by Alvin Blackshear | Historian & Researcher <ablackshear@gmail.com>
A Sad Day, Not a Surprising One
When the Supreme Court struck down race conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard on June 29, 2023, the reaction from educators and advocates was less shock than grief. As one campus diversity officer put it in the ruling's immediate aftermath, it was "a sad day in America, but not a surprising day." That framing captures something real. Affirmative action's opponents had been building toward this moment for a decade, and those working in higher education had time to brace for it, even if bracing didn't make the outcome easier to absorb.
The Argument That Won't Go Away. Legacy, Donors, and Athletes
The sharpest counterpunch from critics of the ruling is that it eliminated one narrow preference while leaving much larger ones intact. A 2026 study published in Education Finance and Policy by Vanderbilt researchers Brent Evans and Cody Christensen examined seven institutions and one statewide policy that banned legacy admissions preferences, including Amherst College, Johns Hopkins, the University of California system, and the state of Colorado. Their finding complicates the simple version of this argument. Banning legacy preferences alone did not consistently increase student diversity. Some institutions saw real gains, others saw little to no change, in part because many state policies ban legacy preference but leave donor preference fully intact and rarely include enforcement mechanisms. The takeaway is not that legacy and donor preferences are harmless. It's that removing them is not, by itself, a substitute for the access affirmative action provided. Older data still underscores the scale of the underlying preference. A widely cited, but dated, Harvard admissions analysis found that more than 43 percent of white students admitted between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacies, on the dean's interest list, or children of faculty and staff, compared with under 16 percent for Black, Asian American, and Hispanic admits.
The Precedent Nobody Should Ignore. What Happened After California Banned Race Conscious Admissions
Critics point to California as a preview of the nationwide ruling's likely effects, and researchers are still tracking the fallout from the newer, national version of that experiment. In a 2026 Brookings research brief, University of Maryland professor Julie Park (whose book Race, Class, and Affirmative Action was published by Harvard Education Press this year and reviewed in the peer-reviewed journal Education Review) documents what she calls a "cascade effect." Underrepresented students turned away from elite institutions are enrolling instead at state flagships, and students previously headed to flagships are being displaced further down the selectivity ladder. Park's analysis found that Black student enrollment fell at a majority of the 29 elite institutions she tracked, with 16 public flagships reporting a net loss of Black students. At the same time, 83 percent of public flagship institutions saw overall underrepresented minority enrollment rise, driven largely by Latino students rather than Black students. This is not a story of straightforward decline. It's a redistribution, and Park's research draws heavily on earlier causal work by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer showing that students who lose access to more selective institutions tend to have measurably worse graduation rates, grades, and postgraduate earnings than they would have had otherwise. That earlier research, on California's Proposition 209, found the ban deterred more than 1,000 underrepresented minority applicants a year from even applying to the UC system and cut Black and Latino enrollment at UC Berkeley by roughly 40 percent.
Race Neutral Alternatives Aren't Neutral in Effect
The practical question facing universities now is what to do instead. Park's 2026 analysis notes that class based, income based alternatives to race conscious admissions do not reliably produce the same racial diversity gains, even when they succeed at increasing economic diversity. That gap is the empirical heart of the argument that "colorblind" admissions policies are not simply neutral substitutes. They tend to produce smaller and less consistent results.
Where This Leaves the Debate
None of this settles the constitutional question the Court already resolved. But it sharpens the practical one facing universities today. If the preferences that most favor wealthy, disproportionately white applicants remain harder to dislodge than expected, and if the race neutral alternatives on offer are inconsistent at best, the real fight ahead is over legacy and donor admissions reform, income based alternatives, and pipeline investment, not just compliance with the letter of the ruling.
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Notes
Arcidiacono, P., Kinsler, J., & Ransom, T. (2022). "Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard." Journal of Labor Economics, 40(1), 133–156. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/713744
Evans, B. J., & Christensen, C. L. (2026). "The Evolving Landscape of Legacy Preference Bans in Postsecondary Admissions. Evidence and Policy Implications from Case Studies." Education Finance and Policy, 21(3), 564–585. https://doi.org/10.1162/EDFP.a.433
Park, J. J. (2026). Race, Class, and Affirmative Action. College Admissions in a New Era. Harvard Education Press. Reviewed by Yingyuan Sun (2026), Education Review, 33. https://doi.org/10.14507/er.v33.4653
