“I think a very plausible outcome of this will be that schools will just cheat and say, ‘Let’s see who gets sued,’” said Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been critical of affirmative action. “The chances of an individual school getting sued are low, and the cost of suing is really high.”
Some education officials have already discussed how to leverage the essay. Students should tailor their admissions essays to describe how race had affected their lives, said Shannon Gundy, an admissions official at the University of Maryland, in a recent presentation sponsored by the American Council on Education.
“Right now, students write about their soccer practice, they write about their grandmother dying,” she said, adding: “They don’t write about their trials and tribulations. They don’t write about the challenges that they’ve had to experience.”
Colleges could also ask for other more pointed essays, along the lines of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” statements that have become a familiar part of faculty hiring.
Ms. Holley, the incoming Mount Holyoke president, imagined a question that would say something like: “One of the core values of Mount Holyoke College is diversity of all kinds. Please tell us why you value it, and what you think you bring to the Mount Holyoke community in terms of diversity.”
