A Confusing New World for College Applicants

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From “The New York Times“, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily“.

Last summer —

We begin tonight with the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action and reshaping college admissions.

— in a landmark ruling, the US Supreme Court overturned nearly 50 years of precedent and banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

In a 6 to 3 decision, the justices ruled that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Constitution.

In doing so, the court eliminated the single most powerful tool for ensuring diversity on America’s college campuses and forced college admissions officers and high school seniors to figure out what the college admissions process should look like when race can no longer be taken into account.

It’s college application season, a stressful time for high school seniors and their parents. But now, six months since affirmative action was repealed, things are even more uncertain for many Black students across the country.

Today, “Daily” producer, Jessica Cheung, documents how over the past year, both students and college officials tried to navigate the new rules. It’s Friday, January 5th.

So this past July, just two weeks after the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, I flew to Rochester, New York to meet some of the students who are part of this first historic class to apply to college under an affirmative action ban.

A group of about 90 high school seniors had also flown in from all across the country to Nazareth University. They were brought here by Pure Forward, a nonprofit that helps mostly Black and Hispanic students from low income communities apply to college. And they had gathered here for a workshop on how to make their college essay stand out.

We’re going in now.

OK. I walked into a small classroom with an instructor and 5 seniors who were sitting facing a whiteboard scribbling into their spiral notebooks with tips on how to write the perfect college essay envisioning that no one else know who you are hundreds of students they’ve never met you. They cannot see who you are. So, what makes you different?

The college essay is a high stakes genre of writing that is supposed to capture everything a 17-year-old is and was and everything he or she could offer to the college of their dreams.

And with that high stakes genre are rules, rules about what to do.

Write a hook.

Show, don’t tell.

And rules about what not to do. Many of the students told me about certain edicts around the college essay. Don’t write a sob story. No COVID. No dying grandparents. These are topics that won’t set you apart from the batch.

But what about an applicant’s race. Historically, race could offer an edge to these students, but in its ruling banning affirmative action, the Supreme Court said that colleges couldn’t do that anymore. Using race as a factor in admissions is no longer legal, and to play it safe, many of the schools these kids are applying to have decided to hide what they call the race box, which means that while students might still check the box that corresponds with their race, the schools will be blind to it. So, unlike any other applicants before them, this year’s class of high school seniors face a new dilemma.

With the race box gone, the question becomes, should students write about race, or should they avoid it altogether, and could writing about race actually work against them?

But by the end of the session, the instructor never brought any of this up.

So during their lunch break, I walked into the dining hall to ask students of color how they were all thinking about this.

I walked over to a table strewn with pizza crust and leftover french fries, and at that table, I met two kids sitting next to each other. Their name tags read Jordan Williams and Francesco Macias from the Bronx.

Jordan told me he wants to be a corporate lawyer, and Francesco wants to be an electrical engineer.

He patiently explained to me that a Tesla coil is a tightly bound coil of wires that can produce a spark. He made it for his eighth grade science fair.

Francesco combs by his passion pretty naturally.

When his grandfather emigrated from Ecuador in the 1960s, he settled in Queens doing laundry at a hospital. Francesco’s dad grew up there and eventually became a technician for buildings around the city, so Francesco grew up tinkering and building stuff with his dad. At one point, they built a computer he found on the sidewalk using spare parts from other computers that were thrown away.

When Francesco was 12, he started watching YouTube videos of engineers exploding Coke bottles and making roving hoverboards. And when he looked at where many of these engineers went to college, time and again, he saw one name. MIT. And that became his dream.

Francesco did everything right to make himself an attractive candidate. He has a 4.0, and he has more extracurricular activities than he can possibly list on the Common Application, which includes student body vice president, engineering club, community service, woodworking, school theater, and he’s a third degree black belt in taekwondo. But his test scores are lower than MIT’S average, and now he thinks the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action won’t give him the boost normally given to Latino students like him.

With MIT’S acceptance rate at just 4.8 percent, losing this upper hand feels like a big loss. And so, other parts of his application are rising to a new level of importance. Most crucially, his essay.

He told me he’s writing about his leather briefcase —

— that helped him conquer his shyness, helped him gain confidence, and make friends. But he was struggling with whether or not his story should include his race.

Jordan the aspiring corporate lawyer was sitting next to us quietly listening this whole time.

I asked what was in his essay so far.

He said the movie training day taught him to question conventional wisdom.

