Several top-ranked schools are rolling out a slew of new essay prompts that fish for demographic information with leading questions — and some are going so far as to directly ask about prospective students’ race.

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore asks students to “tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual…”

Meanwhile, Rice University in Houston asks applicants: “What perspectives shaped by your background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity inspire you to join our community of change agents at Rice?”

And every single Ivy League school has added an application question about students’ backgrounds, according to college admission expert and Ivy Coach managing partner Brian Taylor.

It’s a clever loophole: ask about race … without expressly requiring students to write about their race.

And some schools aren’t even remotely subtle about their motivations.

Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, even cites the Supreme Court’s decision in its essay prompt.

“In the syllabus of a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the author notes: ’Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university,’” the Sarah Lawrence application reads.

“Drawing upon examples from your life, a quality of your character, and/or a unique ability you possess, describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced, or affected by the Court’s decision.”

These schools are pushing the envelope as far as possible — and the federal government seems to be egging them on.

The Biden Administration’s Department of Education is even weighing in, giving colleges tips on how to “enhance racial diversity” in higher education without running afoul of the Supreme Court ruling.

In a report released Thursday, the administration urged schools to increase targeted outreach to non-white communities and give “meaningful consideration in admissions to the adversity students have faced … including racial discrimination.”

Taylor says these new essay prompts leave many students grasping at straws: “They’re often confused because they think to themselves, ’If I’m not an underrepresented minority if I’m not a member of the LGBTQ community, how do I answer this question?’”

Schools are right that diversity is important. We don’t want colleges filled only with ultra-privileged students who could afford the best SAT tutors — or whose families forked over a massive donation.

However, implicitly asking about race makes students feel pressured to write about their ethnicity rather than their character to help their admissions prospects.

“A number of students are disappointed that they feel they have to write about their race in their essay prompt. And they’re correct to think so,” Taylor said, referring to increasing their admissions odds. “They need to let it be known that they are Black or Latino or Native American, and they need to let it be known how that shaped who they are.”

Bunmi Omisore, a 19-year-old Duke freshman, told The Post she’s glad she was in the last class to apply before the ruling for this very reason.

“I wrote about things like my family, ’The Bachelor’ and biking in my application essays,” Omisore said. “But if I were applying now, I think I would have to forfeit writing about some of those parts of my personality and opt for writing about things that I don’t really like thinking about, like my experiences with racism or my racial trauma.

“You’re going to be having a lot of minority students basically telling a single story, and it’s not fair because that takes away from the uniqueness of the applicant,” she added.

Not only is this tactic a brazen abuse of a legal loophole — it also reduces students to their immutable characteristics and incentivizes them to performatively boil themselves down to their race. That’s the opposite of progress.

Abolishing legacy admissions — which disproportionately favor white applicants — and implementing socioeconomic affirmative action, which would boost disadvantaged students of all backgrounds, are two better ways to promote diversity

Colleges need to figure out how to do this without indulging in race essentialism.

But it’s no mystery. Though the court explicitly warned not to “simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” Harvard, the defendant in one of the two cases, seemed to prefer to focus on another passage of the Court’s decision: a caveat that said schools may consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” Harvard’s official statement quoted the perceived loophole and responded, somewhat mischievously: “We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.”

There is a long history of such workarounds to affirmative action bans, dating back 25 years to when the University of California was prohibited by California voters from considering race in admissions. Michigan voters forced the same on their public universities 10 years later. Both university systems, with very selective flagship schools, have taken numerous measures to attempt to diversify their campuses, according to both the amicus briefs they filed in support of Harvard and University of North Carolina (the other defendant) and to the researchers who have studied them.

UC and UM changed their admissions questions, developed outreach programs and made their admissions processes more complex and (their term) “holistic.” These methods were, to differing degrees, creative, expensive and legally fishy. They were also unsuccessful: By the schools’ own admission, no combination of these workarounds worked to enroll the number of underrepresented minority students the universities sought. Clearly, if these workarounds had worked, they would not have filed the amicus briefs in support of race-based preferences.

And yet, elite schools now facing an affirmative action ban for the first time are soon to follow in their footsteps, encouraged by Biden’s Department of Education to enact the same playbook of marginal adjustments.

There’s only one race-neutral method that would work to increase racial diversity on selective college campuses, and it happens to align with the supposed social-justice goals of highly selective schools: giving a clearly defined, substantial boost to low-income applicants. Neither the University of Michigan nor the University of California embraced that method, and so far, it seems likely that no other university will try it either.

Why would schools ignore a winning alternative? Embracing that method would make their student bodies slightly less academically elite (in terms of grades and test scores). It’s also a bit more expensive. But most problematically, giving a large, well-advertised boost to low-income students reduces their precious, complex and labor-intensive “holistic” admissions process to a simple bunch of pluses and minuses. And they won’t have that.

When UC and UM first confronted the reality they could no longer simply rely on an applicant telling them what their race was, they had to figure out new ways to identify diverse students.

“The kids are out there. And you’d have to find them.” That’s what the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, Anthony Carnevale, told me about the challenges of locating qualified Black, Latino and Indigenous (all referred to as “underrepresented minorities” in the admissions community) applicants whom schools would need to recruit to fulfill diversity goals.

Outreach was the obvious choice. The schools figured that by showing up at schools in poor areas, they could encourage promising underrepresented-minority students to apply in greater number, either through new recruitment programs that show up on the application, or even just with a certifiably Black (or Latino)-majority high school listed on the application.

After the affirmative action ban was instituted in California, the University of California immediately doubled its outreach budget from $60 million to $120 million. According to the university system, post-affirmative-action outreach programs have cost the University of California over $500 million dollars. University of Michigan also implemented several outreach programs after Michigan banned affirmative action in 2006, which range from placing UM graduates as college advisers in “underserved” high schools to giving scholarships for summer academic programs for high schoolers.

Though well-financed, the outreach programs have little to show for themselves. It turns out there were not a great many students doing well enough to get into the very selective campuses at University of Michigan or University of California without affirmative action, who also had no idea that the schools existed. In the case of the University of California, its enormous outreach budget didn’t last very long, getting tabled only a few years after it was implemented, without any sign of declining underrepresented minorities as a result of the termination. Zachary Bleemer, an economist who has studied UC admissions after affirmative action, told me “the outreach efforts are widely believed to have had very little or essentially no impact on undergraduate admissions in the state.”

Though outreach was the state universities’ most expensive attempted workaround, it was not their only one.

The Universities of California and Michigan also reached for a much blunter tool: essay questions. Because no law or court could conceivably prevent a student from writing about their own race-related adversity, the universities unsubtly urged applicants to describe their racial struggles as part of their application.

After California’s ban, UC Berkeley’s law school changed its essay questions from “ten short unconnected prompt options for the personal statement, eight of which did not refer to diversity or disadvantages” to “a single lengthy one that invited applicants to discuss their contributions to ’the diversity of the entering class’ and their backgrounds, including ’a personal or family history of cultural, educational, or socioeconomic disadvantage.’” That’s according to a paper by Danny Yagan, another economist who has studied how affirmative action bans changed UC admissions.

Carnevale has studied affirmative action extensively for the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. For him, a system that begs students to describe how they’ve overcome their struggles is “sort of repulsive, making kids sit down and defame their family, their neighborhood, their community and God knows what else.” Earlier in Carnevale’s career, he went to a D.C. jail to help kids with their applications. “I started talking to them trying to help them out and I did two conversations and never did it again. Because you go through this process of saying, ’Your life is really awful. Tell me about it.’ It’s almost pornographic. Because their lives were awful.”

