Yolanda Wang

Since the Supreme Court’s decision to axe race-conscious college admissions in June, many colleges — including all eight Ivy League schools — have added application essays asking students to reflect on their backgrounds and lived experiences.

The News spoke to two high school seniors and three high school counselors to gauge how they are approaching college admissions in a post-affirmative action era and how they plan to tackle new essay prompts.

“I don’t feel like I’m losing space in my essays or on my application to talk about other things by having to talk about race,” Samara Wijesekera, a Sri Lankan American high school senior from Seattle, Washington, said in an interview with the News. “I do feel like I’m more aware of incorporating my race, but also, my race is a big part of who I am, along with my background and the different stories and experiences and accomplishments that have made me who I am and the person I will be in college.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill declared it unconstitutional for a university to consider an applicant’s race when evaluating them for admission.

However, in his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the ruling does not prohibit applicants from discussing their own race in spaces like application essays.

“Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote, later adding that “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

Following the SCOTUS ruling, many schools — including Yale — have modified existing essay prompts or added new ones inviting students to reflect on how their upbringing or background has affected their life and ability to contribute to their college community.

New essay prompts at Yale and other Ivies

Yale’s supplemental essay topics for the 2023-2024 application cycle fall into three categories: three required short answer questions, four required “short takes” and one required essay, in which students can choose to respond to one of three prompts. Students applying to Yale with the Questbridge application, according to their website, will not respond to the short takes or longer essay.

These three categories of supplements have remained consistent in recent years, with small changes sometimes made to specific “short take” prompts. This year, however, Yale added an additional prompt option for the longer essay. In addition to two prompts asking students to reflect on community membership and the exchange of ideals with someone holding an opposing view — which appeared in similar language on last year’s application — there is a new prompt, asking students to reflect on an element of their “personal experience” that they believe will “enrich their college.”

In an episode of the “Inside the Yale Admissions Office” podcast titled “2023-2024 Application Update,” Yale admissions officers discussed this year’s essay questions and addressed these changes.

In the episode, Mark Dunn ’07, the senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, said that the most common reason for an essay question to be dropped or edited is because the previous year’s applicants did not respond to it in a way that the admissions office hoped.

“We added a new prompt this year,” Dunn said, referring to the prompt about students’ personal experience. “Our goal here is just to give the most direct possible route to personal reflection and to tie that reflection specifically to something that you will bring to college.”

The University is not alone in its addition of a new prompt that offers students the formal opportunity to reflect on their experience in their application essays. Every other Ivy League college has included a prompt this year asking students to reflect on some variation of their lived experience, upbringing or something that makes them different.

Harvard, Princeton University and Cornell University all included new prompts this year asking students to reflect on how their “life experiences” have shaped who they are or how they will impact their college community. 

This is the first time Harvard has included short, required essay prompts on its application. In the past, students were asked to include an additional long essay answering one of many suggested prompts or responding to one of their own. For Cornell, this is the first time the application includes a university-wide supplemental essay question. In past years, applicants have had to answer supplemental questions specific to the undergraduate college at Cornell to which they were applying.

Brown University now has a prompt inviting applicants to reflect upon how “an aspect of [their] growing up has inspired or challenged” them. This question is new, replacing a prompt from past years asking students to reflect on discussing a topic with someone who held an opposing viewpoint.

Dartmouth College has replaced two of its supplement essay prompts from last year. The first new prompt asks students to embrace their “inner Kermit the Frog” and reflect on how “difference has been a part of your life.” The second asks students simply what they would like the college to “know about them.” 

While Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania both include prompts of this nature — the former asks students about adversity and their “lived experience,” while the latter asks students about how their “experiences and perspectives” will shape the university community — these prompts are not new and existed for both schools on the 2022-2023 application as well.

In the Yale admissions office podcast episode, co-host Hannah Mendlowitz ’12, associate director of admissions, advised students on how to formulate an answer to Yale’s prompt about personal experience. She suggested that applicants begin by considering an aspect of their background that other students their age may not have experienced and analyzing how that has changed them.

“We do want you to think about how something you’ve experienced, something that has shaped you would be an asset in a college environment where students come from a wide range of backgrounds with lots of lived experiences, and the whole environment is set up to encourage students to learn from each other,” Dunn added in the episode.

Are students and counselors changing their application approaches?

The News spoke to two high school seniors and three counselors about how their application and essay approaches are changing in the midst of the Supreme Court’s decision to reject race-conscious admissions. 

While the two students said that race has been more heavily on their mind since the SCOTUS ruling, they added that, ultimately, they have not changed how they are approaching their college applications. 

Each of the counselors with whom the News spoke said that they have always been supportive of students discussing all aspects of their backgrounds in their application essays, and this support has neither increased nor diminished in the wake of the Court’s decision. They added that they have not noticed a significant change in the topics students choose to pursue in their essays.