Jordan told me more about himself. He could have written about a lot of things. As a Black kid raised by a single mom, he knew his biological dad, but his dad chose not to be an active part in Jordan’s life. And so, he would get himself into trouble succumbing to peer pressure, but his grandfather encouraged him to set his own course in life and focus on school. And now, he’s an honor roll student. But none of that was in his Training Day essay.

Francesco and Jordan weren’t the only ones confused. As I talked to more students at the workshop, it was clear that the confusion over the ruling was everywhere.

jessica cheung

Yeah.

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I don’t really know what’s going on.

They told me they were worried and uncertain of what it meant for them.

And there was panic over news that was being shared on Instagram —

— about how the University of Missouri and the University of Kentucky would go beyond the ruling and end race based scholarships.

And in the absence of answers, some were making up their own, sometimes wrongly.

And so, it’s leading some students to hide their race.

And with all of this misinformation floating around —

— these questions and confusions eventually made their way inside the classroom —

— into the next session, when two students sparred over, if you don’t indicate your race in your essay, would colleges know at all?

And if you apply for financial aid as students said, they would know, wouldn’t they?

And if the schools knew their race, what would they do with that information? There was a pause. I waited for the adults in the room to give some sort of answer.

But, no. The writing coach gently guided their attention back to class.

I eventually looked into this, and the schools in fact wouldn’t know a student’s race from financial aid forms, but no one at the workshop told the kids this.

So, the writing workshop continued business as usual. Between classes, I’d asked the head of Pure Ford, which is guiding all these kids, how their guidance would change as a result of the affirmative action ban. He said it doesn’t. He told me they were still waiting to hear more from colleges themselves about how the ruling might change their admissions formula.

So after the workshop, I started reaching out to those admissions offices, and it turns out the people charged with implementing the court’s decision are just as confused as the students applying.

We’ll be right back.

After my trip to the writing workshop in Rochester, I wanted to get a better understanding of how admissions offices around the country were going to change. Out of the thousands of universities and colleges in the US, a small percentage, some put the number around 10 percent, are actually affected by the decision, the ones who are practicing affirmative action in the first place. But the small percentage are the most selective in the United States. Think the top 100 colleges in the US News and World Report, colleges that are known for their outsized ability to help students from poor backgrounds become high earners after graduation. So, these were the colleges I started to call.

I called over 30 people inside the admissions world.

Some admissions offices never responded to my requests. Some admissions offices wanted to talk, but were vetoed by their general counsel. Some would only talk to me off the record.

And that’s because colleges are treading this new terrain cautiously. No school wants to end up in a legal battle like Harvard did, who was a defendant on the case that led to the overturning of affirmative action. The trial unearthed embarrassing discoveries about Harvard’s notoriously opaque admissions system, including something called a personal score, which admissions officers use to rank traits like an applicant’s self-confidence and likability and routinely scored Asian applicants near the bottom. And Harvard is still being investigated for its admission practices.

But the other admissions officers that did talk to me started to give me a sense of what it’s like inside the schools.

Matt McGann is the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Amherst College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts. It has an acceptance rate of seven percent.

Currently, about half of its student body are students of color.

McGann told me that before the ruling, Amherst achieved this diverse student body in part by considering race among a variety of factors. Do you play a sport? Do you play the French horn? Did you grow up white and on a farm, or Black in an inner city? Race was just one piece of the puzzle.

What McGann told me is something I heard from every admissions office I talked to, that race by itself was not determinative. But the Supreme Court disagreed, saying that race was determinative for a significant percentage of admitted Black and Hispanic students at Harvard and UNC. And now places like Amherst have lost their ability to consider race.

When the affirmative action cases got to the Supreme Court’s door, McGann along with many administrators at Amherst sent an amicus brief to the court and predicted that without affirmative action, the number of Black students on their campuses will drop from seven percent to two percent.

And after the court’s ruling, McGann and his team at Amherst pored over the decision, which came in the form of a 237 page PDF.

But what does being in compliance mean exactly? Unlike with sports, orchestra, and geographic status, race is now off the table. But what if participating in an extracurricular like the Black Student Union has to do with race? How would that work?

The Dean at Amherst isn’t the only one scratching his head over this ruling. In several on and off the record conversations with current and former deans of admissions, they expressed tremendous uncertainty about how all of this was going to work. How do you not consider race when it can be so apparent in things like a student’s extracurriculars, their last name, their essay topic?

