Three years ago this Sunday, the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The 6-3 ruling ended race-conscious college admissions and told universities, plainly, that the Equal Protection Clause means what it says. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Harvard's and UNC's admissions programs lacked measurable objectives, employed race negatively, involved racial stereotyping, and had no defined endpoint. The Court had said as much in Grutter v. Bollinger back in 2003, with a 25-year runway attached. The runway expired. The programs didn't.

That's the part most post-mortems skip. SFFA wasn't a surprise. It was a ruling long overdue. 

The more interesting story is what happened next — and where the ruling is going now.

Some schools did what the Court required. They restructured admissions around socioeconomic factors, expanded outreach to underserved high schools, ended legacy preferences, and built holistic review processes that evaluated extracurricular achievement, first-generation status, and class rank without racial categories. That's the legal path. It's also the honest one.

Other schools found the exit ramp Roberts left in the opinion — that colleges may still consider how race affected an applicant's life if tied to a specific quality the student brings — and turned it into a highway. Johns Hopkins prompts applicants to discuss elements of their identity, including sexuality and community. Rice explicitly mentions "racial identity." Sarah Lawrence cited the ruling directly and invited applicants to discuss how race influenced their development. Several schools heard the carve-out as permission to ask about race without calling it a race question.

The Department of Justice noticed. In May........

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