Indigenous applicants. Title VI bars institutions that receive federal funding from discrimination on the basis of race.

The UNC case argues that because the university takes into consideration race in its admissions process, it violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Federal courts rejected Students for Fair Admissions’ arguments and sided with the universities.

Affirmative action  from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order barring discrimination in the workplace based on race, religion — and later gender — by those entities that received federal contracts and subcontracts.

There are nine states that have banned race-based affirmative action from being implemented in public institutions: Florida, California, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Idaho. Washington state rescinded its ban on affirmative action in 2022.

Oral arguments

, members of the court’s conservative wing, who now make up a 6-3 majority, questioned if it is legal for universities to consider race and for how long such policies should endure, pointing to a 2003 case that predicted that affirmative action would no longer be needed in 25 years.

The case, Grutter vs. Bollinger, allowed the limited use of race to be considered in college admissions, and held that race was merely one of many considerations given in an applicant. The case allowed the University of Michigan Law School to consider race in its admissions process in order to help create a diverse student body.

Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative and the only Black man on the Supreme Court, pressed lawyers defending the schools’ policies on how diversity benefited education.

“I didn’t go to racially diverse schools but there were educational benefits. And I’d like you to tell me expressly when a parent sends a kid to college that they don’t necessarily send them there to have fun or feel good or anything like that. They send them there to learn physics or chemistry or whatever they’re studying,” Thomas said to Ryan Park, the attorney representing UNC. “So tell me what the educational benefits are to that?”

During oral arguments in October of last year, 

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One likely effect is obvious. “There is going to be some closing of doors,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “It’s going to be a landscape in which it’s harder to secure access in most competitive schools.” 

But further down the line, a ruling against schools that factor race in admissions could affect a host of other academic mainstays, from scholarships to the centrality of tests like the SAT and ACT.

The ruling might not end diversity efforts outright. Granting preferential admission to low-income students, children of single parents or those from communities where students often don’t go to college could achieve similar results, experts say, without courting legal trouble. 

“ don’t want race used in admissions, but Americans do want selective institutions to be racially diverse,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and an expert on integration. He thinks the court’s decision could reflect that paradox. “They don’t want to be seen as simply dismissive of the aspiration of racial diversity.”

The court is expected to issue decisions in two lawsuits — brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina — later this month. The plaintiff in both cases argues that the weight universities place on race in admissions violates anti-discrimination laws and puts Asian American students at a disadvantage. 

‘Next generation’

While the cases don’t deal directly with K-12 schools, the high court’s decision could elevate the importance of a recent lower court ruling rejecting a legal challenge to diversity efforts at an elite Virginia high school. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., removed a rigorous admissions test and a $100 application fee, and reserved seats at the school for the top 1.5% of 8th graders in each middle school. Coalition for TJ, the plaintiff in the case, called the revised admissions criteria discriminatory against Asian American students. 

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that view. “The policy challenged here is not just race-neutral: It is race blind,” Fourth Circuit of Appeals Judge Toby Heytens wrote in the

The conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said board members’ desire to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students at the school motivated the new policy. They plan to ask the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit. 

Kahlenberg, who testified on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions about race-neutral alternatives, called the TJ case a “next generation issue.”

If the Supreme Court rules that universities can no longer ask applicants to identify their race, they might see the Fairfax case as a chance to “spell out in further detail the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable,” he said. “I think the answer will be that the TJ program is perfectly fine.” 

‘Formative experiences’

The college admissions industry, meanwhile, has been preparing for the end of affirmative action for months. Beginning in August, for example, colleges can hide a student’s race if it’s included in the , a uniform application for undergraduate admissions accepted at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide.  

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Counselors earlier this year to review all of their policies and practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and to examine any area, such as mission statements and recruitment efforts, where race is a factor — “no matter how minor” — to determine if changes are needed.

Organizations that focus on high school graduation and college enrollment say they plan to continue to identify students who would be the first in their families to attend college, regardless of race. 