The first required question for undergraduate applicants at University of Michigan attempts to avoid making them detail their struggles by instead just hoping they say their race: “Everyone belongs to many different communities and/or groups defined by (among other things) shared geography, religion, ethnicity, income, cuisine, interest, race, ideology, or intellectual heritage. Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it. (Required for all applicants; minimum 100 words/maximum 300 words)”

Selective colleges nationwide have begun to follow in the footsteps of Michigan and California when it comes to admissions questions. Harvard uses a new question that asks how applicants will contribute to its diversity. Gone is Brown’s 2022 question prompting applicants to talk about a time they were challenged by a different perspective, but they’ve got a new question asking them to reflect on being inspired or challenged by their upbringing. When I asked Brown’s representatives why they made this change, their spokesperson Brian E. Clark told me “the Supreme Court’s ruling was one factor among many.”

Johns Hopkins suddenly decided to require all applicants to “Tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual and how that influenced what you’d like to pursue in college at Hopkins.” When I asked them why they added this question, their media and admissions teams made sure to direct me to a note on their website under the question that explicitly says that “the U.S. Supreme Court recently limited the consideration of race in college admissions but specifically permitted consideration of ’an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.’” The note clarifies, “therefore, any part of your background, including but not limited to your race, may be discussed in your response to this essay.”

And there’s Sarah Lawrence’s new and blunt optional question: “In the syllabus of a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the author notes: ’Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.’ Drawing upon examples from your life, a quality of your character, and/or a unique ability you possess, describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced, or affected by the Court’s decision.” Columbia Law School seemingly opted to sidestep these games by simply asking its applicants to submit a video statement (in which the applicant’s race would presumably be visible). When Aaron Sibarium, a reporter at the Washington Free Beacon, asked officials for a comment before he wrote about the new policy, Columbia removed the request for video statements from its website and told the Free Beacon, “It was inadvertently listed on the Law School’s website and has since been corrected.”

The admissions officers hope that these questions inspire underrepresented-minority students to reveal their race, so the admissions officers don’t have to guess. As Brian Taylor, an elite college counselor told me about admissions officers at UC and UM (who pioneered this strategy), “they’re trying to create the class that they wish to see, so they’re never going to write a note on the application that this is a Black student, but if they suspect it’s a Black student, yeah, they’re looking to admit that student.”

Colleges know that this wink-and-nod game — mouthing “please tell us your race” at their applicants — might be illegal. As Carnevale recounted, “One college president has said to me seriously … ’There are red lights, yellow lights, and green lights going forward with this decision. We’ve got to focus on the yellow lights. What can we get away with?’”

It’s not just that president. Carnevale told me, “In a couple of meetings I’ve been in, a couple people have said, ’Maybe we want to be sued.’ You know, if you’re a university where the slaves built the building, maybe you do want to be sued just to make a statement.”

Maybe they’ll get what they’re asking for. When I sent a selection of the new essay questions to Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the Harvard and UNC cases, he sent me back the following statement: “Students for Fair Admissions is closely monitoring the newly implemented essay questions, as well as other admissions policies, at dozens of competitive universities. As the Supreme Court has written, direct racial proxies that are little more than racial classifications in admission decisions will violate the law. It is important to note that college administrators who are proven to have engaged in racial discrimination are subject to personal liability and personal risk under section 1983 of our nation’s civil rights laws.”

But what the colleges might not realize is that even if the questions are allowed to stand, they simply don’t work as they might think at attracting the students they’re seeking. Michigan added their identity question during the 2010-2011 application cycle. In 2010, the percentage of Black undergraduates at University of Michigan—Ann Arbor (the flagship) was 4.78. In 2015, after four years of the essay question, that percentage had dropped to 4.61. Why is that? For one, not all underrepresented minority students even know whether they are allowed to talk about racial struggles in their applications. And white people and Asians (the overrepresented minority) know very well how to describe their struggles. In fact, as a recent paper revealed, these nonacademic qualifications, like essay questions, are exactly the kind that richer students (disproportionately white and Asian) excel at, partly because wealthier applicants are often getting a great deal of help.

Taylor, a managing partner at the college admissions consultancy Ivy Coach, is such help. His firm once charged a mother $1.5 million to help her daughter get into elite colleges. Though his price is higher than most (another counselor called such prices “silly”), there’s no denying that rich parents go to great lengths to ensure their students write essays that admissions officers like, ones that make them stand out regardless of their race. According to Taylor, for Asian applicants, it’s not about hiding your race, but it is partly about not having the “stereotypical profile associated with the race, like you know, excelling at math and science but not English, history or foreign language or, you know, playing the piano or playing the violin, then doing Taekwondo.”

But if the questions don’t work, is there anything actually race-neutral that selective colleges could do to get their diversity numbers up?

There is the much-touted top percent plan, first used by University of Texas in 1997, which works by automatically admitting students who finish in a certain stratum of their high school class. The program started by admitting the top 10 percent to UT-Austin but it has since shrunk to 6 percent as the state grows and the college grows more slowly. Blum, of Students for Fair Admissions, spoke positively about this type of plan in an interview with the New York Times.

That’s surprising, given the program works by effectively discriminating against students for where they live because where a student lives happens to correlate with race. The University of Texas pursued this program because they have enough de facto (and before that, de jure) residential segregation to make it work. If you guarantee spots to 10 percent of high schoolers in public schools in South Texas, you’ll end up with plenty of Latino students. If you guarantee admission to high schoolers in public schools in Houston or Dallas’ southern suburbs, you’ll end up with enough Black students.

But in states where the racial geography renders this switcheroo less workable, top-percent plans wouldn’t increase racial diversity, so they aren’t pursued. This is the story in Michigan, where the vast majority of high schools are very white, so a top-percent policy wouldn’t attract more underrepresented minorities. According to Rick Fitzgerald, the associate vice president for public affairs at University of Michigan, “There just weren’t enough high schools with majority minority students so that it would achieve the goals.”

And while this proxy supposedly works for the University of Texas, it is clearly impossible for the most elite private schools, which have small enrollments. With more than 20,000 high schools nationwide, the entire Ivy League combined could not accommodate even the valedictorians alone, much less the top 5 or 10 percent of every high school.

There is, however, one presumably legal, totally feasible workaround to the loss of affirmative action that America’s selective schools could pursue immediately: They could give a big leg up to students who come from low-income families.

According to Richard Kahlenberg — a former fellow at the progressive The Century Foundation, and then an expert witness on the side of Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard — the Ivy League school could achieve its diversity goals with a few simple measures: End preferences for legacies and applicants with exceptionally rich, potential donor parents. Instead, provide a boost (half the size that recruited athletes get) to students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

For Kahlenberg, this possible solution — that low-income applicants just get a leg up the way Black applicants (or recruited athletes or legacies) have gotten one — has long animated his distaste for affirmative action, telling me that he thinks “the decision will be a win for low-income and working-class students of all races.”

Independent research backs up this solution’s feasibility, and makes it clear it could apply to more schools than just Harvard. A recent study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce concluded that if the top 193 most selective colleges ignored race but rather “admitted students whose academic performance exceeded expectation based on their family’s socioeconomic status and other non-race-based factors associated with educational advantage and disadvantage,” the percentage of Black and Latino students at these schools would go up, although the percentage of Indigenous students would likely drop from 0.3 percent to 0.2 percent.

