The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down longstanding affirmative-action admissions policies means universities and colleges across the country, including in Colorado, will have to stop using race as a factor in their considerations for prospective students.

While not all Colorado colleges and universities use race-conscious admissions and the policies mostly significantly affect admissions to universities and colleges that are highly selective, some of the state’s higher education institutions do factor in racial demographics as part of their processes. Now, they say they will have to find alternatives to ensuring diversity in their student populations, many of which have proven difficult in states that have banned affirmative action policies, leading to less diversity in their workforces.

“Affirmative action (programs) have always acted at the margins, trying to avoid the worst of racial isolation,” said Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in educational policy and law. Welner also leads the university’s National Education Policy Center.

Highly-competitive universities across the country with race-conscious admissions policies are still not considered diverse campuses, Welner noted, with Latino, Black and Native American students still underrepresented. Affirmative action programs in admissions are an attempt to avoid what would happen without them, he said, and other colleges and universities have used them to expand opportunities for those who come from marginalized communities.

The court’s majority opinion did include an exception though: Military academies funded by the federal government are exempt from the ban and can continue using race-conscious admissions, such as the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

The decision to end affirmative action in admissions wasn’t surprising because of the court’s makeup, but it still disappointed college administrators and Colorado’s Democratic leaders who noted that it doesn’t just affect people’s attendance at universities but also their future opportunities and those of their peers who won’t learn from or work with as many people with diverse perspectives. Republicans and the Centennial Institute at Colorado’s Christian University, however, celebrated the decision, saying the court affirmed “high standards and academic excellence.”

Last year, Colorado, along with other states, filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting race-conscious admissions.

“For over 45 years, affirmative action policies have helped to correct for past discrimination, to provide more opportunities to historically underrepresented communities, and to ensure that students can learn in diverse and inclusive environments. … This Court’s misguided conclusion, claiming that these longstanding policies violate the Constitution, threatens to undermine the progress we have made on college campuses to create access for all Americans and ensure a diverse learning environment for all,” Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Colorado Christian University Chancellor Donald Sweeting commended the court’s decision in a statement, saying, “(t)he current practices advantage some people at the expense of others on the basis of race, which is a violation of the equal protection clause. Universities will no doubt encourage racial diversity in other ways.”

Unlike with previous Supreme Courts, this court has not refused to take on cases with already established law as displayed most notably in overturning Roe v. Wade, but instead has reconsidered issues the justices in the majority don’t like, Welner said, thereby bringing politics into the equation. The court first ruled on allowing race-conscious admissions in 1978 in its landmark Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case and again in 2016.

Welner described CU Boulder as a “moderately-selective institution,” a public university that could be at least partially impacted by the decision in the UNC case — the university’s acceptance rate in 2021 was almost 80%.

“CU Boulder uses a holistic approach to admissions that takes into account a variety of primary academic factors and secondary factors as they relate to students’ ability to be successful in our competitive academic environment,” according to a statement from the university. “This includes the review of personal essays and letters of recommendation.”

Employees reviewing applications could also see racial demographics and could use it as one of the factors of the university’s “holistic review process” for admissions, but a prospective student’s race doesn’t determine whether they will be admitted, the statement added.

In Colorado, private schools would be affected by the Harvard case, such as Colorado College — which had a 14.3% acceptance rate in 2021 — and even the University of Denver — which had a 63.6% acceptance rate — preventing them from using race as a factor in the process.

Colorado College’s Vice President for Enrollment Mark Hatch said the college uses race as one of many qualitative and quantitative factors in the admissions process, and there’s strong evidence that this dates back to the early 1970s when the college wrote about trying to diversify its student body in a variety of ways.

“We do a deep dive in every file … and read every word,” Hatch said of the college’s admissions process.

About 26% of the college’s student body of about 2,200 identify as people of color and an additional 6% are international students. The university also considers the diversity of geography and socioeconomic status, Hatch said.

The college’s leadership said the court’s decision won’t prevent them from doing what they’ve always done in considering how an applicant’s background and other qualities can contribute to the campus community.

The Supreme Court’s rulings don’t prohibit a prospective student from discussing how their race may have affected their life, the majority opinion stated, but it has to be tied to “a quality of character or unique ability” to contribute to the university for it to be considered in admissions. That means, race can still potentially come up in personal essays or interviews, but the questions from a university cannot be directly tied to race.

Colleges and universities, especially highly-selective institutions, already often ask for personal essays from applicants, but they will no longer be able to consider race for the sake of diversity as part of a holistic analysis of an application.

That puts the onus on prospective students to write in a way that explains how their racial experiences can be tied to a specific quality that the university wants, rather than just as a descriptor of their background.

“There’s already an industry out there that helps wealthier applicants craft essays and craft applications,” Welner said. “For people who can’t afford that, they need to understand what’s required and what’s allowed by the court and what’s required by the university to make race or ethnicity relevant to the application.”

Even those who work at universities that don’t use affirmative-action admissions policies are concerned. The ruling will make it harder for other colleges and universities to create diverse student bodies, and it will negatively affect access, said Michael Benitez, Metropolitan State University of Denver’s vice president for diversity and inclusion.

“I think what’s missing about the conversation of diversity is we need to be able to tie it historically to what it was aimed to do,” Benitez said. “But we also have to address the evolution of diversity within the context of affirmative action as something that has moved away actually from affirmative action and to a more intentional and proactive effort by institutions to understand the value diversity offers to everybody’s learning and shared experiences within campus communities.”

MSU Denver is the only institution of higher education in the state that admits any prospective student that applies who is 20 years old or older and has a GED or high school diploma. Of its student body of nearly 15,682 undergraduate students and 1,142 graduate students, 54% and 36% identified as people of color, respectively, and nearly 60% of the student body as first-generation students.

In Fort Collins where Colorado State University’s main campus is located, the court’s decision will not affect the undergraduate admissions process, according to President Amy Parsons. CSU had a nearly 90% acceptance rate in 2021, and Parsons said in a statement that the university will continue its commitment of admitting all qualified students from all backgrounds. Of the 5,700 students admitted last fall, 28% are from diverse backgrounds and 25% are first-generation students.

Similarly, Chancellor Jeremy Haefner of the University of Denver reiterated the institution’s commitment to a diverse student body, noting that the university uses race-conscious decision-making as one factor in its admissions, so legal experts would be reviewing how to comply with the law. The university also doesn’t require SAT or GRE scores to create more equity among applicants, and it partners with local groups and high schools to recruit a diverse applicant pool.

The Supreme Court’s decision only blocks the use of affirmative action policies in the admissions process, not for recruitment, scholarships or support for enrolled students. But proponents of diversity, equity and inclusion still worry about far-reaching implications of the ban.

Benitez said the court’s higher-education admissions decision ultimately affects the pipeline to the workforce because it can determine who gets to receive an education, who gets to advance their education to be better prepared, and then who gets to climb and attain higher decision-making or leadership roles, he said.

“We also have to be honest and say that we can’t divorce this also from something like K-12 education,” he added. “So just as important as it is to look at: How does it impact society at large? How does it interfere with democracy? How does it interfere with providing greater opportunity for everyone to be able to be successful and achieve their goals? The pipeline starts with K-12 not having the resources — or even in the segregation that we see in public schools… That already began to demonstrate what disparate impact looks like across a variety of groups.”

Updated 11:52 a.m. June 30: This story has been updated to correct the number of students — 15,682 undergraduate and 1,142 graduate —enrolled at MSU Denver in the fall of 2022.

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