In 2024, we’ve entered a troubling new era of elite college admissions in which many of the evils of the past are rearing their ugly heads. Fortunately, explicit admissions quotas for members of certain groups have been left in the past, but that doesn’t mean new forms of discrimination haven’t arisen to take their place!

Once upon a time (about a century ago or so), elite colleges across the country, following the lead of Harvard University’s despicable President Abbot Lawrence Lowell, discriminated against Jewish applicants with a quota system that significantly impacted Jewish enrollment. By the 1980s, as highlighted by Jerome Karabel’s 2006 book, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, Jewish enrollment had rebounded in the Ivy League only to be replaced by an equally insidious campaign to suppress the number of Asian and Asian American students on these campuses. In 2024, we’re faced with a situation that has regressed in many ways: Asian and Asian American applicants still face discrimination in the elite college admissions process, and antisemitism has taken elite campuses by storm this last year. These forces are continuing to wreak havoc among Jewish and Asian communities. Oy vey!

Let’s unpack how the insidious quota systems of the past continue to inform the admissions process today.

Yesterday, Quotas. Today, Subtle Discrimination and Unfair Admission Boosts

The legacy admissions boost at Ivy League schools was introduced to suppress the number of Jewish students on campus. Harvard and other such schools considered legacy applicants to possess the desirable qualities they sought in a student body. Funnily enough, legacy admissions at most schools has not significantly changed much from a century ago, nor has this suspicious justification for this unfair practice. Today, legacy applicants, recruited athletes, and the children of major donors all get fast-tracked through the door and onto elite campuses. 

These students are more likely to be wealthy and white than their average counterparts. We’re not kidding! A 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that 43% of white students at Harvard were a part of at least one of these advantaged groups. In other words, while explicit racial quotas are indeed a relic of the past, elite schools still give many white applicants a leg up in the admissions process to the detriment of minority enrollment. Quotas aside, the process is still riddled with bias and injustice!

How the SCOTUS Ruling on Affirmative Action Reshaped Elite College Admissions

In 2023, the Supreme Court officially did away with using race-based admissions criteria in college admissions. We at Ivy Coach decried this ruling because of the adverse implications it will have for underrepresented minority groups applying to highly selective universities. While we wouldn’t call this a silver lining, at the very least, this ruling has significantly decreased the likelihood that colleges will be able to cruelly use race-based admissions quotas in the future, as this data is (ostensibly) no longer collected from applicants.

However, complicating this new admissions landscape is the Roberts Loophole, which leaves the door open for applicants to write about how race has impacted their lives in their college admissions essays. Counterintuitively, this loophole will force applicants to lay greater emphasis on race amidst an application process that has long been saddled with the pressure to foreground identity. How this ruling will impact the demographics of incoming cohorts remains to be seen. Still, the famously accurate Ivy Coach crystal ball predicts an increase in Asian, Asian American, and white enrollment and a decrease in Black and Latino enrollment.

2024 is An Inflection Point for Elite College Admissions

As the higher educational sphere anxiously awaits this incoming data, we’d like to use this time to reflect on the many ways these schools continue to fail certain groups. Jewish students and Asian American applicants, for example, should feel welcome on college campuses. Until schools like Harvard and Yale (two of the tone-setters of higher education at large) take accountability for their legacies of hate, discrimination, and (as the last year has demonstrated) violence, we won’t blame applicants from these groups for feeling scorned and unwelcome. 

Still, we at Ivy Coach would like to unequivocally state that students of all backgrounds should apply to the top schools in the nation. If applicants play their cards right, an elite college education is well within reach for students of all backgrounds.