This solution also seems legal. According to Blum, who is by far the biggest threat to selective schools and their admissions policies, “It would not be illegal as long as the low-income preference [is] applied to all applicants, regardless of race.”

This fact — that colleges could get more underrepresented students by preferring more disadvantaged students of all races — is what led Kahlenberg to tell me confidently that “we’ll see universities give a more meaningful admissions boost to economically disadvantaged students of all races.”

But schools may not be so eager to pursue this.

For one, it would hurt their average academic credentials. The Georgetown simulation showed that the median SAT score at the most selective 193 schools would drop from 1240 to 1210 and the median high school GPA would fall from 4.03 to 3.92. Kahlenberg’s Harvard simulation showed SAT scores at Harvard dropping from 99th percentile to 98th percentile, leading Cameron Norris, the lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, to tell Justice Sonia Sotomayor, “That’s moving Harvard from Harvard to Dartmouth. Dartmouth is still a great school.”

Another issue is cost. Letting in more poor students means letting in more poor students, and while elite schools can easily cover increased financial aid, not all selective schools could do so without having to dip into their endowments or raise more money, which, according to Carnevale, they are not going to do. “In the end,” he said, “the business model governs.”

Implementing preferences for low-income students that are big enough to restore the schools’ diversity would be dramatic. If you know that only 20 percent of the poor applicants you admit will be Black, and you want to have 50 more Black students, you would need to admit 250 more poor applicants of all races. In Kahlenberg’s Harvard simulation, where he modeled a large boost to low-income students instead of affirmative action, the percentage of underrepresented minority students went up from 28 percent to 30 percent, but the percentage of first-generation college students rose from 7 to 25.

Elite schools, though, don’t seem likely to simplify their admissions process in this way. They have a self-image as participants in a “holistic” admissions process, a black box that can’t be explained with simple pluses and minuses. Of course, it helps in college admissions to have a compelling story, or to have good grades, but admissions officers have been able to maintain the mystery for years by asserting their college admissions are complex and irreducible. And they aren’t keen on parting with that any time soon, even if it means keeping their diversity up.

According to Han Mi Yoon-Wu, the executive director of undergraduate admissions at the Office of the President at University of California, UC doesn’t favor low-income students at all, despite it being an obvious way to boost underrepresented enrollment given that they can’t consider race. “It’s not a plus factor necessarily to be poor,” she told me. She argued that there wasn’t even such a thing as an admissions boost, since the process is so complex and “comprehensive.” When I asked her if it was a plus to have a higher GPA, she said, “Not necessarily.” And when I asked her to compare two students at the same high school, one with a higher GPA than the other, she said that applicants are not compared in the admissions process.

Here’s a secret: Once you’re in, elite college is not especially difficult. The average GPA at Harvard is 3.8 out of 4.0, meaning the average student receives an A or an A- in every class, despite Harvard saying that A’s are reserved for “extraordinary distinction.” With graduation rates in the mid- to high-90s, it is nearly impossible to flunk out of an elite school, even if organic chemistry or a few other classes remain arduous.

Though attending an elite school is not as challenging as many might imagine, it is valuable. As one recent study by Opportunity Insights concluded, going to an elite school increases your chance of being in the top 1 percent of earners. For most students, either their family or their financial aid covers the vast majority of their tuition, so they are given four years of fun at a small (or zero) cost to them, and they graduate with a high-paying, prestigious job, or at the bare minimum, an amazing network they can soon use to get one. Students aren’t the only ones who benefit. Professors at elite schools are paid well (average salaries at the most elite schools are well over $200,000 a year) and administrators get to have desk jobs in pretty places.

But this win-win-win rests on a certain reputation for these schools, one that they go to great lengths to preserve. This great deal requires good PR, so that high-performing students will continue to apply. It requires actually having graduates who are highly productive, so that employers don’t feel tricked by the fancy name on someone’s degree. It requires rich, well-connected kids whose parents pay for the school, or better yet, donate, so that the administrators and professors can be paid, the financial aid can be awarded, and the endowment can be increased endlessly.

A “holistic” admissions practice makes the whole thing easy because it gives admissions officials the leeway to accept students to satisfy different goals to different degrees, and nobody needs to know which students are fulfilling which goal, and officials never have to articulate which of the goals is more important.

Elite schools don’t want to participate in a system where all they get to do is select the smartest possible future leaders, and they don’t want a simple formula giving a well-defined boost to low-income students. They want to pick and choose students using their own criteria and they want not to be challenged about who gets in and why.

And when affirmative action has been taken away from elite schools in the past, they stick to that script and make only small tweaks to the whole process, retaining the confusing morass of admissions while only marginally adjusting the process to make it easier to take the kids they favor for whatever secret reason. The UCs no longer consider test scores at all, further slimming the chance that we ever have any idea how they select the students upon which to spend their $47 billion of public money.

As Yoon-Wu told me, “Using, a single criteria, again, would be not appropriate in our comprehensive review. So, additional weighting on particular factors like low-income status is not how [UC] campuses are conducting their admissions.” Low-income students won’t get a leg up if admissions officials can’t even conceive of a framework where it would be possible, even if it unquestionably is.

Perhaps the day is coming when Rick Kahlenberg’s dream comes true, where colleges get rid of legacies and dean’s list for rich donor parents and instead give a large admissions bump to kids from poor families. But it’s not coming any time soon.

If their diversity plummets, they’ll blame the Supreme Court.

As Carnevale told me, “When I think of [selective] colleges, the word courage doesn’t come to mind.”

Last year’s freshman class at Tulane was nearly two-thirds female. Tulane’s numbers are startling, but the school is not a radical outlier: There are close to three women for every two men in college in this country. (The way schools report gender may not yet reflect many students’ nonbinary understanding of it, but the overall trend is clear.) Last year, women edged out men in the freshman classes of every Ivy League school save Dartmouth, and the gender ratio is significantly skewed at many state schools. (The rising sophomore class at the University of Vermont is 67 percent female; the University of Alabama is 56 percent female.) Most small liberal-arts colleges are close to 60 percent female, and the discrepancy is even more pronounced at community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities. Colleges with powerhouse football teams or the word “technology” in their name, or elite schools known for engineering, like Carnegie Mellon, tend to be closer to parity or even have more men, but it is safe to say that a college graduate under 60 today is more likely to be female than male — especially since men also drop out of college more often than women.

The gender gap in educational achievement starts early: Girls are already significantly outperforming boys on reading and writing tests by the time they are in fourth grade, an advantage that is often attributed to differences in brain development, despite inconsistent findings in neuroscientific research to support that explanation. In high school, girls volunteer more on average, all the while getting higher grades, including in STEM subjects. By the time they graduate, they make up two-thirds of the top 10 percent of their class. Although men have historically performed better on standardized college-admissions tests, women have inched past them on the A.C.T. and almost closed the gap on the SAT. 

That young women are better prepared to excel in college helps explain why more of them apply in the first place. But economic calculations are also affecting young men’s decisions about whether to enroll: Wages are higher for young people than in the past, which increases the immediate opportunity cost of paying tuition. The trade-off is especially relevant for young men, who tend to earn higher wages without a college degree than their female counterparts — they might find jobs in construction or technology, which pay significantly more than the ones young women often land in elder care or cosmetology. Conservatives have also steadily been devaluing higher education in ways that might be more salient for men; the critique that liberal-arts colleges are pushing “gender ideology” on students positions those institutions as threatening to traditional conceptions of masculinity. 

