This collection of research on race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action, originally published in May 2023, has been updated with new research, data and other information.
In the two years since the Supreme Court effectively banned race-based affirmative action in college admissions, many of the nation’s most selective institutions have admitted fewer Black and Hispanic students.
Schools have adjusted their admissions and recruitment processes to try to maintain their student diversity. But bringing in the same number of students from underrepresented minority groups is more difficult without affirmative action policies, which often give students from underrepresented minority groups a small edge in the admissions process. A small edge can make a big difference at highly selective schools such as Harvard and Stanford universities, which accept about 4% of all applicants.
After affirmative action ended, top-tier colleges and universities reported admitting significantly fewer Black freshmen. At the country’s 85 most selective institutions, the number of Black first-year students fell an average of 19% — from a combined 10,125 students the year before the Supreme Court decision to 8,183 students the year afterward, a new analysis from The Hechinger Report shows.
Across those 85 schools, Hispanic enrollment rose slightly from 2022 to 2023 but then dipped in 2024, according to The Hechinger Report. However, some institutions saw drastic reductions. For example, Johns Hopkins University recently reported a sharp decline in Hispanic students. The proportion of first-year students there who identified as Hispanic or Latino dropped from 20.8% in 2023 to 10.1% in 2025.
Academic studies demonstrate that so-called “race-neutral alternatives” to affirmative action are generally less effective. Much of the research to date focuses on race-neutral strategies implemented at public colleges and universities in states that eliminated affirmative action years before the Supreme Court did. In 1996, California ended affirmative action at all state-run higher education institutions. Eight other states followed from 1998 to 2020.
The most common race-neutral approaches include:
- Giving preference to students with a lower socioeconomic status, typically determined by family income and the occupations and education levels of members of students’ households.
In the U.S., a person’s race and ethnicity is closely linked to their socioeconomic status, with Black, Hispanic and Native American students more likely to have a lower socioeconomic status than white and Asian students. For example, in 2022, 13% of Hispanic children under age 18 lived in households with adults who had not finished high school, compared with 2% of white, non-Hispanic children, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
However, policies aimed at aiding students based on income or socioeconomic status do not just benefit underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities. Nearly half of undergraduate students who are the first in their families to go to college are white and not Hispanic, according to the Center for First-Generation Student Success, part of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.
- Expanding recruitment efforts. Higher education officials often target high school students who are the first in their families to go to college and high schools located in lower-income areas.
- Increasing the number and dollar amount of scholarships offered to students from low-income households or low socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Introducing a “holistic” application review process, which takes into account students’ extracurricular activities, accomplishments outside school and lived experiences as well as traditional measures of academic ability such as test scores and grade-point averages.
Stanford University, which practices holistic admissions, tells applicants on its website that it takes into account their background, educational pathway, and work and family responsibilities. “By focusing on your achievements in context, we evaluate how you have excelled in your school environment and how you have taken advantage of what is available to you in your school and community,” the university explains.
- Dropping the requirement that applicants take and submit their scores on college-entrance exams such as the SAT and ACT. The change benefits underrepresented minorities and lower-income students because they often earn lower scores than white and Asian students and students from higher-income backgrounds.
- Adopting a “top percent” program. Florida, California and Texas have adopted programs that guarantee youth who graduate within a top percentage of their high school class a seat at one of their public universities. Such policies aim to diversify college enrollment by capitalizing on high levels of racial and ethnic segregation among high schools in those states.
“Black and Hispanic students who rank at the top of their class disproportionately hail from minority-dominant schools,” Princeton University scholars Marta Tienda and Sunny Xinchun Niu write in a 2006 paper examining Texas’ Top Ten Percent rule, which guarantees Texas high school students who graduate in the top 10% percent of their class and complete other requirements admission to most public universities in the state.
Benefits, consequences of race-neutral alternatives
California was the first state to eliminate race-based affirmative action at public universities. In 1996, voters there approved Proposition 209, which amended the state constitution to prohibit state agencies from considering race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin when evaluating potential employees, contractors and students.
Eight other states — Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington — also ended the practice. In 2022, however, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee rescinded the ban in that state.
The University of Michigan, a top-ranked public university, introduced a wide range of programs to replace affirmative action after residents of that state voted to end it. Proposal 2, approved in 2006, prohibits all public institutions and agencies from giving preferential treatment to anyone based on race, gender, ethnicity and other factors.
University of Michigan officials have argued that their race-neutral strategies for recruiting and supporting underrepresented minorities have been expensive, time consuming and labor intensive. The university “was forced to radically alter its admissions process in order to even approach the diversity levels achieved prior to Proposal 2,” attorneys for the school write in a 36-page amicus brief they filed with the Supreme Court in 2022 in support of affirmative action.
“That change was so disruptive that the response not only took time — over 15 years and counting — but vast resources and efforts extending far beyond University campuses, as [the University of Michigan] developed extensive new race-neutral initiatives that reached into school districts around the state,” the attorneys write.
