"You Don’t Want to Go Too Deep": Race in College Essays after 2023

• In Event: Schooling Race

Abstract

The 2023 Supreme Court case banning race-conscious admissions in college applications left the door open for applicants to write about race in their essays. Yet we know little about how applicants have responded to the new policy. Our research fills this gap by interviewing students who applied after the 2023 ruling about their college essay production process. Drawing on over eighty interviews with applicants from a variety of racial and ethnic identities, as well as content analysis of their essays, we ask: How do students make race legible in their college essays? How do they make sense of their decision to write or not write about race? We find mixed support for the impact of the Supreme Court decision on students’ essay writing processes. While some students expressed hesitation about sharing their identities, self-censoring was most prevalent among students lacking exposure to college application guidance or who expressed reservations about the centrality of their racial identity to their presentation of self. On the other hand, many students made race and ethnicity central to their essays. Students discussed their identit(ies) as cultural, linking their race to values, family, and experiences. For applicants of color, maintaining racial palatability was top of mind, while white students wrote about ethnic identities or reflected on privilege. Students primarily wrote about their ident(ies) as individual attributes, de-emphasizing structural concepts. Rather than change their essay writing approach in response to current events, some students leveraged the ban to judge higher education institutions. For example, students gauged schools’ commitment to racial justice by their essay prompts. Other students reasoned that if schools did not accept them because they wrote about their race, they would not want to attend. We theorize these findings in the context of anticipatory beliefs about the institutions of higher education.

Authors

• Sarah Iverson, American University

• Adrian Davis, American University

• Garrett Michael Washington, American University

• Sarah Mondesir, American University