Men’s relative lack of engagement in higher education is both a symptom and a cause of a greater problem of “male drift,” as it has been characterized by Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Reeves points to rising rates of suicide among young men as a distressing signal of a vicious cycle underway: Men without college degrees tend to be underemployed, and underemployed men are less likely to marry and benefit from the grounding influence of raising children. “These guys are genuinely lost,” says Reeves, who recently founded a think tank, the American Institute for Boys and Men, to focus attention on the issue. The gender gap in higher education has been a concern in education circles for decades, but as is true of so many trends, the pandemic seems to have only exacerbated the problem: Male enrollment plummeted more quickly than female enrollment and has not bounced back to the same degree.

As a result, many schools are fighting hard to close the gender gap — not only for the students’ benefit but also for their own. It’s a longstanding fear among enrollment officers that if the gender ratio becomes too extreme at a given school, students of all genders will start to lose interest in attending (an idea that persists even if none of the admissions experts I spoke to could point to research about college enrollment supporting it). “Gender parity is something that’s an institutional priority for most private colleges and universities in the United States,” says Sara Harberson, a former dean of admissions and financial aid at Franklin & Marshall and the founder of Application Nation, an online college-counseling community. “Whether it’s fair or not, colleges with gender parity or close to gender parity have been viewed as the most desirable.”

Some schools are trying to attract male applicants by improving their sports programs; others invest more heavily in buying boys’ email addresses or give incentives to boys that they do not offer to girls — such as free stickers or baseball caps — for filling out information on the school website. Marketing materials are sometimes designed to speak specifically to young men. Heath Einstein, dean of admission of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, recalls fondly a pamphlet known internally as the “bro-chure,” which featured shots of the football team, a rock climber and a male student shoving cake in his mouth. But the easiest way for many competitive schools to fix their gender ratios lies in the selection process, at which point admissions officers often informally privilege male applicants, a tendency that critics say amounts to affirmative action for men. 

That Title IX exemption still stands, allowing private colleges and universities to privilege men during the admissions process. Marie Bigham, the executive director of ACCEPT, a group that works to improve equity in college admissions, said that until the pandemic, when many schools stopped requiring standardized tests, she considered the boost for being male to be about “equal to an extra 100 points on their SATs.” Angel B. Pérez, who ran enrollment at Trinity College until 2020, told me that it wasn’t unusual for the initial selection rounds there to skew heavily in favor of women. “There were some years when it was in the extremes, and I’d say, ’We just can’t do this,’” says Pérez, who is now chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “I can’t come up with a class of 20 percent men — that’s just not good for the campus.” At that point, he said, the team would go back and seek more men to balance the class.

For the sake of a well-rounded student body, Wesleyan leadership still believes in making choices that yield an even ratio, even if it sometimes means passing over an exceptionally qualified girl in favor of a boy whose application is not quite as strong. “If you had all these people who were really superb but they were all shortstops, you wouldn’t take them, or all violin players,” says Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s president, “because you need other people in the orchestra.” 

Even after the lawsuit at the University of Georgia, some state schools persisted in privileging male applicants, at least informally. “We, and every other college these days, give a male applicant a second look,” Louis Hirsh, then the dean of admissions at the University of Delaware, told the reporter Peg Tyre for her 2008 book “The Trouble With Boys.” It wasn’t that they were taking demonstrably worse male candidates over female ones, he clarified, but they would look harder for reasons to accept the male ones in the name of a better ratio. 

The following year, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights began an investigation into gender discrimination in admissions at 19 colleges and universities in the mid-Atlantic region, but the inquiry was dropped in 2011 on the grounds that the statistics the panel received were not sufficient for accurate analysis. Some commentators in the press theorized that Democrats on the panel might have been wary of opening a larger conversation about race and affirmative action. In her book “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin suggests that they were uncomfortable with the prospect of publicizing that men, rather than women, were the ones in need of support and help.

Even now that the Supreme Court has struck down race-based affirmative action, colleges are very likely not panicking about their efforts to maintain some control over their gender ratios: The Supreme Court gives parties more leeway to discriminate on the basis of gender than it does on the basis of race. Nonetheless, Einstein says he has heard representatives of the most elite institutions discuss the possibility of stripping information about gender from the versions of applications that admissions officers read. Admissions officers could not help discerning the sex of the applicant in most instances, but that small, formal change of policy might still give litigants seeking an ideal testing ground a reason to target some other elite institution. “They’re doing everything in their power,” Einstein says, “not to be at the epicenter of a lawsuit.” 

For self-protective reasons, and out of genuine concern about equity, admissions officers would prefer to increase the number of men who are applying to their colleges, rather than favoring male applicants in the final round of selection. “Think about the front end of the equation when you’re trying to get people interested in your institution,” Madeleine Rhyneer, the dean of enrollment management at EAB, a higher-education consulting firm, told me she advises her clients. 

It’s common wisdom that athletes have an advantage over nonathletes in elite admissions because schools need to fill teams, but at many schools it’s the other way around — the school needs the teams in order to inspire more men to apply in the first place. “As schools get more desperate to recruit male students, one of the avenues for attracting them is an emphasis on recruiting for traditionally male sports in particular,” says Guha, now executive director of the Consortium on High Achievement and Success, a nonprofit at Trinity College that works to help both students and staff members of color succeed on campuses. Colleges believe that varsity sports attract male students, which is one reason that, even as research on the health risks of football grows, some 73 schools added football teams over the past decade or so. Football teams can have rosters of more than 100 players, and they also pull in other young men who are simply attracted to a school that has tailgate parties and football games. 

Adding a football team does bump up male enrollment for the first year, but the effect fades after about three years, research has found. And not every small liberal-arts school can afford to add a football team. For that reason, some schools are turning to sports such as men’s rugby and volleyball that don’t have the high costs associated with experienced football coaches, stadiums and large rosters. 

Schools’ efforts to attract men can create a strange dynamic: The scarcer men are, the more they end up driving a school’s priorities. “Unlike a large Division I school, where even a large football team is a tiny fraction of the study body, at a relatively small school, if you have 2,000 students, and 1,000 are men, and 100 of them are playing football, suddenly 10 percent of the male population is a football player,” Guha says. “You add that up with additional large teams — lacrosse, ice hockey — and a larger proportion of the male population participates in these sports, and they come with a particular identity and culture of what it means to be a man. And I think it does disproportionately shape the experience on campus.” At Lewis & Clark, a progressive school in Portland, Ore., that typically skews very heavily female, fully 21 percent of the men in the freshman class this fall are on the football team.

Sports are an imperfect solution to address the urgent problem of male enrollment, argues Laurie Essig, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Middlebury. “Men and boys have been disadvantaged by patriarchy, too,” she says. “We tell boys, ’Sports is all that matters.’” Essig points out that when schools try to attract male students with the promise of sports, they are only perpetuating the problem they are trying to solve, which is an emphasis on sports at the expense of full academic engagement. It troubles her that even at an elite school like Middlebury, athletes regularly miss class for games or say they don’t have time to do even minimal amounts of homework because they are so busy working out and traveling to compete. 

During his time at Wesleyan, Guha told me, he noticed that female athletes were still expected to have stellar grades and other interesting activities. “Whereas for the boys, you saw it very clearly — their sport was their identity and their value as a young person in society,” he says. “It was all based on athletic excellence, and a lot of other things fell away. And that seemed to be OK with everyone.” A 2010 study of 84 Division III colleges and universities found that recruited male athletes had lower G.P.A.s than nonrecruited male athletes, which was only marginally true of recruited female athletes.