“In some ways for us, it will be business as usual — to serve underserved students. That’s been really the heart of our work long before this became a hot-button issue,” said Pam Johnson Davis, director of fellow support for OneGoal, a nonprofit that works in eight states to increase graduation and college enrollment rates. Eighty-six percent of the students served by the organization are Black or Hispanic. She supports 400 “fellows” in the Chicago area who are already in college or another postsecondary program.

If students are barred from bringing up their race even in their admissions essays — a hypothetical scenario that came up during Supreme Court — teachers at OneGoal schools would still encourage students to write about barriers they overcame to pursue education, Davis said.

Facing discrimination, raising younger siblings, translating for parents who don’t speak English — “these are really formative experiences in students’ lives,” she said. “Their stories will be shaped by their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Stephen Barker, a spokesman for the organization, added that opportunities for Black and Hispanic high school students to earn college credit could become more important for colleges and universities if the court strikes down affirmative action in admissions. 

“Institutions need to double down on those partnerships [with districts] if they want to keep that diversity going in a race-neutral way,” he said.

But he said it’s hard to predict what importance universities might place on other aspects of a student’s application, including GPAs, honors classes, and SAT and Advanced Placement exam scores if race no longer factors into the equation.

The potential end of affirmative action in admissions a growing movement away from requiring the SAT or ACT for admission, with some researchers and advocates for educational equity arguing the tests are biased against Black and Hispanic students and . According to FairTest, an advocacy group, are now test-optional or don’t even accept the exams.

But others say that criticism of the tests is misguided and that they still serve as a good predictor of how well students will perform in college. Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, said are “deeply vetted” to remove content that might disadvantage minority students. GPAs, he added, are less controversial, but large remain.

He doesn’t think the test-optional trend is only about removing barriers for Black and Hispanic applicants. Admissions officers may have other motivations, he said.

“Either [universities]think that the exams aren’t so important or … they, for financial reasons, desire an excuse for admitting more affluent students with less academic preparation,” he said.

With or without admissions exams, the end of race-conscious admissions would put more pressure on K-12 counselors serving Black and Hispanic students, Kahlenberg said.

“For years, the [private] prep school kids have had the upper hand. There are fewer students per counselor and they can put time into writing impressive letters [of recommendation],” he said. “Here’s an opportunity for public school counselors to paint a picture of students who have done remarkably well despite the barriers.”

, part of a series of studies conducted in the wake of high-profile litigation against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, shows that Hispanic and African American applicants to both colleges enjoy substantial advantages relative to whites and Asian Americans. Their chances of acceptance are drastically higher than they would be in the absence of affirmative action, but with a somewhat counterintuitive addendum: preferential treatment is relatively weaker for minority applicants from poor and working-class backgrounds than it is for their peers from more affluent families.

Those findings, and those of the preceding papers, are built on data that was made publicly available during the discovery phase of two lawsuits — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — that were before the court. Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and the studies’ lead author, has provided expert testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim that the storied institutions have systematically discriminated against Asian applicants. In an interview with The 74, he said he hoped his work would help clarify the public debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

“So much of the debate about affirmative action is happening in this binary where you’re either for it or against it,” Arcidiacono observed. “But there’s a large range of possibilities, from just [using] race as a tiebreaker to fully equal outcomes. So in order to get a sense for whether affirmative action has gone too far or has not gone far enough, you have to understand the role that race plays currently, and you can’t do that without the data.”

Those questions are becoming more concrete by the month. in the case, which will be heard in the 2022-23 term. With plaintiffs asking the nation’s highest court to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in the college application process, and Republicans in Congress that would force colleges to publicize their use of non-academic characteristics in admissions, the stage is being set for a major rollback of affirmative action as it has been practiced for half a century. According to Arcidiacono’s latest study, a significant reversal could shrink the percentage of African American students admitted to Harvard by more than two-thirds.

