High School Seniors Are Applying to College Without Affirmative Action. We Know How This Will Go.

They say the U.S. looks to California to see its future—and in the case of affirmative action, the Golden State was about 25 years ahead of the Supreme Court.

In the early 1990s, the state’s violent crime rate was peaking and the economy was going through a painful recession—prompting a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. In response, state Republicans proposed a ballot measure to ban affirmative action at California’s public universities. In 1996, Proposition 209 passed with a comfortable margin of 55 to 45 percent, making California the first state to ban race-based admissions policies in its higher education system—long before the Supreme Court effectively banned it nationwide.

In the years afterward, several states would do the same: Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Idaho all banned affirmative action in public universities. (Washington banned it in 1998 but then rescinded the ban in 2022.)

The experiences of these state university systems vary, but the ones that had large, elite institutions found, almost uniformly, that incoming freshman classes became notably less diverse soon after the removal of affirmative action. That was particularly true in California and Michigan—something the school systems there tried very hard to warn us about.

Now, as the Class of 2024 sets its sights on college, it becomes the first group of students in almost half a century to do so without the option of applying to schools with affirmative action policies.

Affirmative action was first introduced to desegregate workplaces in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order that made it unlawful for federal contractors to withhold employment because of a person’s race, religion, gender, or national origin. Then, in 1978, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that opened the door for that principle to be extended to university admissions: An applicant’s minority status could be used as a determining factor in college admissions.

In 1965 only about 5 percent of college students between 18 and 24 years old were Black. After that, Black students’ college enrollment began to inch upward. In 1970 about 8 percent of college students were Black; by 1980, that number had risen to about 9 percent and in 1990 reached 11 percent.

By 2008, Black undergraduate enrollment had increased to nearly 14 percent, while Black Americans made up about 12 percent of the U.S. population. Black students weren’t the only people to benefit from this shift either. Research suggests that diversifying education advantages students across the board: The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, found that integrated classrooms promote creativity, motivation, deeper learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. They can also help reduce racial bias and counter stereotypes.

All of that progress was essentially undone when the high court ruled on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in June, though the justices did leave some loopholes: Schools can still consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life” in an essay, so long as that applicant is still “treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”

But if California’s experience is any lesson, that vague exception may do little to make up for the loss of affirmative action.

An amicus brief filed by the University of California chancellors in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case—detailing the school’s failed efforts to diversify its campuses after the state ban on affirmative action—included some sobering data. In 1995, before Proposition 209 had been enacted, Black students made up about 7 percent of UCLA’s freshman class. By 1998, two years after the ban, Black students’ presence at UCLA shrunk to about 3 percent of the campus population. Latinx students experienced a similarly stark drop-off, accounting for about 22 percent of UCLA’s freshman class in 1995, then plummeting to about 10 percent in 1998. This happened despite Black students consistently representing about 8 percent of California’s public high school graduates in 1998 and Latinx students representing 31 percent.

UC–Berkeley’s campus had a similar experience. Black students made up about 6 percent of its freshman class in 1995 and dropped to only about 3 percent in 1998; Latinx students were about 16 percent of Berkeley’s freshman class in 1995, but only about 7 percent in 1998.

Even though the schools’ board of regents initially supported getting rid of affirmative action, the institutions ended up scrambling for ways to connect with prospective Black and brown students and to stop their numbers from plummeting further. Robert Berdahl, UC–Berkeley’s chancellor at the time, said he would “personally phone as many of these students” as he could. In 2001 the school system started comprehensive and holistic reviews of applicants and embraced an admissions policy that looked beyond an applicant’s grades and test scores to include life experiences. More recently, it completely eliminated the use of standardized tests. It also expanded its statewide eligibility program in 2012, which guarantees admission into the California public university system to students that graduate within the top 9 percent of their class (instead of the top 4 percent), and stopped legacy admissions.

But these efforts didn’t make up for the loss of affirmative action. This year, as the Supreme Court considered Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the UC system came forward and presented itself as a cautionary tale. Its chancellors submitted an amicus brief detailing how, despite the UC system’s best efforts spanning nearly a quarter century, in 2019, its campuses failed to reflect the level of diversity among California’s public high school graduates. (For example, 52 percent of high school graduates were Latinx; only 25 percent of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses were Latinx.)

In a study published in 2020, Zachary Bleemer, a labor economist at Princeton, took a deep dive into what happened to diversity in admissions at UC schools from 1994 to 2002, looking at roughly 400,000 students who’d applied to UC schools, whether or not they had gotten in. In addition, he also looked at about 2,000 incoming freshmen who had chosen not to apply to UC schools.

He found that almost all of the decline in incoming Black and Hispanic students occurred on the campuses of Berkeley and UCLA, which are considered UC’s elite and most-competitive schools. Bleemer estimates that about one-third of the decline was driven by a change in behavior—students choosing not to apply to UC schools—and about two-thirds was driven by policy changes, namely the end of affirmative action leading to more students of color being rejected.

