College Application Trends Following the Supreme Court’s Race-Conscious Admissions Ban

Title: Application Trends Following the End of Race-Conscious Admissions

Authors: Brian Heseung Kim, Elyse Armstrong, Mark Freeman, Rodney Hughes, Sarah Nolan, Tara Nicola, and Trent Kajikawa

Source: Common App

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled that race and ethnicity could not be used as a factor in the college admissions process. A year later, policymakers, administrators, researchers, and students alike are wondering about the ramifications.

The authors of a new report from Common App note that the findings they present should not be interpreted as causal, meaning they cannot definitively pinpoint the SCOTUS decision as the driver for any findings. They used application and racial and ethnic reporting data to determine if there had been any meaningful departure from recent trends, starting with the 2019-20 application cycle up through all applications submitted by April 30, 2024.

There are four main takeaways from the 2023-24 application season:

1. Students are not changing the way they report their race or ethnicity, indicated by the relative changes in applicant volume across racial and ethnic groups. Applicant volume growth was highest among American Indian or Alaska Native students (11 percent) and lowest among White and Asian students (both 1 percent). The growth of the applicant volume of students identifying as Asian may be “flattening,” but cannot be confirmed due to its very small size.

2. The average number of applications per student has also not meaningfully diverged from its trend over the past five years. When analyzing application numbers by broad racial and ethnic groups, this pattern holds. In the 2023-24 application cycle, Asian students on average submitted 7.06 applications, compared with 4.29 applications per Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander applicant. Among students in the 95th SAT/ACT or GPA percentile (referred to as “high achieving” in this report), the smallest share of students applying to at least one of the most selective institutions were Black or African American (62.2 percent), compared with 91.7 percent of Asian students, the highest of any racial or ethnic category.

3. Among all returning Common App member institutions, the racial and ethnic makeup of applicant pools has not significantly diverged from the trends of the previous four application cycles. There is also no substantial change in trend for the most selective returning members across student achievement levels. The pool of low-income, first-generation students applying to the most selective institutions mimicked that of recent years, except the share of Latino applicants to these institutions increased at a slightly faster rate in the past year.

The Supreme Court outlined a specific exception in its ruling: Students may discuss how race has affected their lives. It was hypothesized that a higher share of students would mention race in personal essays.

4. For this application cycle, all racial and ethnic groups’ use of terms indicating race or ethnicity remained consistent with the trends since the 2021-22 application cycle, except among American Indian or Alaska Native students. Their mentions of race increased from the 2022-2023 application cycle, unlike other racial and ethnic groups. Notably, high achieving underrepresented minority (URM) students may be discussing race/ethnicity at a higher rate than comparable non-URM students.

While there have been some small movements and deviations from recent trends, the report finds there are no drastic, abundantly clear, or concerning shifts in application patterns. The lack of transformation does not indicate that the SCOTUS decision is not impacting students but instead that these metrics are not capturing those impacts in the year after the decision. Future admissions and enrollment data are paramount to understanding the implications of this ruling.

To read the full report, click here.

—Erica Swirsky