Georgetown economist Harry Holzer finds those projections plausible. A proponent of race-based affirmative action, he signed (alongside multiple Nobel laureates) defending Harvard’s policies that was filed in a lower-court iteration of the suit. Arcidiacono’s line of research “makes reasonable points,” Holzer said, while arguing that it does not invalidate the use of racial considerations by admissions officers. 

“It doesn’t change my support for affirmative action to see his numbers, though I certainly don’t disagree with the research findings. It shows that when very elite schools practice affirmative action in admissions, which they do, it does effectively raise the admission rate for people of color — especially African Americans — by a lot.” 

Race & class

Arcidiacono and his coauthors dug into admissions records for over 300,000 domestic applicants to the admissions classes of 2014–2019, of which roughly 142,000 applied to Harvard, 57,000 applied to UNC as in-state candidates, and 105,000 applied to the same college from out of state. Applicant-level information included demographic attributes such as race and socioeconomic status, as well as richly detailed academic records covering high school grades, standardized test scores, and individual ratings from admissions officers across a range of academic and non-academic indicators. 

Combining high school GPA, SAT scores, and scores on SAT II subject tests, the research team created academic ratings for each applicant and ranked them by decile (a statistical measurement dividing data into 10 equal parts). The lowest-performing students were grouped into the bottom 10 percent and the strongest performers grouped into the top 10 percent. Most African Americans fell into the bottom 20 percent of all applicants to both Harvard and UNC, but they were admitted at the highest rate for almost every performance decile, followed by Hispanic, white, and Asian applicants.

The acceptance gaps between categories are largest around the middle of the spectrum for academic qualifications, with African Americans applying to Harvard being accepted at a rate double that of Hispanics — and 12 times greater than Asian Americans — at the fifth decile (i.e., between the 41st and 50th percentile of qualifications). For out-of-state applicants to UNC, African Americans at the fifth decile were almost 33 times more likely to be accepted than Asian Americans and 14 times more likely than whites. 

Overall, Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood that an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. For out-of-state applicants to UNC, the force of racial preferences multiplied African Americans from 1.5 percent of admitted students to 15.6 percent, a tenfold increase. Black applicants applying in-state to Chapel Hill gained a smaller advantage from affirmative action, becoming 70 percent likelier to win admission.

Beyond these general calculations, the authors noticed a peculiar interaction between race and class. While white applicants from lower-income families appear to receive an advantage in admissions relative to wealthier whites with similar academic profiles, disadvantaged African Americans and Hispanics do not. Affluent applicants of color therefore receive a comparatively larger boost over affluent white applicants than poor and working-class students of color enjoy over poor and working-class whites. 

Holzer said the substantive arguments in favor of affirmative action — particularly the educational value of maintaining a racially diverse campus — “don’t require that the specific recipient face bias or barriers in the past.” Still, he asserted that low-income students of color deserve “extra credit” not only for their race but also their class background.

“If the bump for just being African American is really large, you could imagine that maybe [admissions officers] think, ‘We’re already taking care of that problem,’” Holzer said. “But for someone like me, who thinks that class really matters a lot, you want to make sure that lower-income students of color get consideration.”

Arcidiacono argued that the large edge claimed by some wealthy students, even if they come from historically excluded groups, risks eroding public faith in the fairness of admissions altogether. Disillusionment already exists not only due to long-running patterns of underrepresentation, he added, but also newer blots such as the Varsity Blues scandal, which saw moneyed parents conniving with college employees and private admissions counselors to game the system.

“This is in the context of a system that completely favors people who come from richer backgrounds,” Arcidiacono said, listing the factors already favoring upper-class applicants: ready access to college counselors, special weight placed on extracurricular activities, and recruitment for sports like sailing and golf.

“To me, one of the arguments for affirmative action would be that you’re trying to build trust in the system for a group that has been traditionally disenfranchised. But the way you do that matters, and it’s not really hitting the poorer African Americans — they’re not the ones benefiting the most.” 