Bleemer found that many of the underrepresented minority students (composed of Black, Hispanic, Chicano, and Native American students) who didn’t apply to Berkeley and UCLA actually had the grades to get in—they just chose not to apply. Students who applied but were rejected from Berkeley and UCLA ended up at less selective, lower-quality schools.

Knowing there wasn’t any kind of affirmative action policy in place, Bleemer believes that these students likely assumed they wouldn’t have had a shot at being admitted to UC’s elite schools. And the actual decline of Black and Hispanic students on campus may have made the experience for those who did get accepted worse—these students may have felt more and more alone on campus, and less and less welcome.

Bleemer’s conclusions are specific to the top UC schools, which are unique as public institutions because they are so highly selective. Indeed, these schools often serve as a launchpad into higher-income employment, something that Bleemer’s research has found has a disproportionately positive impact on the Black, Latinx, and Native American graduates of these universities.

For less-selective schools, Bleemer’s research suggests, affirmative action isn’t as important. At, say, the University of Nebraska or Idaho—where the admittance rate hovered around 80 percent between 2021 and 2022—getting rid of affirmative action didn’t change much. “They just didn’t have very substantial affirmative action programs in the first place,” said Bleemer of these public schools. “Because, of course, they were hardly rejecting anyone.”

In other words, affirmative action actually did what it was supposed to do: It provided avenues for social mobility for Americans who were underrepresented at the most prosperous levels of society. Bleemer’s study found that students of color really do lose out economically without affirmative action—they literally earn less money. “By the mid-2010s, Prop 209 had caused a cumulative decline in the number of early-career [underrepresented minority] Californians earning over $100,000 by at least three percent,” he wrote.

“The majority seems to think that race blindness solves the problem of race-based disadvantage,” Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion against the high court’s affirmative action decision. But the irony of ignoring the race-linked opportunity gap in the U.S. is that it will only make it worse. “It will delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive, regardless of race,” she wrote.

In its amicus brief, the UC system argued that race-based admissions policies are a necessary bridge for elite schools to reach racial minorities, a conclusion Bleemer also came to as a result of his research. “There’s no silver-bullet policy that comes out of California that allows you to continue enrolling with a level of racial diversity that race-based preferences allowed,” he said. (In 2020 California tried to reinstate affirmative action in its public school system through a ballot measure, but it did not pass.)

The University of Michigan also submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court attesting to its failed efforts to boost diversity after Michigan banned affirmative action in 2006.

Between 2006 and 2021, Black undergraduate enrollment at U of M went from about 7 percent to only 4 percent, despite the total amount of Black college-aged students in Michigan increasing from 16 to 19 percent. It remained this way even though the school system implemented many of the same programs as the UC school system to try to keep it stable. And once those numbers drop, it can kick off a vicious cycle.

“Low numbers of enrolled minority students makes it harder to recruit,” wrote Timothy Lynch, vice president and general counsel of U of M, alongside other university officials in the amicus brief. Lynch explained that without affirmative action, minority students who still gain admission to the school may opt not to attend because they may assume, given U of M’s low admission rates, that its campus is “unfriendly toward minorities.”

Both the UC and U of M school systems emphasized that a United States without affirmative action is a blow to higher education. “If the student body of a state’s flagship university—whose mission is to educate the state’s future leaders—is severely out of step with the larger applicant pool,” said UC’s amicus brief, “people may conclude that the pathway to leadership is not truly open to all, thereby undermining future leaders’ ‘legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry.’ ”

How are selective schools preparing for this new admissions world? Harvard already announced updates to its 2024 application, which features a revamped essay section that poses this question: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?” Occidental College, a small, private school in Los Angeles, recently announced that it would end legacy admissions; broaden outreach efforts to low-income families; and expand its fly-in program to give students who would not otherwise be able to visit the campus a chance to do so. “We want students from diverse backgrounds to know they are welcome here, and to not be discouraged by the Supreme Court’s decision,” said Courtney Stricklin, senior associate dean of admissions for Occidental, in an email to Slate.

The Department of Education attempted to offer some guidance to colleges and universities on how to navigate a new college admissions season without affirmative action. “This may mean redoubling efforts to recruit and retain talented students from underserved communities,” wrote Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights under the Department of Education. She emphasized that schools can still consider students’ experiences with race and that they should “identify potential barriers posed by existing metrics that may reflect and amplify inequality, disadvantage or bias.”

Whatever schools try to do to counter the recent changes is likely to be closely watched, and contentious. Shortly after the Supreme Court issued its affirmative action decision, Students for Fair Admissions began circulating a letter warning colleges that “racially exclusive scholarships internships and other education programs have always been illegal.” While that’s not actually true—colleges are technically still allowed to offer those—some state officials have started to ban race-based scholarships. Other schools may simply decide it’s better to be safe than sorry and eliminate them out of fear of litigation. After all, opponents of affirmative action won once, and our country is poorer for it.