Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll take a look at how the college admissions process has already changed in the few months since the end of affirmative action. August 1st marked the start of the first admission cycle since the Supreme Court banned universities from considering an applicant's race in their decisions. Why August 1st? Well, students of today know well that this is when Common App, the nonprofit that combines the applications of over 1,000 universities launched for the new year.

How are universities who care about racial diversity aiming to achieve it within the new confines of the Supreme Court's decision? For one thing, many are utilizing their essay prompts to learn more about the backgrounds of prospective students. Brandeis University's essay question now reads, "Brandeis was established 75 years ago to address anti-Semitism, racism and gender discrimination in higher education and today the university remains dedicated to its founding values of inclusivity and justice. How has your educational experience shaped your perspective on these values?" That's in a Brandeis essay prompt.

Sarah Lawrence took an even bolder approach, you might say, directly citing the court. In their question it reads, "In a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected the applicants life so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the applicant can contribute to the university,” quoting from John Roberts. “Drawing upon examples from your life,” Sarah Lawrence continues, “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." In your face Supreme Court, right?

Other schools are changing their admissions procedures and policies too in hopes of making the process more equal. Columbia University's president just announced this week that the institution would shift from individual schools or departments creating admissions policies to a university-level focus. That's what they call it, a university-level focus. We'll get into what that means in a moment.

Let's look now at how universities across the country have begun adapting to this new legal landscape. Joining us is Liam Knox, a reporter who specifically covers admissions and enrollment for the publication Inside Higher Ed. Liam, thanks for joining. Welcome to WNYC.

Liam Knox: Thanks for having me, Brian. Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: I just read two out of the many essay prompt schools have put out there that pretty explicitly invite students to discuss their racial backgrounds. Is that clearly allowed under the Supreme Court ruling or does it seem they're testing boundaries there?

Liam Knox: Well, it's certainly this-- any decision that a university makes right now in regards to an admissions policy or an essay prompt, they're going to be consulting with their legal counsel thoroughly. This is a time of caution for universities when navigating what is still a pretty uncertain legal landscape around admissions policies. The Sarah Lawrence's specifically admissions dean when I spoke to him shortly after they released this question on August 1st, he said that they were pretty confident that it would pass legal muster, but he understood that it was a bold move. That it was in some ways, a risk, as many things are right now because everything is so uncertain. But Chief Justice John Roberts--

Brian Lehrer: Although the wording on first impression, and I only saw this for the first time this morning, but on first impression it sounds like the Supreme Court could not rule against asking somebody to comment on the Supreme Court, right? Because the wording was, “Describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced or affected by the court's decision.” They can't stop you from asking that, can they?

Liam Knox: Well, right, and I think a lot of lawyers would say that that is actually a pretty solid firewall to directly quote from the court's decision. I'm sure that's part of the reason why Sarah Lawrence did it, another part being the reason you're reading it out loud on WNYC because it made a bit of a splash and it helped them reinforce what their response was going to be to this landmark decision.

I also think, however, that there's, like I said, a lot of uncertainty. They quoted that part of Justice John Roberts' majority opinion about how colleges can consider race as part of a holistic assessment of a student, so as part of their lived experiences that might have shaped the character of who they are, while they're applying to the college. That, of course, that's not something the court can prevent colleges from considering.

At the same time, there's another sentence that's not cited in there that conservative legal activists like to cite more often where he says essentially that colleges should be wary of using anything that's not explicitly race-based affirmative action as a proxy for the practice that they determined was unlawful. That leaves the door open to further lawsuits, whether from students or from groups like Students for Fair Admissions, which was the group that that won both of these cases at the Supreme Court, both meaning the ones against Harvard and UNC, which made up the affirmative action case.

There's a lot of risk-taking that went into these new essay prompts, and it wasn't just Sarah Lawrence and Brandeis. It was dozens of colleges including Columbia University, as you said. Like I said, the actual legal outcome of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action made it pretty clear that considering race as one factor in an essay response should be fine, but these are stances that these schools are taking, whether they are going to be able to come right out and say that or not.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story. Are you or your children applying for college this coming year? Are you planning on talking about your racial or ethnic background in your or your child's personal essay? 212-433-WNYC. Does it feel burdensome that you have to discuss race while applying to college when in the past, students could just check a box and then write about whatever they wanted? Are you glad that institutions are finding workarounds for the Supreme Court? 212-433-WNYC. We'd love some of you to help us report this story if you're dealing with a new environment laid out by the Supreme Court and getting ready for somebody in your family or yourself to apply to college in the coming months. 212-433-9692.