Because schools have to be careful not to trigger a Title IX violation, one the most popular new varsity sports on college campuses is ostensibly gender neutral: varsity e-sports. E-sports teams compete against other schools in games like Super Smash Bros and Valorant, a “tactical hero shooter” game, events that also have the benefit of being inexpensive. “Many schools recommission old rooms that aren’t seeing much use,” the author of a blog post on gamedesign.org wrote in an article charting the rise of those programs. “They gut it, spruce it up and fill it with gaming gear. Boom, there’s your varsity e-sports training facility.” About 500 colleges and universities now have e-sports teams, according to the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE), and the consulting firm EAB says it has fielded around a dozen requests from schools interested in introducing one. This year’s college tour at the University of Delaware (whose rising sophomore class is 54 percent female) features a visit to the high-tech e-sports arena at its student center, which campus guides present with evident pride. Nationwide, close to $25 million was given away in varsity e-sports scholarships in 2022, and that number is expected to grow, with technically gender-neutral scholarship money effectively being used to benefit and attract mostly men. According to NACE, only 8 percent of college e-sports players are women.

As all-women colleges have long advertised, women benefit in many ways from being in the majority on campuses, where they may feel freer to explore academic subjects that are typically dominated by men. Tulane, for example, can boast that the makeup of its computer-science classes ranges from 35 to 50 percent female, depending on the year, while computer-science programs at peer schools tend to max out at around 25 percent. The student newspaper and magazines are also dominated by women. 

Tulane has not actively been trying to shift its gender ratio, Jeff Schiffman, a higher-education consultant who worked in recruiting at Tulane for 16 years, told me. The school has invested in its football team, but it has no men’s soccer or lacrosse team. “The gender balance was never part of the planning narrative,” he says. “No one ever said, ’We have a major problem.’ The faculty thought students were performing well, and there was no need to make major shifts.” But Brian Taylor, a managing partner at the college-advising business Ivy Coach, believes, based on what his team sees, that Tulane accepts more boys than girls for whom the college would be considered a “reach.” “Tulane is no Seneca Falls,” he says. “They’re playing the hand they’ve been dealt.” Taylor says that he’s more likely to encourage a young man with unremarkable grades to apply than a female applicant with a similar transcript. (A representative of Tulane told me that the school is “an equal-opportunity educator”: “The notion that Tulane has lower admission or academic standards for its male applicants versus its female applicants is completely false and without merit.”)

That there was a difference in the strength of male students relative to female ones seemed obvious enough to Mercedes Ohlen, a communications and anthropology major who also edited a lifestyle magazine on campus. She says that she and her friends frequently discussed the fact that their male classmates didn’t seem to be working as hard, which they found frustrating. “Some of these boys were just taking these classes to kind of get through it and get their degree and leave,” says Ohlen, who graduated this spring. Taylor Spill, a senior, says Ohlen’s take on male students at Tulane was so commonly held that she felt bad for the high-performing male students. “It’s almost like it’s reverse sexism,” she says. “Here at Tulane, I feel like the women kind of underestimate the men. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they’re not.” 

Even as young women outnumber men on college campuses, and increasingly walk away with academic awards, men, some have argued, exert an outsize influence on campus social lives. In the 2015 book “Date-onomics,” the business reporter Jon Birger builds the case that hookup culture has become the norm on almost all college campuses, largely because the gender ratio is so skewed. In a world in which straight men are scarce, he maintains, they control the terms of social life. That argument may seem somewhat dated given that so many students now have a wider and more fluid understanding of gender and sexual orientation. 

Even so, several women at Tulane expressed to me their sense that the gender ratio left them with fewer options, in sheer numbers and in the kinds of relationships available to them. Emma Roberts, who graduated from Tulane in the spring, told me she discussed the problem in her gender-studies class. “I think everyone’s consensus we came to was that it’s pretty disgusting trying to date,” she says. “Because the reality is you’re not likely going to find someone that wants to date you.” 

Women I spoke to at the University of Vermont agreed that high numbers of female students did not necessarily make for a feminist haven. “It shocks me how many women we can have here and still have a horrible toxic male culture,” said one woman, a junior who didn’t want to be named because she was candidly discussing her sex life. On the evening I met her in early July at an outdoor cafe near campus, she and two friends spoke frankly about their frustrations with dating in college. They characterized the straight men at their school as “picky” and “cocky.” All three felt they had settled too often — that by the time they left school, they were less confident about what they had the right to ask for in a relationship. The young women were older and wiser than when they started, ready to head into the world with the economic advantages that are associated with a bachelor’s degree. But for all their achievements, they also left feeling — to use a word they all agreed on — “humbled.” 

In order to help more men enroll in college, some researchers have insisted that changes need to start as early as kindergarten. Already many upper-middle-class families hold their sons back a year before enrolling them in school. That’s an option that could be adopted for boys more broadly across all socioeconomic groups, Reeves, the Brookings Institution researcher, has proposed, although he also acknowledges that the burden of paying for an additional year of child care is substantial. 

Clearly, society suffers when any large group of the population is cut off, for whatever reason, from the most effective engine of upward mobility, which is why leaders in higher education are thinking innovatively and aggressively about how to recruit more male students, especially in Black and Latino populations, whose college enrollments are lowest. “There’s a reason they passed the G.I. Bill,” says Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. “It’s typically not good for society when young men feel they don’t have a future.” 

But the issue of admissions equity raises different questions at elite colleges, where a clear gender paradox has emerged: The more women succeed, as a group, in high school, the harder it is for them to gain access to some of the schools that forge the most direct path to positions of real power. At Brown, for example, almost 7 percent of men who apply are admitted, compared with 4 percent of women. Jayson Weingarten, who worked as an assistant director of admission at the University of Pennsylvania for six years and is now a senior admissions consultant at Ivy Coach, estimates that at most highly selective colleges, the ratio of women to men would be closer to 60-40 if gender weren’t a factor, rather than the current norm, which is close to 50-50.

Schools’ efforts to attract men can create a strange feedback loop: The scarcer men are, the more they end up driving a school’s priorities.

In defense of class “shaping,” Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s president, suggested to me that even numbers of men and women make for a better learning environment — one that prepares young people for the professional world. “You will probably work and live in a context where there are men and women and nonbinary people,” he says, addressing an imaginary student. “And I think when schools become unintentionally focused on one gender, they have a diminished capacity to prepare people for the world beyond graduation.” 

But the world beyond graduation Roth invokes is one in which women are still struggling to gain access to the highest echelons of power. They remain underrepresented in C suites, on boards, in Congress, on the Supreme Court and in the White House. If anything, by the logic of affirmative action that schools like Wesleyan embraced for years, young women might still be considered the more worthy beneficiaries. While recognizing that women still haven’t reached parity at the highest levels, Reeves argues that ensuring a strong male presence on elite campuses has value that extends beyond the diversity of the learning environment. “You don’t want to feel like there’s something incompatible between masculinity and educational excellence,” says Reeves, who worries that if college comes to be understood as a feminine pursuit, that notion would be hard to reverse.