Those combined efforts helped the university raise its underrepresented minority enrollment to 13.5% in 2021 — slightly above where it had been the year before the state banned affirmative action. While an influx of Hispanic students helped the University of Michigan rebuild its enrollment of underrepresented minorities, the university has not been able to regain its footing with regards to Black and Native American students.
Neither has the California public university system, which has spent more than a half-billion dollars implementing alternate policies over the last 25 years, its attorneys note in another amicus brief filed in 2022 with the Supreme Court.
The University of California system has adopted various race-neutral policies since voters there approved Proposition 209, a state constitutional amendment similar to Michigan’s, in 1996. That ban began with the freshman class of fall 1998.
The state’s most selective public universities — the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Los Angeles — lost the most ground. Prior to the ban, 6.32% of freshmen at UC Berkeley were Black. In 2019, that figure dropped to 2.76%. The proportion of Native American freshman fell from 1.82% to 0.37%.
Hispanic enrollment, however, has grown across California’s public universities. But the state also has seen its Hispanic population swell in recent decades, thanks partly to a growing number of Hispanic students attending K-12 schools in the state.
“UC has established a number of outreach programs aimed at students from low-income families, students whose families have little or no previous experience with higher education, and students who attend an educationally disadvantaged school,” attorneys for the university system write in their amicus brief, which also was submitted in support of Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill.
“Because these outreach programs primarily target economically and educationally disadvantaged students, the extent to which they are able to reach underrepresented minority students depends on changing demographic patterns. By 2020, it had become more difficult for these outreach programs to reach African American and Native American students, even as more Latinx, Asian American, and White students benefited from them.”
A look at research on race-neutral strategies
Much of the research on race-neutral alternatives focuses on public universities in a single state. Often, it is California, the most populous state and home to two of the country’s highest-rated public universities.
When scholars publish a paper that examines race-neutral strategies at one school or a group of schools in one state, the results typically apply only to the institutions studied. It is incorrect to assume other colleges and universities will have the same experiences. Even so, researcher’s findings can provide insights into how enrollments might change in the years after institutions stop using affirmative action.
A narrow segment of affirmative action-related research looks at how well race-neutral alternatives work. It’s hard to evaluate individual policies, however, because college administrators often use several strategies at once, Mark Long, the dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.
Also, it is not always clear what exactly institutions are doing differently to boost minority enrollment. Some changes “might be subtle and not advertised by the schools — for example, changes in the inputs used to make admissions decisions,” Long added.
Demographic shifts have made it tougher for scholars to estimate the impact of race-neutral alternatives. Scholars have seen Hispanic enrollment climb at some public universities after they stopped using affirmative action. In many cases, they believe those increases are the result of changes within the Hispanic population, not university interventions.
Nationwide, the number of Hispanic youth attending public elementary, middle and high schools almost doubled from 7.7 million in fall 2000 to 14.3 million in fall 2022, the U.S. Department of Education reports. The student population, as a whole, grew less than 6% over that period.
More Hispanic students are going to college, too. In 2021, 2.4 million Hispanic adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were enrolled in college, up from 1.2 million in 2005, data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Long and researcher Nicole Bateman, a former analyst at the Brookings Institution, investigated changes among students who applied to and enrolled at public universities in states that prohibit affirmative action.
The researchers studied data from 19 public universities across all nine states spanning from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s — before and after bans were put in place. Their conclusion: Race-neutral strategies were an “insufficient” replacement for affirmative action at those 19 schools.
“We find a sizable decrease in [underrepresented minorities’] share of admittees immediately following the affirmative action bans,” Long and Bateman write in their analysis, published in 2020. “Of more concern, the trends in nearly all of these universities are negative in the following years.”
State flagship universities and selective institutions, including the University of Florida, University of Georgia, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and UC Berkeley, were most affected.
The researchers argue that raising underrepresented minority enrollment is too large a job for colleges and universities to do alone, especially considering many of the factors that influence enrollment are outside education officials’ control.
State policymakers need to do more to reduce economic disparities among racial groups and bolster Black, Hispanic and Native American children’s academic achievement, Long and Bateman write.
“To help university administrators, public administrators and policymakers should particularly note the large racial gaps in kindergarten readiness and note that these gaps are maintained as students progress through the education system,” the researchers add. “Thus, without sustained, focused attention on mitigating gaps that emerge in the first years of life, we should expect persistent racial inequality in higher education.”
A roundup of research
Journalists covering college admissions need to familiarize themselves with the research on race-neutral strategies for boosting student diversity. Below are summaries of academic papers that examine three of the most common approaches: test-optional policies, holistic review and “top percent” plans. The featured studies focus primarily on undergraduate student enrollment.
Test-optional policies
Untested Admissions: Examining Changes in Application Behaviors and Student Demographics Under Test-Optional Policies
Christopher T. Bennett. American Educational Research Journal, February 2022.