“I don’t think my counsel changes now as the Supreme Court hasn’t infringed upon a student’s ability to tell their story, however they desire,” Emmi Harward, a former high school counselor and current executive director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools wrote in an email to the News. “It’s up to each student what they choose to talk about and what elements of their story or identity make it into an essay. I think any counselor would support a student who chooses to talk about their experiences through the identity lens of race.” 

Grace Little, a high school senior from Dallas, Texas, told the News that she is applying to 15 colleges, including Yale. She said that over half of these applications have a supplemental essay question asking about their lived experience. Samara Wijesekera, who is also applying to Yale, said that she has seen many prompts in applications asking about students’ backgrounds.

Wijesekera said that she likely would have talked about her race somewhere in her essays even if race-conscious admissions were still legal. But with their repeal, she said it was on the forefront of her mind.

“I am trying to structure those lived experience essays around how, as a Sri Lankan American, I can bring diversity and unique perspective to the schools I’m applying to, especially for more elite schools that have been historically white,” Wijesekera told the News.

Before the SCOTUS ruling on affirmative action was announced in June, Wijesekera said that she was not concerned with writing about her race or culture in her admissions essays, focusing instead on her character and accomplishments. With the fall of race-conscious admissions, she said that she has made a deliberate effort to talk about her racial upbringing, usually in at least one essay per college.

Wijesekera speaks both English and Sinhal. She wrote about how being bilingual has shaped her worldview and the activities in which she has become involved. In one supplement, Wijesekera said she wrote about how just as she combines her two languages when communicating with her family at home, she combined her love of marine biology and teaching as an instructor at a local aquarium.

While she has made a conscious effort to mention her culture in her essays, Wijesekera said she has also avoided centering her essays solely around race.

“Obviously, I want admissions officers and the people reading my essays to consider my application holistically,” Wijesekera said. “I don’t want them to just focus on my race, but obviously on my accomplishments and why I want to be admitted to the school as well. But now, since affirmative action isn’t there, I’ve definitely made a deliberate effort to include race in my essays.”

Little, who is white, said that the axing of race-conscious college admissions has not affected the way she selected the schools she is applying to. With no existing data on how the absence of affirmative action has affected admissions rates for different groups, she said she found it unnecessary to significantly change her college list or application approach.

Among her peers and the counselors and teachers at her school, Little said that she has not sensed a significant change in the way college applications are being approached this year. As a white student, she said that she found the new essay questions, which she described as “broad” and “open-ended,” simply offered an additional forum for her to share her identity with a college.

“I approached the questions at first thinking there was one way to take it, which was talking about your race,” Little said. “It felt initially limiting because I felt like I didn’t have enough to talk about on that point, since I’m not a person of color and my race has not really been a point of adversity. But I think on second glance, I have appreciated them because it’s just another opportunity to talk about another aspect of my identity that I haven’t fit in somewhere else yet.”

Rebecca Rutsky, director of college counseling at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, Alabama, also spoke about how the new essay prompts might invite students to discuss topics beyond their race.

She recalled urging students who did not want to discuss their race or did not feel like it had a significant impact on their upbringing to use the new prompts to discuss other aspects of their background that may have caused them adversity. 

For example, Rutsky said she has told students to discuss their socioeconomic background or family history if it had a significant impact on their life.

While Rutsky said students’ attitudes towards college admissions have not significantly changed since the SCOTUS decision, she said that she has seen an increased pressure among students to leverage certain parts of their identity above others.

“I don’t like that students feel like they have to be strategic about what parts of their background they share in a college admissions essay,” Rutsky said. “I hate for them to have to sit there and go, ‘oh, you know, what’s going to score points?’ But I think that there probably is more gamesmanship in the admissions process since affirmative action was repealed.”

Marian Boyns, a college counselor at Amity Regional High School in Woodbridge, Connecticut, said she encouraged students to use other parts of their application to share important information about their backgrounds if they could not find the space to do so in their essays.

She said that this advice applied specifically to students who were applying to colleges that, unlike Yale, have no supplemental prompts or do not have a prompt asking about applicants’ lived experiences.

“What I’ve said to my students is, ‘look, if you want the school to know something, and now you can’t express it in one way, express it in another way’,” Boyns said. “There’s always space to share what you want to share. Use that space. There’s that additional information section. There are other ways.”

Ultimately, both Little and Wijesekera said that the general stress of college admissions has felt more pertinent than any specific anxieties about newly race-blind admissions. 

Each of the three counselors with whom the News spoke agreed with this assessment.

“These are kids, and they have a million things going through their heads,” Boyns said. “And I think that when I see these seniors who are still only 17 years old, they’re in their little bubble of high school, they don’t really think all that far ahead or that deeply about the bigger picture of the admissions world.”

The term “affirmative action” was first used by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to refer to measures designed to achieve non-discrimination.