How to grant women their due while addressing the concerns that Roth and Reeves raise is a complicated question at any school, but offering more transparency would at least allow for a more informed debate. Emily Martin, the vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, believes that if people better understood the advantages given to men, the national conversation about affirmative action might look very different. “The status quo of widespread affirmative action for men sits uneasily with the deep sense of grievance from those we hear speaking on behalf of white men,” she told me. “In the higher-education context, that ranges from attacks on race-based affirmative action to broader attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, to attacks on gender-studies programs.” At the very least, Martin says, we should know when there’s a thumb on the scale, and for whom.

The landmark ruling prohibited colleges from considering an applicant’s race in admissions decisions, but Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the June opinion that college admissions officers were not prohibited from “considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

In a statement following the court’s ruling, Harvard University, one of the two defendants in the case alongside the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, quoted the chief justice’s words and said the college “will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.” Likewise, UNC said the university would “comply with the Court’s ruling that an applicant’s lived racial experience cannot be credited as ’race for race’s sake,’ but instead under some circumstances may illuminate an individual’s character and contributions.”

Brian Taylor, a managing partner at the college prep company Ivy Coach, told the Washington Examiner that not much has changed in the wake of the court’s ruling, even as some colleges have tweaked their admissions essay prompts to solicit responses that more directly discuss an applicant’s race.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Taylor said. “Many [colleges] are taking advantage of Chief Justice Roberts loophole that he penned in his majority opinion, [and] they’re asking more community-based questions. They’re asking more questions about your background or your culture or your experiences.”

Indeed, Taylor noted, essay prompts have been tweaked for the 2023-24 cycle to encourage applicants to discuss their race and ethnic background. The nation’s most elite schools, he said, have been at the forefront of it, with most of them changing their admissions prompts. Those that didn’t change their prompts, he added, already had questions that solicited responses about a student’s background.

“The ones that didn’t change it, many of them already had questions that were using the words ’community,’ ’background,’ ’identity,’ ’experience,’” he said. “They’re saying without saying it.”

For Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, the use of essay questions to invite students to discuss their race still allows admissions officers to consider an applicant’s race when making admissions decisions.

“What we’ve seen so far are new or amended essay questions that make it easier for an institution to infer … an applicant’s race,” Kissel told the Washington Examiner. “So what that suggests is that admissions officers know what their job is and can infer race and use it if they want, so long as they don’t create a paper trail.”

The language used by the essay prompts varies substantially but with the general goal of encouraging applicants to discuss their personal background, including their race.

“Feel free to tell us any ways in which you’re different and how that has affected you,” Duke University’s prompt reads.

At Dartmouth College, applicants are told to “Let your life speak. Describe the environment in which you were raised and the impact it has had.”

Harvard likewise shied away from explicitly encouraging students to discuss their race but primed its essay prompt by saying, “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body.” The prompt goes on to ask applicants to describe how their “life experiences” will allow them to contribute to the college.

Taylor noted that Johns Hopkins University made one of the most blatant attempts to encourage students to discuss their race, noting that the prompt even uses the word, something that most other schools avoided.

“Tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual and how that influenced what you’d like to pursue in college at Hopkins?” the college’s admissions essay prompt reads.

“They’re directly asking about a student’s race or gender or sexuality,” Taylor said of the school. “They’re explicitly stating it, and a lot of these schools are not doing so.”

Johns Hopkins University did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for UNC directed the Washington Examiner to university Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz’s statement following the ruling.

The questions, Taylor said, apply to all applicants, regardless of their race, noting, “You don’t need to be an underrepresented minority to answer these questions.”

“As far as underrepresented minority applicants, they should certainly make [their race] clear, not by saying ’I am black,’ but they should make it clear in their storytelling … and not leave it open to interpretation so that admissions officers can go to bat for them because they’re trying to help underrepresented minority applicants with this loophole,” he added.

1. Alumni interviews will become ’alumni conversations’

The first change was to alumni interviews — now called ’alumni conversations’ — which have historically been offered to applicants solely based on alumni availability.

“Each year Penn attempts to connect as many applicants as possible with alumni, depending on volunteer availability,” the Penn Admissions website reads. “We foster these connections to provide an opportunity for you to learn about Penn through an alum’s experience, and for us to learn more about you as an individual.”

Laurie Kopp Weingarten, the president and chief educational consultant at One-Stop College Counseling, said that the application now describes the conversations as “non-evaluative.”

She notes that on the Penn Admissions website linked beneath the new policy on the Common Application, the conversations are still “strongly encouraged,” if a student is matched with an interviewer. 

“To me, that is sending a strong signal that Penn wants the conversation,” Weingarten said. “However, right on the application, it says you can opt out with absolutely no disadvantage.”

She speculated that many students will opt out of the alumni conversations, but that due to the ambiguous wording of the policy, “more savvy applicants” will be afraid to.

All alumni conversations will be held virtually for this admissions cycle.

Brian Taylor, a managing director of the college counseling service Ivy Coach, said that the interview is “one of the least important parts of the college admissions process,” and that the change is actually not very significant. Taylor described the interviews as a way to keep alumni involved in the admissions process, adding that they do not receive significant training nor are representatives of the admissions office.

“Nothing has changed with respect to Penn’s alumni interview process,” he said. “It’s always been a conversation; it’s never been really evaluative as they suggested.” 

Still, Weingarten said that when she brought up the change at a meeting of the Wharton Club of New Jersey, “it was not a good reaction.” 

“People were not happy,” she said, adding that many people in that group are “active Penn alumni” who are part of the interview program.

2. Removal of intended area of study question

The application no longer includes a question asking an applicant’s intended area of study for applicants to the College, Wharton, and Nursing. Applicants to the School of Engineering and Applied Science can indicate their intended major in the “Academics and Interests” section of the supplemental essay, Penn Admissions wrote in an FAQ response.

While Penn no longer offers a drop-down for students to select their intended area, it is asking students to write a new school-specific essay. 

Previously, instead of the school-specific essay, Penn had applicants to all four schools answer a single short-answer response about their academic interests. With the introduction of school-specific prompts, Penn Admissions has added links to provide applicants with more information on the College of Arts and Sciences, the Wharton School, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the School of Nursing. 

3. Question added about campus group involvement

Penn has added a drop-down question that allows students to select from a list of campus groups that they are interested in joining if accepted. 

“Penn is home to many resource centers and hubs designed to enrich student experiences and build community,” the application reads. “You can learn more about these centers and other ways students find belonging at Penn by visiting this page.”

The University did not add additional questions to the application that ask about a candidate’s background or experience with diversity in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn affirmative action – which Taylor said the majority of top schools in the U.S., such as Harvard have chosen to do.

“That sort of question, regardless of the verbiage, is popping up on a lot of college supplements this year as a knee-jerk reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision,” he said. 

Other changes to the Penn application questions in recent years include the introduction of the gratitude prompt to the supplemental essays in 2022.

Weingarten said that the nature of college admissions is constantly changing, citing emails she receives almost every day announcing changes to schools’ admissions processes and policies. 

“The more things change, the more things stay the same,” Taylor said describing changes to admissions practices. “People might talk a whole lot about the significant changes that are on this year’s application, but in reality, not much has changed.”

Using data from the Common Data Set, the analysis examined trends in test scores for incoming first years from 2017 to 2022, comparing Penn to six other Ivy League schools. Dartmouth College was excluded due to missing test score data in 2021 and 2022. 

According to the data, approximately 30% of the Class of 2026 did not submit test scores in 2022. This is an 8.7% increase from the previous year — the highest among the Ivy League schools that published SAT score information.