We'd love to hear from anyone working in college admissions too. Tell us something about your school's admissions adaptations in this new environment. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text or tweet @BrianLehrer or you can also ask a question. Anyone can ask a question of our guest, Liam Knox, reporter at Inside Higher Ed covering admissions and enrollment. Want to talk about Columbia? What I said in the intro is that they're trying to adapt partly by making admissions university-wide rather than department-wide or what they call schools within the university. What are they doing exactly?

Liam Knox: Sure. The actual change from a school level admissions policy to a university-wide, I haven't spoken to anyone at Columbia about what this actually would do. My guess is that that is mainly a decision meant to ensure compliance across the university. It's much easier to make sure that everyone's admissions policies and admissions decisions are in line with a new law, a new legal understanding, then when you have that being done in a centralized office than it is when you have every school operating for themselves. My guess is that it has more to do with compliance than with finding any workaround to maintain diversity.

I think what's going to be interesting is what happens next, what comes out of this working group at Columbia. Columbia, an Ivy League school, one of the first of the Ivies to announce that they're actually-- a formal working group to address this, although others have informally essentially said to await their announcements about what their responses are going to be in terms of new admissions policies, in terms of things like getting rid of legacy admissions or new scholarships, things like that, that could offset the effects of the affirmative action ban. None of that at the Ivy level has really happened yet and so we're still waiting on something concrete to come out of this. The Columbia announcement is more waiting, I would say than anything, but it is an indication that something will come. We just have yet to see what that is.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, by the way this is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming @wnyc.org at 11 o'clock. Nick in Corning, New York, you're on WNYC. Hello, Nick.

Nick: Hi, Brian. I'm not sure if you're getting sick of me yet, but I keep calling.

Brian Lehrer: Keep calling Nick.

Nick: I just wanted to make the comment that myself as a Democrat and as a liberal, this is one of the few points that I would maybe identify on a little bit of a gray area here, because I think that having to discuss and articulate how your race has affected or the Supreme Court decision rather has affected your admissions process, it's maybe a difficult and maybe a little bit of a tumultuous pill to swallow at first, but in the end it's enriching. It's healthy to have somebody have to incorporate a little bit more context and be a little bit more introspective with their race rather than just checking a box.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, well, that's an argument for the basis of the Supreme Court decision, or it's not even the basis of the Supreme Court decision, which was a constitutional interpretation, but for the policy of not having affirmative action by race. I don't want to rehash, but the argument on the other side would be that in 400 years of discriminating explicitly on the basis of race in American history, why is race the only thing that cannot be taken into account when colleges look at all kinds of characteristics of their applicants? We're just going to leave that there, but Nick do keep calling us.

I want to ask you Liam, about many of the universities taking this more aggressive approach, being private institutions. Certainly the ones we cited so far are. What about public universities, which more usually serve students of underrepresented backgrounds, but can also be selective as we know in certain public university cases?

Liam Knox: It's a great question. They have to handle this a lot differently I think in a lot of cases, and that's especially true in red states. The day that the Supreme Court decision was handed down, elected officials and political appointees in certain states, I'm thinking of Ohio and Missouri, released orders and warnings to their public colleges saying, “This means you have to change things. You have to comply with the law and that's going to mean immediate changes.” In some cases, the Missouri Attorney General for instance, told the University of Missouri that not only could they not have consider race as a factor in admissions, they couldn't consider it in hiring, they couldn't consider it even as a proxy in essay questions that inferred that.

There's a wide range of interpretations of this decision because it wasn't extremely clear on its scope. There are public institutions and Republican states, and in blue states that have to tread very, very carefully, because they are subject to more scrutiny from more stakeholders, from state representatives, from elected officials, from offices of civil rights. Although of course, private institutions in some cases are subject to that as well, but there's a lot more potential danger in the immediate aftermath of that ruling.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe one example of what you're saying, the politics that's around state universities, because they're governed by state governments, which are political bodies. You reported on an instance in which the governors of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill voted to ban the consideration of race, not just in student admissions, but also in hiring and contract decisions. That's an example. Of course, we may be having this conversation in next year's Supreme Court term as they try to expand the anti-diversity interpretation to involve the workplace, and not just student admissions.

North Carolina, I guess being a fairly conservative state is taking that step on its own regarding Chapel Hill. Dominique from Suffolk County, who is a college admissions counselor, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dominique.

Dominique: Hi Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got? What are you doing as a college admissions counselor that's new?

Dominique: Well, I've always helped students with their college essays. This year my advice to students is really, if you were not already planning on writing about your racial background for your college essay, don't do it. Because most likely, your essay will be really, to put it, inauthentic, and use one of the supplemental essays where you're explicitly asked about diversity to do that. Instead, what I'm encouraging students to do, sort of what I've always encouraged them do is, hone in on a characteristic that really helps define you.

