After Affirmative Action, DEI Opens a New Frontier in University Admissions

Like many universities across the United States, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is revising its admissions policies to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023). While the university’s leadership has made clear its intention to comply with the basic contours of the law, UW-Madison intends to follow peer institutions in using its holistic admissions process to continue towards its diversity and equity goals.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, the new strategy of admissions reviewers is to create essay questions for applicants that evoke characteristics, experiences, and beliefs aligned with diversity, equity, and inclusion goals for the institution. This strategy is not illegal as long as it is not used as a simple proxy for race in the admissions process. Moving away from data-driven race-based admissions practices is progress, but using essay questions to accomplish related goals raises other problems. UW-Madison’s approach is an instructive case study for these issues and the tradeoffs of transitioning from affirmative action to different strategies to increase diversity.

UW-Madison’s leadership announced three specific changes to its admissions practices in an internal email to graduate school faculty, department chairs, and admissions coordinators in August 2023. First, the university will still collect race and ethnicity information, but application reviewers will not be able to view or consider those data in the admissions process. Second, graduate programs will be permitted to add supplementary essay questions focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion to their applications. Third, departments are encouraged to use a holistic review of applications for admission that includes how applicants can contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

To support departments in this transition, the university’s Office of Legal Affairs developed a list of approved DEI essay questions that were vetted to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023). These questions ask students to define their “role and/or contribution to create a more diverse, accepting, and stimulating” environment on campus and in the community, or to describe how they have “further[ed] [their] knowledge about building or enhancing a community of inclusion, belonging, and respect.” While these essay questions offer students the opportunity to provide racial and ethnic information about themselves that could be misused in the admissions process, it is of far greater concern how these questions can be used to gauge an applicant’s loyalty to the ideological principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Over the last decade, colleges and universities across the country have started to use similar essay questions to ensure allegiance to diversity, equity, and inclusion among its faculty. According to a legislator’s testimony for a Wisconsin State Assembly hearing on a 2024 assembly bill to ban such practices, nearly half of all large universities require potential faculty members to write statements in support of DEI. A representative from the Cicero Institute, a Texas-based think tank that has worked extensively to ban DEI academic loyalty oaths in state universities, offered additional testimony that noted that the University of Wisconsin removed such requirements for faculty, but other Wisconsin universities, like Madison Area Technical College, have not.

The UW—Madison may have removed requirements for potential faculty to write DEI statements during the hiring process, but under new admissions policies, the university’s graduate departments may now require prospective students to fulfill similar requirements. Other universities are likely to follow this path, replacing race-based admissions practices with ideology-based admissions practices. The result could be catastrophic for free speech and academic freedom among students.

States like Florida, Tennessee, and Texas have passed laws like the one being considered in Wisconsin which ban DEI in hiring and training at institutions of higher learning. These laws, however, do not specifically include admissions practices for undergraduate or graduate students. Universities are likely to exploit this gap in states that have already passed DEI reforms, and legislators may need to revisit their legislation. In states like Wisconsin that are still developing their reforms, legislators ought to consider whether or not universities should be permitted to require student DEI loyalty oaths. Universities appear to be accommodating the new requirements for admissions practices under the Supreme Court’s ruling, but a new frontier in perverse admissions practices has opened, and policymakers must remain vigilant.