Penn experienced 8.7% decrease in SAT submission rate from 2021 to 2022

Despite having the most significant decrease in test submissions among the Ivy League from 2021 to 2022, Penn’s median composite SAT score for incoming first-year students has displayed consistent growth since 2017. However, compared to other Ivy League schools, Penn has experienced a slower growth rate in median SAT scores since enacting a test-optional policy.

In 2023, Penn announced it would continue its undergraduate test-optional admissions policy for the 2023-24 application cycle. The Class of 2027 is the third class admitted under the policy, with the Class of 2025 being the first.

Approximately seven out of 10 of Penn’s incoming first-years did submit test scores in 2022. This places Penn’s 2022 test score submission rate as the third-lowest among Ivy League schools excluding Dartmouth, with Columbia University and Cornell University having slightly lower rates at 68% and 59%, respectively. 

Brian Taylor, a managing partner of the college counseling service Ivy Coach, said that Penn has one of the lower submission rates because of what he called “squeakers” — students who think they can be accepted without submitting test scores.

“Based on this data, it seems that there are more squeakers applying to the likes of Penn and Cornell and Columbia, thinking they can squeak into the Ivy League, whereas they know better when they’re applying to the likes of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,” he said.

Median SAT scores have increased for all Ivies after test-optional policy implementation

Compared to the drop in test score submission, Penn’s median composite SAT score has increased steadily since 2017 for enrolled first years, increasing nine points per year on average. Penn is the only Ivy League school where scores grew at a constant rate, with other Ivies experiencing accelerated growth in median scores after test-optional policies were announced in 2020. 

If growth were to continue at its current average pace, Penn’s median SAT score would be on a trajectory to reach approximately 1560 by 2025. 

Penn is averaging a 9-point per-year increase in its median SAT score

Unlike Penn, whose median test scores have grown at a constant rate since 2019, other Ivies saw a decrease in median test scores from 2019 to 2020. But those schools, like Penn, saw significant jumps in median composite SAT scores following the implementation of test-optional policies. 

For Penn’s test scores only, the median SAT score has increased from 1490 to 1535 in the past five years, while the median ACT score has increased from 33.5 to 34.5. Penn’s median ACT score also experienced three plateaus since 2017.

Penn’s median ACT score grew from 33.5 to 34.5 from 2017 to 2022

Under a test-optional admissions policy, Vice Provost and Dean of Admissions Whitney Soule has said that first years can submit scores if they are happy with them.

“If you take a test and you feel good about the result, then you can include it and we’ll review that, too,” Soule wrote in February 2022. “Or, if you take a test and you’re not happy with the result — for how it represents YOU — then you can withhold it, and that’s just fine with us.”

A request for comment was left with Penn Admissions.

College first-year Moe Mansour — an international student from Lebanon who was admitted as a member of the Class of 2026 but took a leave of absence before beginning this fall — said he submitted his SAT score because he was competing with applicants who had the advantage of taking IB or AP classes. 

“People submitted scores, even if it was on the lower end or [in] the 10th percentile,” Mansour said of students with whom he has spoken about their test scores.

Taylor said that students who submit scores are typically not submitting scores that are below the mean and added that he would still encourage applicants to submit a test score.

“No matter what schools like Penn tell you, students with great scores will always enjoy an advantage over students who do not submit scores,” Taylor said.

Note: The available data does not include students who submitted both SAT and ACT scores. 

Recent studies, including one from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University-based nonprofit, find that children of alumni — and especially children of the wealthiest alumni and donors — are up to six times more likely to be accepted into the nation’s most elite private universities than comparably qualified middle-class nonlegacy and nonathlete applicants.

The practice of legacy admissions now is being scrutinized across the country, including at Harvard. The university’s legacy admissions policy is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education based on complaints by three advocacy groups representing Latino and Black people.

That comes in the wake of a June U.S. Supreme Court ruling — in suits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina — that struck down affirmative action based on race-conscious admissions on the grounds they discriminated against white and Asian applicants.

Critics of that ruling are questioning why it is discriminatory to consider the ethnic and racial background of underrepresented minorities while legacy policies that tend to favor privileged white students still stand.

Defenders of legacy admissions argue the practice fosters strong bonds with alumni and encourages donations and fundraising. But a practice that began in the 1920s as a way to limit admissions of Jews — according to academic research and writings from that period — can still serve to perpetuate the status quo, critics said.

“Yes, it’s become more diverse over time, but the legacy pool to this day remains overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly privileged,” said Brian Taylor, managing partner of college admissions firm Ivy Coach, which for fees ranging from $99,000 to $1.5 million will advise applicants and their families on how to build an Ivy League-attractive resume and application.

Taylor, who grew up in Roslyn Heights, said top public schools on Long Island long have sent nonlegacy students to the Ivy League. But middle-class applicants have been squeezed, he said: On one side, there are elite preferences for underrepresented minorities. On the other, and even more significantly, there are preferences for legacy admissions, along with recruited athletes in some sports, and wealthy students whose tuition payments and parental donations bolster university coffers.

Legacy admissions are estimated to range between 10% and 20% at some of the most selective schools. At Harvard, with a 4% acceptance rate, a survey of the freshmen in the Class of 2025 found that about 15.5% were children of alumni.

Skip Stern, president of the Harvard Club of Long Island and a 1981 Harvard grad who helps interview local applicants for his alma mater, said admittance has become much more difficult given the “explosion” in the number of applications flowing to elite schools through Common App. That’s a single application that can be sent to multiple schools, with additional school-specific sections.

The percentage of people “who get admitted every year is less and less. And that is true for legacy kids and nonlegacy kids,” said Stern, a personal banker who lives in Port Washington.

Already, several highly selective schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wesleyan University, Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University, have renounced legacy admissions as unfair.

No edge at Long Island campuses

At Long Island institutions, legacy admissions do not give applicants an edge, given that acceptance rates are far higher and less competitive, local administrators said. None that responded said they considered legacy status in admissions decisions.

At Molloy University in Rockville Centre, where admissions official Marguerite Lane estimates that 25 alumni children are enrolled each year, legacy status isn’t considered. “It’s definitely more for the competitive institutions than others,” Lane said. “We have a lot of students who come because family and friends attended.”

At Adelphi University in Garden City last fall, 3.1% of all students admitted were legacy, with an alumni parent or grandparent. That number is 2.6% for this fall.

While legacy status entitles Adelphi students to a $500-per-semester scholarship, said Shawana Singletary, assistant vice president and chief enrollment officer, it does not factor into admissions decisions. She said the university “proudly emphasizes the admission of students based solely on their academic achievements, leaving no room for preferential treatment based on familial backgrounds.”

Stony Brook University ignores legacy status entirely. In a statement, the university asserted it “does not do legacy admissions nor do we track them. We would not be aware if a student has a parent or grandparent who attended the university.”

’You are not lost in the crowd’

For those whose college experience is a family affair, there are benefits even if that doesn’t boost admission chances.

Matthew Floyd, 21, a criminal justice major and college athlete, heard about Molloy from his college-athlete mother, Christine, a Molloy alumna. He attended alumni events with her and, he said, “I liked the atmosphere and sense of community of the athletic teams that the school gave off. … There’s scholarships offered, also connections, people she knew when she was there who are still there. I was able to talk to them and network that way.”

Mary Ann Mearini, Adelphi’s alumni relations associate, who got an undergraduate degree taking night classes in the 1990s with a son, said three of her four children, a nephew, three cousins and a brother-in-law all attended at different times.

