The Supreme Court’s Admissions Ruling Mainly Affects Selective Colleges. They’re a Tiny Slice of Higher Ed.

The lawsuits that ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision on race-conscious admissions centered on two colleges where most prospective students who apply won’t get in.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, just two in 10 applicants were admitted for the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data. The odds of enrolling at Harvard were even slimmer: The Ivy League institution had an admission rate of 4 percent.

Institutions like them — selective enough to need to use race as a factor in admissions to diversify their student bodies — have garnered outsize attention in the long-running debate over affirmative action’s role in higher education. That’s in part because the road to high-level positions in government and industry often includes a stop at a highly selective institution. One example: Five out of six living U.S. presidents earned undergraduate degrees at colleges that admit less than 15 percent of applicants.

Still, in the landscape of colleges and universities, highly selective institutions are far outnumbered by those with much higher acceptance rates. Most students never participate in an admissions process that considers race in the manner of UNC and Harvard. Although it’s hard to say definitively which colleges use race in some way when making admissions decisions, selectivity is a useful lens through which to view the practice’s real reach, as the following data visualization shows.

Methodology

This analysis considered more than 3,000 degree-granting institutions in the United States that participate in the Title IV student-aid program. The percentages by race include the total minus students who identified as nonresidents or of unknown race. “Underrepresented minority” is the sum of students who are American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and two or more races. Only institutions that received more than 50 applications for first-time, first-year students for 2021-22 and had 150 or more undergraduates in the fall of 2021 are included. The percentages may not add up to 100 percent because of rounding.