For example, one student I'm working with is Peruvian, and he picked hardworking. He talked about how he worked really hard to learn Spanish so that he could communicate with his mother's family. In that way, the student is talking about their racial or ethnic background, but we also learn a lot about what kind of student that person is, and would be at the university. Because I think if students just try to say write an essay about, "I'm Peruvian," it probably wouldn't be a very good essay.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting point. Thank you very much. Are you hearing other things like that as you report on college admissions in the new environment, Liam?

Liam Knox: Yes, absolutely. I think that one concern a lot of people have is that students of color are going to feel pressure even more than before. It was already there before to write about or even exaggerate the effect of racial trauma on their lives in order to get admitted to these highly selective universities. That's something that college admissions counselors are wary of, certainly, high school advisors are wary of that pressure on students.

Brian Lehrer: Which is also ironic in a way at least potentially because the advocates of banning affirmative action and admissions say they're doing so because they want to aim for a more "Colorblind society" not one where everybody from the start divides themselves into their racial groups for the core of their identity. But they may be pushed more into doing that under the new structures that have been dictated by the court.

Liam Knox: Yes, that's the fear. With any decision like this, there's going to be a reaction in some cases, a reaction that is more polarizing than before even in some ways. I think we're still seeing where the issues are falling on that, but students answering their college applications this month, they're starting in this new world to respond to these prompts and think about what it is they're going to include. It's almost impossible not to consider the effects that this decision is going to have on a student's thinking.

Whether they want to or not, it seems like-- and institutions have been very careful to say that these new essay prompts, these new spaces for discussing one's, racial identity and their lived experience that there are opportunities for students who want to do so. Not in any means and wording them even in such ways to make that clear, but I think regardless, the pressure is going to be felt.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more caller in here, and then we're out of time. Here's Susanna who teaches at Columbia, and I think is going to give us more background on what they're doing there. Susanna, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Susanna: Hi Brian. Yes, so we got an email from Minouche Shafik who's the new president at Columbia about a week ago, who in regards to the new admissions policy said, "One particular focus will be local opportunities and that they want to welcome students from local public high schools, community colleges, and other public institutions." Columbia has a really strained history with Harlem in particular, but it seems like looking to New York City public high schools in Queens and the Bronx, and in Harlem particularly, seems like one of the strategies that they're looking to employ, which I hope folks that are listening take that- -to heart and think about applying to Columbia and looking into those opportunities and that outreach this year.

Brian Lehrer: Good. Susanna, thank you very much. Of course, some schools are using zip codes as a surrogate for who lives where because of housing segregation, using what they call adversity scores, all these things. I guess my closing question, Liam, because this ruling is making us ask around here, what's the point of selective colleges in the first place? My question is do you think colleges are asking themselves that in new ways now, whether it's an Ivy at the top of the selectivity heap or a flagship state school that's more selective than other campuses in their systems? What purpose does any school think it's serving for the public interest, not just for its own interest, by the way they choose among students?

Liam Knox: Well, I think we're certainly, and we've seen this happen increasingly since the ruling came down, we're certainly seeing people asking those selective colleges what the purpose of that high level of selectivity is. Whether internally this is going to lead to some kind of revolutionary reflection that might cause the Harvards and Yales of the world to throw open their wrought iron gates to a much broader swath of the public, I don't know. It's certainly causing reflection. We're seeing that out of all of the selective institutions, the way they're talking about what they're going to do moving forward.

Part of that is focusing locally. Columbia is not the only one doing that. Duke University announced that they have a free tuition program for students from the Carolinas whose families make under a certain amount. There are lots of, I think, tools and strategies for increasing diversity and increasing access that we're going to see come out of this based on a reflection about the lack of access to these highly selective institutions.

Because of affirmative action, as some people, I believe, has been a little bit of a crutch for these institutions in terms of not needing to pursue some of these other angles. We'll see whether that leads to a much deeper reflection on the place of selective colleges in American public life. I think that is a much more difficult question to answer right now.

Brian Lehrer: For another segment, because we're out of time for this one, I'll note a caller who's on the line who we don't have time to actually put on the air, Sharon in Denver, but making an important point that if this is going to focus now on the essays, that the essays are another potential trap because people of means can hire help for their kids and their schools have greater resources to coach the kids in their essay writing. That's for another day to be explored-

Liam Knox: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: -in more detail, but we leave that here as a reference. For now, to close out our conversation with Liam Knox, reporter who covers admissions and enrollment for the publication, Inside Higher Ed, Liam, thanks so much for joining us.

Liam Knox: Thank you, Brian.

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