I'm a College Admissions Officer in a Post-Affirmative Action World

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action and race-conscious admissions. The following story is based on an interview with an admissions associate at a liberal arts college.

I’ve been working in college admissions for six years. I was part-time back in 2018, working at the college I attended. Gradually, I took on more responsibilities and fell into a full-time role.

When the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action came down, our university president put out a statement saying that we were still committed to inclusion. I put up something on Instagram, which I don’t normally do, saying it was horrible and concerning. Privately, we were in meetings and we were all kind of confused. We weren’t sure what it would mean for us, a liberal arts school that is selective but not highly selective like the Ivies. Within the whole university, the acceptance rate is about 66%, although within a particular school those numbers can range from 35% to 80%. 

Here’s how it typically works: We read the whole Common Application, from start to finish, primarily focusing on the extracurriculars, the essays, the letters of recommendation, and then the GPA and transcripts. There’s a little section where you take notes and write anything about their bio that stands out. Other than that, I leave out any bio from my notes. Sometimes if the student is borderline, like below a certain GPA or has really concerning writing but a high GPA, we'll send it to a panel and then look at it all together with my team and go over if we think the student would be successful. 

I was trained by someone that was our partner for a scholarship program for low-income students. She was really on it about flagging students that were high-need. Back in 2018, I would often put “BIPOC” in the notes, but that never really impacted the final decision. In the past, race wasn’t mentioned all that much; I remember one director I worked with would bring up race sometimes. We would send an application to panel to talk about them, and she would say things like, “It’d be really great to enroll an Indigenous student—we need that diversity.” Or, she’d tell us to go find more Pacific Islander students. She would get really excited about the fact that we could get a non-white student, almost like she was exotifying them.

We’re lucky in the sense that we've never had diversity numbers pushed on us. Our school is already a really diverse institution. I think it's about 60% international. So at my level and even my director’s level, we weren’t told that we need x, y, z amount of Black students, Indigenous students, Hispanic students. Some institutions might have had that imposed upon them. So, at least when we're looking at applications, we're not ever discussing race anymore in panel meetings.

Post-SCOTUS decision, I pretty much do all the notes the same way that I used to, except I don’t mention “BIPOC.” If I’m writing notes on their background, I’ll mention if they’re from a single-parent family, or they’re low-income, or they’re the first generation in their family to go to college—which are all often related to race. Another thing I look for on an application is if they have an application fee waiver. They have to write a letter through their school counselor in order to waive the $60 fee.

And then obviously within the essays, there can sometimes be indicators, too, but usually there's not an indicator of high need in an essay. Students will sometimes write about race and racism. They’ll write about media representation, and sometimes they will talk about being bullied for their race or because they’re an immigrant. I read an application recently from a student in a border town, who felt left out and confused about their identity.

There's also a community disruption section on the Common Application where you can write anything that's happened to you recently. The prompt might be like COVID-related, but students take that opportunity to mention undiagnosed mental health struggles like depression or anxiety or ADHD—more than I ever saw when I first started working. There are students struggling with houselessness because of the pandemic, students having to work to help out their parents, things like that. They would take it to acknowledge, for instance, that during COVID both their parents lost their jobs and they had to take on part-time work, so they couldn't do extracurriculars because they were working.

In terms of how it’s affecting applications, students don’t seem to be thinking about it—or maybe they’re just not telling us. In the fall, I did some recruitment events, which would have been right after the SCOTUS decision, and we didn't really get any questions about it. I don't know if the students that are coming to meet with us even know about it. I know that with very, very selective schools, it's a bigger deal, so maybe those students are taking it into consideration. Whenever I meet with students, I tell them to utilize the "community disruption” or “additional information” sections. I explain that it’s a really great place to talk about any struggles that you've had, whether it's academic, personal, or financial—just so that we have context for your application. 

At this point, we’ve made our admissions decisions. I won’t be sure until we have an enrollment breakdown in April, but it seems like our numbers are pretty on trend—I haven’t noticed anything different. I’m honestly surprised, because when the decision came out, I was concerned. But I wasn’t thinking about the big picture in the sense that we usually didn't look at race explicitly; we looked more at all the things that race could affect.