In 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision struck down racial preferences in college admissions. In the time since, the admissions systems of selective colleges have become fairer and more open to low-income and working-class students.
Pre-SFFA, elite colleges considered race as a major factor in admissions. They also employed a set of preferences that mostly helped well-off students, including the children of alumni or faculty. As a result many top colleges were racially integrated but economically segregated. At Harvard University, a majority of students were non-white but there were 15 times as many wealthy students as low-income students. Almost three quarters of the Black, Hispanic, and Native American students at Harvard came from the richest 20 percent of the Black, Hispanic, and Native American populations nationally. The paucity of students from working-class families, which typically have more culturally conservative values, perpetuated an ideological monoculture. The system was deeply unpopular and 68 percent of the public supported the Supreme Court ruling ending racial preferences.
Once affirmative action for upper-income minority students became unavailable, several highly selective universities announced new programs to enroll more low-income and working-class students, a disproportionate share of whom were likely to be Black and Hispanic. Some institutions eliminated legacy preferences. Many adopted new financial aid programs. Some began sending more recruiters to low-income high schools. Others set explicit goals for boosting economic diversity. In 2024 Duke University’s dean of admissions said that enhancing economic diversity “was clearly helpful for us this year in terms of racial diversity in enrollment.”
Those post-SFFA efforts are continuing to bear fruit. In a new Progressive Policy Institute study, my colleague Aidan Shannon and I found that the share of students eligible for federal Pell Grants (which go to low-income and working-class students) increased at 83 percent of top colleges for which data were available. The findings are in accord with a 2025 Associated Press analysis of 17 highly selective colleges, which found that “almost all saw increases in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year.”