But as I continued to talk to admissions officers, I finally started to get somewhere. They seemed to all point to a key passage in the decision that was in this moment of darkness a kind of north star. Chief Justice Roberts wrote it, and it goes, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But he says, a benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination, or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated on the basis of his or her experiences as an individual, not on the basis of race.

So, what does that mean? Roberts says that if a student does write about race, you as the admissions officer will now have to connect race to a lived experience, like overcoming discrimination. Then, you’d have to explain how overcoming discrimination uniquely connects to the mission of the college, like how overcoming discrimination shows resilience and promise. And these are the students that we’re looking for. The distinctions between race and race as a lived experience is a granular distinction, and I wasn’t sure how it would play out.

But by the fall, as colleges launched their applications on the Common App, I began to notice a new kind of essay question pop up.

Over and over again, I kept seeing schools introduce new supplemental essay prompts that draw words directly from Roberts passage. Prompts like, talk about lived experiences and how you could uniquely contribute to their campus. It was a subtle change, but a change nonetheless.

For example, Brown University used to ask its applicants to write, quote, about a time when you were challenged by a perspective that differed from your own. Here, it allowed applicants to argue that by simply belonging to a minority group, other students can learn from them and vice versa. It relied on a previous Supreme Court precedent that says colleges can use affirmative action to create a diverse learning environment. But after the overturning of that precedent, Brown replaced it with a new prompt this year with words drawn directly from Roberts. It read, share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community.

The key change here is that there is now a right kind of race essay and a wrong kind. And in the end, I found that at least 20 selective colleges, including several in the Ivey League, had changed their essay questions this year using words from Robert’s passage. But the students this year will have a hard time understanding this distinction on their own.

In my conversations with admissions deans, they told me their schools were still committed to diversity, but the schools are in a bit of a bind. If they produce the same level of racial diversity in the incoming year as the year before the ruling, they put themselves at legal risk. The anti-affirmative action opposition are on the lookout for schools that, behind the closed doors of admissions offices, are practicing a kind of under-the-table affirmative action.

I talked to Jeff Brenzel who was the Dean of Admissions at Yale but is now working with Morehouse College to figure out what this new world of admissions is starting to look like. He crunched the numbers. He estimates that there will be a 20 to 30 percent drop in Black enrollment in the top 100 colleges. He says he expects HBCUs like Morehouse to catch some of those 20 to 30 percent, but it’s unclear how many of those students those colleges can actually support.

And as for Latino students, no one I talked to has speculated on where they might wind up. I asked McGann at Amherst, given all of this, whether students of color are applying this year will have a harder time getting into schools, schools like Amherst.

Just weeks before Francesco submitted his application to MIT, I call him after school.

I wanted to know where he landed, whether he ended up mentioning race in his application essay.

He says even though race is still a big part of who he is, it’s not the thing he wants admissions officers to see.

His decision is fueled in part by the same narrative I heard from the other students at the workshop six months ago, which is this feeling of increasing distrust. Francesco knew that affirmative action guaranteed that his race could only help him, but now that that protection is gone, he’s worried that the discrimination he sees everywhere else in the world could now enter the admissions process.

A few weeks ago, I met up with Jordan, who if you remember was working on his essay on the movie Training Day. He ended up scrapping that all together. He said he thought more about the court’s ruling, and unlike Francesco, he decided he would not only mention his race, but he was going to dedicate the topic of his essay to his identity about growing up as a Black kid in the Bronx, he said. If the Supreme Court ruling says race doesn’t matter, he’s saying race matters to me and this is how.

And that’s the choice a generation of 17-year-olds is having to make in a moment as formative as applying to college. Do they choose to define themselves by their race like Jordan, or do they hide their race like Francesco? And while that choice may or may not mean the difference between getting in and not, it will almost certainly shape how they see themselves and how they think the world sees them.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the bombing attack that killed 84 people in Iran on Wednesday, a claim that according to the Times aligns with an intelligence assessment by American officials. The claim is significant because some Iranian leaders had initially sought to blame Israel for the attack, raising fears that Israel’s war in Gaza could widen into a regional conflict. Now that ISIS has said it was responsible, that possibility seems less likely.

And new documents released by congressional Democrats show that during Donald Trump’s presidency, his businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments, most of it from China. The transactions offer concrete evidence that Trump engaged in the kind of conduct that congressional Republicans allege that President Biden did as they try, so far without success, to build a case for impeaching him.

Today’s episode was reported and produced by Jessica Cheung with help from Will Reid. It was edited by Lynsea Garrison and Michael Benoist, fact checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker and Rohini Niemisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.