The study: The author looks at how undergraduate student diversity changed at private colleges and universities in the U.S. after they started letting students apply without submitting SAT and ACT scores. Bennett examines 99 private institutions that enacted test-optional admissions policies between the academic years 2005-2006 and 2015-2016 and compares them with a group of 118 private institutions that enacted or announced test-optional policies for the 2016-2017 academic year or later.
The findings: At the schools studied, test-optional policies were associated with small increases in underrepresented minorities, lower-income students and women. Bennett estimates the number of underrepresented minorities who enrolled in schools that had implemented test-optional policies rose 10.3% to 11.9%. He adds that although the increase was “fairly substantial in relative terms, such effects correspond to a modest 1 percentage point increase in absolute terms in the share of [underrepresented minority] students among the entering class.”
In the author’s words: “For institutions seeking dramatic shifts in the student populations they serve, test-optional policies would likely need to represent one facet of a more comprehensive plan.”
Holistic review
Affirmative Action and Its Race-Neutral Alternatives
Zachary Bleemer. Journal of Public Economics, April 2023.
The study: Bleemer examines three admissions policies — race-based affirmative action, holistic review and top-percent policies – to find out which did the best job raising underrepresented minority enrollment across California’s public university system. To investigate these policies, Bleemer built a database representing 2.2 million freshmen at nine undergraduate campuses between 1994 and 2021. Six campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, implemented holistic review between 2002 and 2012.
He explains that holistic review “eliminates universities’ use of fixed weights over the wide variety of admission criteria used to judge applicants, providing evaluative flexibility designed to benefit applicants whose academic preparation was hindered by limited pre-college opportunity.”
The findings: Race-based affirmative action had the largest impact, increasing underrepresented minority enrollment by about 850 freshmen per year, or 20%, during the years of the study period it was allowed. Holistic review had the second-largest impact. It boosted Black, Hispanic and Native American enrollment about 7%, on average, across the six campuses using that policy. Bleemer writes that about 45 underrepresented minorities enrolled as a result of holistic review in 2002, but the figure swelled to about 600 in 2017. Meanwhile, top percent policies resulted in an enrollment bump of less than 4%.
In the author’s words: “These findings suggest that the most common policies adopted to replace affirmative action in states where race-conscious university admission preferences have been prohibited have had non-trivial but comparatively small [underrepresented minority] enrollment effects in California, suggesting that preserving racial and socioeconomic diversity using race-neutral admission policies will require policy innovation.”
Top percent plans
Texas Top Ten Percent Plan: How It Works, What Are Its Limits, and Recommendations to Consider
Stella M. Flores and Catherine L. Horn. Report for the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, December 2016.
The study: Flores and Horn compare top percent plans in Florida, California and Texas, pointing out their value, strengths and shortcomings. The report focuses heavily on Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan, the most frequently studied. The authors also synthesize what is known about percent plans and offer recommendations for education leaders considering adopting race-neutral alternatives.
The findings: Data collected on Texas’ percent plan provide a mixed view of its effectiveness in building underrepresented minority enrollment at Texas public universities. Assessments of the program that take into account the state’s changing demographics indicate Hispanics have been less likely to go to college since the initiative started, Flores and Horn write. The report raises questions about whether Black students gaining automatic admission through Texas’ percent plan are more likely to attend the state’s lower-tier public universities than its most selective ones.
In the authors’ words: “In sum, percent plans vary both in their guarantees and in the ways in which demographic context nuances understanding of their effectiveness.”
Academic Undermatching of High-Achieving Minority Students: Evidence from Race-Neutral and Holistic Admissions Policies
Sandra E. Black, Kalena E. Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove. American Economic Review, May 2015.
The study: Black, Cortes and Lincove examine the application choices of minority students in Texas who graduated in the top 25% of their high school class. They look specifically at whether two admissions policies — Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan and holistic review — contribute to academic undermatching, or the tendency for high-achieving minority students to attend lower-tier public universities even though their academic abilities would allow them to go to the state’s two highly selective flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University.
The researchers analyzed data for about 35,000 students who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class in 2008 and 2009 and about 31,000 students who graduated in the top 11% to 25% of their senior class the same two years.
The findings: Only 29% of Black students and 32% of Hispanic students who graduated in the top 10% of their class enrolled at selective flagship universities in Texas despite being guaranteed admission. Meanwhile, 48% of their white counterparts and 51% of their Asian counterparts did. Academic undermatching was even more common among Black and Hispanic students who graduated in the top 11% to 25% of their class and whose applications underwent holistic review. Of the Black and Hispanic students in this group, 5% enrolled at flagship campuses.
In the authors’ words: “Both Black and Hispanic top 10% and top 11-25% students are more likely to enroll at less selective public universities or two-year colleges, and less likely to enroll in private or out-of-state four-year universities than their white student counterparts, which suggests highly-qualified minority students are choosing lower quality Texas universities, rather than leaving the state for higher quality institutions.”
Expert Commentary