The ‘narrowly tailored’ standard

The Supreme Court will consider Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard this fall, eight years after it was first filed in federal district court. When a decision is finally reached, the case could fundamentally alter the practice of affirmative action in college admissions and, with it, the racial composition of some of the country’s most prestigious schools.

Existing Court precedent was set in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case, in which a plaintiff alleged that preference systems at public graduate schools — in that instance, the University of Michigan Law School — illegally disadvantaged white students on racial grounds. A majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor found instead that “the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions” was constitutionally permissible, while adding that the issue would be ripe for reexamination within 25 years. That deadline has nearly elapsed, and the Harvard litigants seek to reopen the question of whether affirmative action has been “narrowly tailored” to begin with.

The case, along with the corresponding UNC suit, centers on the accusation by a group of Asian American students that Harvard’s policies unfairly disfavored them relative to applicants from every other racial group. Although the admissions candidates with the highest GPAs and test scores are disproportionately Asian American — showed that about one-quarter of Asian high school graduates scored above a 1400 on the SAT, compared with 8 percent of whites, 2 percent of Hispanics, and 1 percent of African Americans — they were consistently graded lower according to Harvard’s personality scores. A released by Arcidiacono and his colleagues suggested that, absent the subjective penalty that Asian applicants face, they would be admitted at a rate 19 percent higher than currently prevails.

The findings instantiated a theory that first gained widespread attention a decade ago, when one right-wing commentator that Asian Americans were tacitly being held back by admissions quotas lest they grow to dominate Ivy League campuses. Although Asian high schoolers were routinely among the top-performing students in the United States, their numeric presence on elite campuses peaked around 1990 and remained roughly the same over the next 20 years.

Trends in Asian American college enrollment were the focus of by the Manhattan Institute. Author Robert VerBruggen, a journalist and fellow at the conservative think tank, noted that the unmistakable stagnation in representation — which occurred even as Asians were continually growing as a percentage of all college aspirants — began to lift about about a decade ago. Whether that was connected to the growing focus on apparent discrimination is unclear.

“It’s an interesting question why that’s happened, but it’s certainly consistent with the narrative that everybody started making a stink about it, lawsuits were filed, and schools got a lot more careful about what they were doing,” Verbruggen said.

The release of the schools’ data allowed researchers to investigate trends in admissions beyond purported anti-Asian bias. In a widely covered , Arcidiacono and his co-authors calculated that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard between 2014 and 2019 were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of university faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (i.e., relatives of potential high-dollar donors). Another postulated that the school, which has its efforts to diversify, may African American students who stand virtually no chance of gaining admission. 

“In some sense, there’s this uneasy compromise that works to the detriment of Asian Americans and poor whites,” Arcidiacono said. “You’ve got the racial preferences helping underrepresented minorities get into certain colleges, and you’ve got the legacy and athlete preferences helping rich, disproportionately white kids get into college.”

A Supreme Court ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could leave that system profoundly changed, upsetting the demographic mix that elite schools have worked hard to cultivate. By Arcidiacono’s accounting, the proportion of African Americans admitted to Harvard over the period he studied would have been less than 1 percent if acceptance was offered on the basis of academic qualifications alone; those admitted to UNC in-state or out-of-state would sink to 4.3 percent and less than 2 percent, respectively. At the same time, the percentage of Asian Americans would have risen substantially — to over 50 percent of all admitted students, in Harvard’s case.

While oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t come for months, the recently announced recusal of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a promising sign for the plaintiffs. With the departure of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has lost two members who had previously ruled in favor of race-based affirmative action in postsecondary education.

Whatever the legal outcome, VerBruggen said that Arcidiacono’s work offered considerable value simply by shining a light on the internal admissions processes in two highly competitive universities.

“Schools are so tight-lipped about their affirmative action policies that we don’t have a lot of data on them,” he remarked. “If you want to know what’s going on in a school, you basically have to sue them.”