Affirmative Action: Holistic Review of Applicants Under Fire

For two decades the constitutional defense of race-conscious admissions rested on a single, carefully bounded idea: that a university may weigh an applicant’s race only as one element within an individualized, “holistic” review of the whole person. That model survived Bakke, was blessed in Grutter, and was twice tested in Fisher. With the Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari in late January 2022 in the paired challenges to Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the holistic framework itself — not merely its application at any one campus — moved to the center of the docket. The question is no longer whether a particular admissions office tailored its program correctly, but whether the entire approach of reading race into the file can stand at all.

The framework now under attack

The doctrine traces to Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in which Justice Powell’s controlling opinion rejected fixed racial quotas but allowed a university to treat race as a “plus” factor in pursuit of a diverse student body. A quarter-century later, Grutter v. Bollinger adopted Powell’s rationale for a majority of the Court, upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s individualized review while striking down, the same day in Gratz v. Bollinger, an undergraduate system that mechanically awarded points for race. The line drawn across those two decisions is the heart of the matter: flexible, file-by-file consideration is permitted; a formula that converts race into an automatic numerical advantage is not.

Race-conscious admissions are reviewed under strict scrutiny, meaning a university must show both a compelling interest and narrow tailoring. Grutter identified the educational benefits of diversity as the compelling interest and deferred, to a degree, to the institution’s academic judgment that those benefits matter. The Court coupled that holding with an expectation that such measures would not be permanent, suggesting that in twenty-five years racial preferences might no longer be necessary. That sentence, often read as aspiration rather than command, has since become a recurring argument for those who say the clock has run.

What “holistic review” actually means

Holistic review is the practice of evaluating each applicant against the full record — grades, testing, essays, recommendations, activities, background, and circumstance — rather than admitting on a single index. Within that practice, race appears not as a tiebreaker applied at the end but as context that can color how a reader understands an applicant’s path. Fisher v. University of Texas reaffirmed the approach in 2016, holding that the University of Texas could weigh race within its holistic file review so long as the use was narrowly tailored, while emphasizing that courts owe no deference on the tailoring question and that the burden of justification rests on the university.

The opacity that makes holistic review attractive to admissions offices is precisely what makes it vulnerable in litigation. Because no published rubric fixes the weight of any factor, a challenger cannot point to a formula; instead, the dispute turns on statistical inference about outcomes. That is the terrain on which the Harvard and UNC cases were tried.

The two cases and their differing legal hooks

The challenges share a plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, but rest on distinct legal foundations. Harvard, a private institution, is reached through Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars race discrimination by recipients of federal funds; the Supreme Court has long treated the Title VI standard as coextensive with the Equal Protection Clause in this setting. UNC, a public university, is a state actor reached directly under the Fourteenth Amendment. The doctrinal tests therefore converge even though the doors into the courthouse differ.

A second feature distinguishes the Harvard record. SFFA alleged not only that race operated as an impermissible plus but that Harvard’s “personal rating” — a reader’s score of traits such as likability and courage — systematically disadvantaged Asian American applicants. The trial court found that Harvard did not intentionally discriminate and that race functioned as a permissible plus factor under existing precedent, and the First Circuit affirmed. The disputed-statistics posture means the Court can address the doctrine without first resolving the factual quarrel over the personal rating.

Why certiorari changed the stakes

The questions presented ask the Court to decide whether to overrule Grutter and hold that institutions of higher education may not use race as a factor in admissions at all, and, in the alternative, whether the Harvard and UNC programs survive strict scrutiny. The first question is the one that unsettles the field. A ruling confined to tailoring would leave the holistic model intact and merely police its edges, much as Fisher did. A ruling that overrules Grutter would remove the constitutional permission slip on which every race-conscious program in the country relies.

What follows if the express racial factor falls

Should the Court bar the direct use of race, admissions offices retain considerable latitude over everything else they read. Several states already operate under such constraints: California’s Proposition 209 and Michigan’s Proposal 2 prohibited race-conscious admissions at public universities years before this litigation, and the workarounds developed there — percentage-plan admissions, expanded recruitment, weight on first-generation status and family income — offer a preview of a post-Grutter landscape. Whether those proxies reproduce the diversity that universities say they value, or merely the appearance of it, is an empirical question that the constitutional ruling will not answer.

The downstream reach is wider than undergraduate admissions. Title VI governs any federally funded program, so a decision rewriting the standard would ripple into graduate and professional schools, scholarship criteria, and pipeline programs, and would invite fresh litigation over employer and contractor diversity practices that borrow the same vocabulary. Readers tracking how courts recalibrate constitutional rights against shifting majorities may find parallels in earlier coverage of contested Fourth Amendment doctrine, and the case sits within this publication’s broader case tracker of equal-protection disputes.

The road ahead

Argument and decision lay months beyond the cert grant, and the realistic forecasts ranged from a narrow tailoring loss for the universities to a categorical overruling of Grutter. The composition of the Court made the broader outcome plausible, and institutions were already modeling admissions classes under both scenarios. What was clear at this stage was that the holistic framework had stopped being a settled premise and had become the contested question itself. The Court would ultimately resolve it the following term, and the resolution narrowed the doctrine far more than a tailoring ruling would have — a development covered in this publication’s later analysis. The commentary here offers analysis, not legal advice; institutions weighing changes to their admissions practices should consult counsel on their specific circumstances.