“When my nephew was there and had a problem, he said, ’Aunt Mary, who should I see?’ I gave him the name of a professor I had and he ended up coming back for a second degree,” she said. “To know that there’s family that feel what I feel about Adelphi means the world; that you are not lost in the crowd.”

Elizabeth Panchyk, 21, didn’t think she wanted to go to the same college as her parents, but when she took the Adelphi tour, it felt right for her, she said. Now a rising senior, she is the editor-in-chief of the college paper, the same as her dad, Richard Panchyk, when he attended more than 30 years ago.

“To me, it’s just something I can share with my parents,” she said. “There is a small scholarship for it, and that’s it.”

“Qualified students who apply to Adelphi will get in, and that’s another reason I liked Adelphi,” said Richard Panchyk, of Westbury, Class of 1992. “It’s just a fairer process for applicants.”

“Right after the ruling came out, all of our students said, ’What does this mean? And how does this affect me?’” said Caroline Koppelman, a college admissions consultant who runs the Koppelman Group.

In the days following the Supreme Court’s June 29 ruling, many colleges said they’re still figuring out the implications for themselves. And experts whose primary task is preparing high school students for the next phase also say the future remains uncertain.

The ruling brought an end to decades of race-conscious admissions practices, but the experts said it’s still not clear how selective colleges and universities will adapt, or the extent to which they’ll embrace “workarounds” that allow students’ racial backgrounds to remain in the admissions mix.

Regardless, many experts predicted that students from underrepresented groups would come to see acceptance to prestigious institutions as increasingly unobtainable.

“Feeling like they ’belong’ on these predominantly white and upper-class campuses is already a challenge, and the decision is likely to make them feel — rightly or wrongly — even less like they can be at home at these schools,” said Janice Bloom, who co-founded College Access: Research and Action.

Bloom said students and high schools are currently in a waiting period, as colleges and universities determine their next moves in response to the ruling.

“My guess is that colleges are also in the early days of sorting through what they will do differently,” she said.

But answers could begin to emerge in the next few weeks, when colleges release the “supplemental questions” they use to go beyond the Common Application process that lets a student apply to multiple colleges at one time, said Koppelman.

That usually happens around the start of August.

Koppelman said those questions are “really good windows into how the schools are thinking about certain things,” and anticipates that most schools will give students a space to share stories about race.

Andres Marquez, who teaches history at Park Slope Collegiate, a public school in Brooklyn, said the notion that certain colleges are most desirable is something even his ninth graders have internalized, regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds. His message to those students, particularly Black and other students of color, as well as others from marginalized communities, remains unchanged.

“The playing field has never been fair or level,” Marquez said. “There is no Willy Wonka golden ticket for you. If you work hard, you may get into the Ivy League pipeline and sit alongside the wealthy elites and their legacy children, but there are no guarantees.”

The ruling significantly affects schools with highly selective admissions processes — the roughly 200 schools that accept 50% of applicants or fewer. But Koppelman said it really comes down to the nation’s most selective colleges and universities, the 30 to 50 institutions that admit fewer than 1 in 5 applicants and which have seen their acceptance rates drop to historic lows.

Any school within that coveted list functions as a “luxury brand,” she said, one with a perceived value that’s gone up and up as demand increased and supply remained the same.

“And I think for a lot of people with privileged backgrounds, it’s what they think is just in their future, has always been something that they are going to have,” Koppelman said. “And for a lot of other people it is a huge stepping stone, economically.”

Essays with subtlety, not ’sob stories’

Many experts argue that with the inevitable disappearance of the race “checkbox,” schools will look for other ways to secure diverse student bodies, including through college essays that delve into a student’s background. College consultants are not of one mind, however, when it comes to the tricky task of writing essays and the extent to which students should delve into issues of race and identity.

Some point to the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote in the majority opinion that “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.”

However, college consultant Brian Taylor of Ivy Coach said those who decide to reflect upon their race and how that shaped them need to do so in creative ways. That might mean relaying specific experiences or perspectives, rather than overly broad assertions about what it is to be from a particular background.

You have to be more subtle, but yeah, if you’re a Black applicant, make sure they know.

College consultant Brian Taylor of Ivy Coach

“Just because you’re Black doesn’t mean you have to write about George Floyd,” Taylor said.

A student who only says they’re a member of a particular race, but doesn’t communicate more specific insights, could come off as just trying to work around the affirmative action ruling.

“You have to be more subtle, but yeah, if you’re a Black applicant, make sure they know.”

Christopher Rim, the CEO of Command Education, said his main advice is to focus on extracurricular activities. He said students who are considering delving into their past or writing “sob stories” should proceed with caution.

“It should be about how students stood out, their life experiences,” he said. “And if their background did have a huge impact on an organization or club or internship that they got involved with, then that’s perfectly fine. But I wouldn’t recommend students to go out of their way to talk about their background in their college essay, because they think they’re going to see a huge benefit.”

Pushing to end legacy admissions

While much about college admissions remains uncertain, several experts felt the end of race-conscious admissions means that legacy admissions, which privilege applicants whose family members attended the same school, is now decisively in the crosshairs of higher education.

“Our crystal ball predicts that legacy admission is going to fall, not in the next few months, but in the next several weeks,” Taylor said. “They can no longer justify legacy admission without affirmative action.”

Already, he noted, several notable institutions had removed the legacy option, including Johns Hopkins, MIT and Amherst. And a civil rights complaint against Harvard’s practice of legacy admissions was filed last week by Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of Black and Latino students.

“The students who receive this preferential treatment — based solely on familial ties — are overwhelmingly white,” reads the complaint, which argues that legacy applicants are six times more likely to be admitted than non-legacy applicants.

The campaign to end legacy admissions has gained traction with national Democrats as well as Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. State lawmakers have introduced legislation that would put an end to legacy admissions in New York state, but some consultants said the issue is somewhat complex.

Legacy students are more likely to donate considerable amounts of money to institutions, Rim said. He said legacy “should certainly be removed,” but that doing so presents a potential financial hurdle for those schools and for certain students.

“If you remove that and schools have lower endowments, maybe they have less scholarships to offer or grants to offer students who can’t afford it,” Rim said.

Beyond ending legacy admissions, Taylor said schools needed to adapt in other ways in order to preserve some semblance of racial diversity.

“Let’s stop earmarking so many slots in college admissions for squash players and water polo players and swimmers,” Taylor said. “These are sports that are overwhelmingly white, that are overwhelmingly privileged. These eliminate slots and admissions from Black applicants, from Latino applicants.”

Whether those changes take place remains to be seen. For the time being, students will have to make sense of a college landscape that is even more daunting than it was before.

In a recent post shared on its Facebook and Instagram feeds, the nonprofit Sadie Nash Leadership Project, which works with young women and “gender-expansive youth,” said the affirmative action ruling shouldn’t be seen in isolation, but as part of a larger, more troubling wave.

The statement said the organization is “disheartened, sad and worried about these recent Supreme Court decisions to end affirmative action, strike down student loan forgiveness and uphold discrimination against LGBTQ+ folks.”

“These decisions, the anniversary of the end of Roe v. Wade, and the expanding gender-affirming care bans are all very overwhelming,” it said.

Samra Ghermay, the director of development and communications at Sadie Nash Leadership Project, said the combination of all these things within a relatively short time and against the backdrop of the pandemic was especially hard for those aspiring to be the first of their families to attend college.

“There is always the concern of losing morale with such a drastic decision that deeply affects the young people we work with and their access to education,” Ghermay said.