The Mix 2024: Supreme Court decision impacts admissions process

By Lila de Almeida
St. Thomas Aquinas High School

A year after the Supreme Court decision banned the consideration of race in college admissions, applicants and their parents continue to have questions about how the decision plays out in practice.

The high school class of 2024 is still finalizing their college decisions, and data isn’t yet available about how the first admissions cycle under the policy went.

Kimberly Almeida, parent of a rising high school senior, asked, “The information that the admissions office receives – does it not have any information about race? Is it blind? Or do they have all the same information but they can’t make a decision based on something like that?”

In fact, some students are still unaware of the change. When asked about how he believed the decision would affect him, rising senior Nathan Pabst said, “That’s actually my first time hearing something like this; I’m surprised I haven’t really seen it on the news.” 

Until recently, affirmative action played an important role in the admissions office of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Admissions officers considered the racial and ethnic backgrounds of applicants, prioritizing the applications of those who would increase the campus’ diversity.

Disputes over affirmative action in university decisions are nothing new. John F. Kennedy first used the term affirmative action in 1961 in Executive Order 10925 to outline methods of integration in the hiring and higher education admissions processes, according to the National Archives. 

In the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Allan Bakke, a white applicant to UC Davis’ medical school, protested that affirmative action robbed him of admission by favoring minority students. Becky Sullivan of NPR reports that the court established that educational institutions were permitted to consider race, among other factors, when reviewing applications in order to diversify the student body, in turn enhancing the quality of education at a particular school.

In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions organization sued Harvard University and UNC Chapel Hill, alleging their admissions policies violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. The case made it to the Supreme Court in 2022, and a majority of six justices ruled in favor of Students for Fair Admissions.

Concern About the Recent Ruling

Watch these videos to hear more about students’ and parents’ concerns:

How reviews work

Allee Olive, a UNC Chapel Hill admissions officer for the past nine years, read more than 1500 applications during the last admissions cycle. Even after the Supreme Court decision, UNC admissions officers always read applications under an “individual comprehensive review,” considering all aspects of one’s “lived experience context,” Olive said.

In previous years, Olive explained, officers could view the demographics that a student had entered. Now, the field has been hidden. However, in the Common Application and supplemental essays, students are still able to write about their racial and ethnic background as a “core part of who they are and their experience,”  Olive said.