How will universities handle diversity goals now that affirmative action is illegal? 

As universities across the country settle into the fall semester, and high school seniors begin applications for fall 2025, declining enrollment and the elimination of diversity considerations in admissions are contributing to structural shifts in higher education, influencing student choices and experiences. 

U.S. News & World Report recently released its Best National University Rankings for the U.S., with a category for diversity of student enrollment. The top-ranked school, Princeton University, claims a current minority enrollment of 50 percent, but of this number only 19 percent are underrepresented minorities — that is, students who are disproportionately underrepresented in higher education relative to the proportion of that group in the population.

New York University, ranked #30, has a minority enrollment of 49 percent, with 24 percent underrepresented.  

Admissions practices on campuses across the country changed in response to the June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court elimination of affirmative action in its Students for Fair Admissions decision. And these changes may have long-lasting effects. The decision prohibits university admissions officials from considering race or ethnicity when evaluating applicants.

Individual experiences, including “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life,” can be considered in the admissions process, but decisions cannot be rendered “on the basis of race.”

While applicants may address diversity in their essays, evaluation forms no longer list “diversity” as a positive factor. 

At many colleges, the percentage of Black students in the first-year class dropped in the fall of 2024, while at others it did not, or it did not drop more than the percentage of white students. However, some institutions recalculated their race and ethnicity data from 2023, ostensibly to present a more positive view of the numbers in 2024.

It is clear that affirmative action did contribute directly to an increase in access for qualified underrepresented minority students to higher education. While it is too early to assess the impact of the 2023 SCOTUS decision, information from states that had banned affirmative action prior to 2023 indicates that the percentage of underrepresented minority students on college campuses likely will decrease in other states in the coming years. 

“Diversity” refers to many kinds of difference, and not necessarily just to one underrepresented identity. Not only are fewer students identifying with a single racial or ethnic category, more students are electing not to check the race-ethnicity box at all. This shifting data impedes the ability to get a clear picture of the immediate impact of the end of race-based admissions. 

The shifts in the student population come at the same time as a period of intense cultural change. Restrictions on free speech, and the elimination of programs and centers promoting diversity, are part of ongoing right-wing efforts to reshape a supposedly overly liberal college landscape across the U.S. Some faculty and administrators express a fear that a perceived need to appease conservative critics and donors may reduce universities’ ability to contribute to an informed citizenry. 

As a faculty member for 23 years and director of an honors program at the University of Illinois, I have observed some chilling downstream effects of the disappearance of affirmative action, but also some hopeful collective action. Eliminating data on race and ethnicity from applications does not merely mean that admissions officers know less about the applicants. Instead, as with other policy changes, ripple effects on experiences in classrooms, social groups and the world outside the university occur. These effects are difficult to calculate, but nonetheless real. 

When diversity no longer can be considered a plus, students in a variety of campus organizations — from the newspaper to club athletics — ask if they can consider an applicant’s race when making decisions about who will join their boards or their membership. Such decisions affect resumes and therefore may impact students’ experiences long after graduation. K-12 schools across the country also are navigating more uncertain terrain with respect to race and admissions. 

The increase in overall racial and socioeconomic diversity offers a multiplicity of perspectives and backgrounds and opportunities for instructors to learn, as well as students. Far from focusing primarily on racial or ethnic identity, campuses provide a multitude of spaces where robust argumentation and ideas drive our work, including the critical questioning of identities. 

There is hope for the future, as some universities have taken actions to preserve access and diversity. This includes a tool the College Board developed called Landscape, which provides nuanced metrics about applicants’ high schools and neighborhoods, although it does not compensate for the loss of race and ethnicity data. Other admissions officers are putting more proactive work into recruiting underrepresented students prior to application season, as well as assertive recruitment after admission. 

Diversity is good for business, and it is undoubtedly good for the universities that help produce a knowledgeable and thoughtful public. If diversity diminishes, so will the progress higher education administrators have made in offering access and opportunity to a much wider swath of the population. When fewer identities are represented, ideas become impoverished. 

Laurie Johnson is professor of German and director of the Campus Honors Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project.