It’s been two weeks since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down decisions in two significant cases for higher ed: affirmative action and student loans.
In both cases, higher ed feels like it “lost” after the high court struck down 50 years of precedent in using race as a factor in admissions (and with it institutional autonomy in deciding how to craft a class), and then the next day, rejected the Biden Administration’s loan-forgiveness plan.
While a lot has been written and said about these decisions in the last two weeks, it will be perhaps a year—and probably longer—before we really know the impact of either decision.
🎓 On affirmative action, we should learn the racial and ethnic makeup of the incoming freshman class at selective colleges next spring—if institutions release enrollment numbers themselves (and that’s a big if). It will be much later if we need to wait for the official numbers from the U.S. Department of Education. In either case, those numbers will account for the first year after the decision—just a snapshot in time (see more on that below).
💳 On student loans, the Education Department has already initiated the official process to write a regulation granting student debt relief. But that bureaucratic approach is lengthy, so any new proposed regulation is a year away—at the earliest. What’s more, any regulation that proposes to forgive loans will likely face further legal scrutiny.
While we wait to see the downstream effects play out over the next year, here are more immediate developments I’m watching for:
1. Test optional here to stay? The rapid expansion of test-optional admissions during the pandemic brought more applicants—and more applicants of color—to selective colleges. Plus, when institutions don’t have a test score for every applicant, it’s a piece of evidence those claiming discrimination don’t have at their disposal to use in their case.
2. When colleges ‘see’ checkbox data. The Common App will still give students an option to identify as Hispanic, Black, Asian, white, etc. But colleges can have the Common App withhold that information when applications are transmitted to the institution or receive it but mask the data from their admissions teams. The question, as one college official told me earlier this week, is when does the admissions dean look at the data? Do they wait until students commit in May, or do they look weeks earlier during yield season before accepted students have deposited?
3. Shifts in recruitment and yield strategies. If colleges know the racial and ethnic makeup of their accepted pool in April—after acceptances have gone out but before deposits are in—admissions deans I talked with recently believe they can still race as a factor in how they yield students. That might include improved financial aid packages, campus visits where colleges fly-in accepted students, and other tactics colleges have long used to make their class.
At the other end of the admissions funnel, expect selective colleges to focus more recruiting time and resources on high schools with large proportions of students of color.
- The University of Virginia, for instance, announced last month a plan to target 40 high schools in the state that have sent few applications to the flagship campus.
- But even those approaches might come under fire in some states. After the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced an expansion of free tuition for families making less than $80,000 a year following the Supreme Court decision, some members of the system’s Board of Board of Governors and Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees pushed back, questioning why the university never presented the idea to them before releasing it publicly.
4. Restarting loan payments and the broader economy. Borrowers are set to resume payments on their federal student loans in September, after more than three years of forbearance that began during the pandemic. During that time, borrowers spent their student-loan payments on housing, food, travel—basically everything but student loans. Restarting loan payments will be hard enough on borrowers and on the Education Department, but its ripple effects are also likely to be felt in the broader economy.
5. Public sentiment about higher ed. The issues tied up in these two Supreme Court cases stirred up public passions about who “deserves” to get into top-ranked colleges and who should pay for higher education. Admissions is the front door of higher ed—it’s the first thing the public encounters when it engages with colleges. Meanwhile, student loans are a reminder of the cost of college long after students graduate. Taken together, these cases brought to the forefront long-simmer debates in higher ed about access, affordability, and graduate outcomes. No wonder a new Gallup poll out this week shows only 36% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—down 20 points from eight years ago.
Read, watch, listen where I’ve recently addressed these issues and more:
📰 Wall Street Journal: How Elite Colleges Will Work Around the Supreme Court’s Ruling
📺 PBS NewsHour: Interview with William Brangham
🎧 NPR: The 1A Show with admissions officers from Colorado College and Spelman College.
