Supreme Court affirmative action decision from 2023 affects UNC admissions practices

One year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the use of race-conscious admissions practices in its 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision, UNC admitted its first affected class this fall. The demographic data for this class showed a drop in Black and Latino enrollment.

To comply with the decision, the University changed some aspects of its admissions process, including new essay prompts and tools to consider other aspects of a student's identity, such as a renewed focus on socioeconomic background. These changes were not permitted to be proxies for race — a practice explicitly prohibited in the court decision.

With only one cycle of admissions data available, establishing trends is difficult. By their nature, experts and advocates say these changes fail to do what affirmative action was intended to in cultivating diversity and representation in higher education. 

“These policies don't specifically target students of color,” Joseph Williams, a professor at the UNC School of Education, said. “They will help some but, if you don't actually consider how race and class actually intersect, you have these race neutral policies that serve to benefit white first-generation and white low-income students, because numerically, they are the majority population.”

The UNC Office of Undergraduate Admissions said there was no one available to comment on the changes and their impacts.

Essay prompts and race data

For this application cycle, the short essay section of UNC's application had two options: one was about having a positive impact on a community, and the other about an academic topic the applicant is interested in. In previous years, there have been prompts about the ways personal identity shapes life experience. One in the previous 2022-23 admissions cycle featured a quote from UNC alumnus and Civil Rights activist Esphur Foster.

Sarah Zhang, a senior and founder of the Affirmative Action Coalition at UNC, said that the new essays, along with the other changes in the process, might make applicants feel like their experiences don’t matter. 

“I wrote my essay about my experience growing up Asian American in a predominantly white community, and how that shaped me,” Zhang said. “And I feel like with the new essays, students should not feel uncomfortable talking about their race or their background. That is the direction that we're shifting in." 

Along with changes in essay prompts, racial demographic data about applicants is no longer available to anyone involved in the application process. The University removed race from application evaluation forms, reports and data queries in Connect Carolina.

In an informational video prepared for UNC admissions officers, the University shared guidance on what to do if they became aware of an applicant’s identity through a part of their application, such as in their response to the short essay. The video instructs admissions officers not to track the applicant's race or try to compare the racial demographic data of the incoming class to the prior class with this information. 

Race and ethnicity, the video said, can be considered in a very specific context according to the Supreme Court’s guidance.

“The Court’s decision does not prohibit a program from considering a student’s discussion of lived racial experiences as part of the application process,” the video said. “But only if that experience is connected to a separate individual achievement, character trait or other evaluation criteria that is available to all applicants and does not function as a proxy for race.” 

Other demographic factors

Like many universities responding to the SFFA court decision, UNC also began using College Board’s Landscape Tool. The resource provides additional information about the high school, neighborhood and expected test scores of each applicant.  

Daniel Klasik, an associate professor at the UNC School of Education who researches affirmative action, said Landscape has been shown to be effective in increasing socioeconomic diversity, but falls short of race-conscious admissions in increasing racial diversity. 

“If we want to build racial diversity, by far the best tool we can use is being able to see race directly,” he said. “Anything else that sort of we think is related to students' race or their experience growing up, that's just kind of going to be like a one or two degrees away from what we actually want”

Like in other years, the admissions office also said in its training slides that it was prioritizing representing all 100 counties of North Carolina, considering income and hoping to represent counties from each of the three tiers as designated by the N.C. Department of Commerce.

The impacts of this effort are incomplete, as the full admissions data for this application cycle has not yet been released, although the incoming class includes students from 95 N.C. counties, and 35.8 percent of in-state students come from rural counties. 

Though income and socioeconomic diversity is important, Williams said it is a separate goal from racial diversity.

“Part of the race-conscious admissions and affirmative action, although that may be a short-term solution to a larger problem, is to readdress the racial inequality that actually happened,” he said. “The years in which, you know, Black and brown folk weren't allowed to actually attend the University, it has ramifications. Oppression has a legacy. It accumulates. It compounds interest and debt over time.” 

Klasik said that when in practice, affirmative action was an effective but imperfect solution. 

"The point at which a student is applying for college is sort of the end point of years of inequitable access to educational opportunity," he said. "And there's only so much that a consideration of race can do to undo that." 

Without any consideration for race and with new policies like the System-wide DEI repeal, Zhang said they expect the problem of a lack of diversity to only continue. 

"In my senior year, and DEI is on attack, and affirmative action isn't here anymore and I'm seeing the campus grow less and less diverse," Zhang said. "I'm kind of just like, 'this definitely isn't the Carolina that I applied to back in 2021.'"

---