Cole Clemmons aimed higher. Demar Goodman aimed lower. They both wrestled with feelings of fear, anxiety and self-doubt after the Supreme Court remade college admissions.
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On the day affirmative action fell this summer, Demar Goodman phoned his best friend the second he got home from Georgia Tech, where the 17-year-old Black rising senior was conducting epidemiology research.
“So,” Demar said. “Safe to say Harvard is out, right?”
The Supreme Court had ruled that morning in an ideologically split decision that colleges could no longer use race-based affirmative action when weighing applicants. A majority of the justices found that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
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The ruling upended the world of college applications, sending admissions counselors, teachers, parents and students scrambling to understand what the history-making decision meant, on a personal and practical level, for them.
No one Googled, questioned and second-guessed more than this year’s crop of incoming high school seniors — seniors like Demar in Atlanta and, 400 miles west of him in Tennessee, 17-year-old Cole Clemmons.
Cole learned of the Supreme Court decision while surrounded by other teens also attending a University of Memphis international studies program. “Whoa, this is crazy,” Cole muttered to his Korean American roommate, holding up the New York Times alert on his iPhone.
“This is going to help me,” Cole remembers his roommate whispering mid-lecture. And Cole, who is White, realized it might boost him, too.After the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in college admissions last June, these two students reconsidered their college applications approach. (Reshma Kirpalani/The Washington Post)
Cole and Demar lived in different parts of the South and were total strangers to one another. Yet they were also alike: hard-working, eager and ambitious. Demar wanted to become a U.S. senator. Cole aimed to pursue a career in environmental science, or maybe international relations. Both were determined to make it to college. To a great college. Both aspired to the Ivy League.
Both were girding for senior years swollen with AP classes and after-school activities. Demar would serve as student body president. Cole would become head of Model United Nations. Both had long lists of target schools months, if not years, in the making. Both were seen by the numerous adults they’d befriended over their academic careers, from teachers to debate coaches to pastors, as exceptional.
And, after the Supreme Court’s decision, both would reconsider their applications. The difference was how.
Cole’s dream school had always been Columbia University, attractive for its academics, strong alumni network, diverse student body — the undergraduate population is 61 percent minority — and location in his favorite city, which he adored for its all-hours energy. It would be easier to get in now, he thought, with a frisson of discomfort. He’d never considered applying to other Ivies.
But on Aug. 1, the day the Common Application opened, Cole clicked into a separate Google search tab. He typed “prettiest Ivy League campus” and scrolled through images of illuminated stone archways, white-edged brick buildings and leafy quads aglow with fall colors. He paused over pictures of one school, whose blue-green trees and hills reminded him of Maine, his favorite state, and thought: What about Dartmouth?
Back in June, a month before, Demar waited on the phone for his friend to answer his query about Harvard.
“I think it’s too early to tell,” said 18-year-old Quentin Carter, a freshman at Morehouse College. Then he opted for a joke: “Well, at least they did it your year, not mine.”
Demar laughed — and in his head, crossed Harvard off the list. The school was just too selective, he felt, and without his race taken into account, he would never get in.
He didn’t bring up his second choice. But in the months to come, as deadlines inched and then hurtled closer, Demar would return to the unasked question: Was it still worth applying to Cornell?
CHAPTER I: WRITING
Cole
Sitting at his desk, a tumble of pillows from his unmade bed visible over his right shoulder, Cole clicked into a Zoom meeting and nodded hello to his eighth-grade English teacher. Alex Eichner, wearing a gray plaid shirt and transparent glasses, nodded back.
“We’re here,” Eichner said, “because you have an exciting journey in front of you. And hopefully, I can help out with that.”
Cole hoped so, too. Eichner was one of four adults he was counting on to usher him across the college finish line. His parents were two more. The fourth was his counselor for gifted students at Franklin High School, a teacher assigned to him as a high achiever since 10th grade. Eichner, though, would be paid several hundred dollars to help craft Cole’s Common Application essay, starting on that sunny Thursday morning in August, 83 days before the early decision application deadline for most schools.
Eichner asked Cole to “give me the profile, give me the scoop.” The teen leaned back, scratched his left shoulder and flashed a small smile.
“Okay,” he said, “so GPA, I have a 4.4.” The top ACT score. President of his high school’s Model U.N. program. Outreach officer for the Young Democrats. A filmmaker in his spare time, whose work was slated to be shown at this year’s All American High School Film Festival in New York. And, “I’m working on it right now, but I’m probably going to be president of our History Honor Society.”
Eichner was smiling now, too.
“I knew you were an impressive young man years and years ago,” he said. “But it’s nice to see that you stayed on that upward trajectory.”
Cole ducked his head, a little embarrassed. Eichner moved to the main question: Where did Cole plan to apply?
“The number one place I want to go is Columbia,” he said.
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Cole kept quiet, for the moment, about the other Ivy League schools that had started to seem more realistic since affirmative action’s demise. As Eichner jumped into a spiel about the three-part structure of the best college essays — an enticing “hook,” a middle anecdote that shows character and a closer that “sells … however you grew in the middle part” — Cole stayed quiet. He didn’t bring up the Supreme Court decision.
He had read online that the fall of race-conscious admissions would mean fewer Black and Hispanic students admitted to highly selective colleges, including Columbia. It made him less excited about the school, even though, confusingly, he also felt it made him more likely to get in there. Still, Columbia remained his top choice.
Near the end of the call, Eichner asked whether Cole had thought about possible essay topics. Cole described a moment when, campaigning to lead Model U.N., he had to get up and speak in front of 700 people. It was terrifying, he told Eichner, because he’d always hated public speaking. But he found his confidence in the end.
“I see a low point, I see a growth piece,” Eichner said. “Although we would want to expand beyond just public speaking. I don’t know if that’s quite profound enough, I think.”
He suggested that Cole pivot the essay to focus on “appreciating other cultures.” Perhaps Cole could write about how Model U.N. introduced him to new people and nations, instilling a respect for diversity. And when Cole arrived at Columbia — or whichever college — he would become a champion for “interacting with people that you wouldn’t expect that you would be concerned about.”
Because, Eichner said, the game had changed.
“Affirmative action is gone, and so every school has had conversations about what they can do, I’m sure, to keep diversity in,” he said. “And I could be wrong, but I don’t think you have any inherent diversity pieces.”
Cole nodded. It was true: Joining Model U.N. as a sophomore taught him to care about diversity. It marked the first time he was surrounded by Black, Hispanic and Asian students, unlike in classrooms and hallways at his high school, which is 83 percent White. He made a good friend, of Middle Eastern descent, whom he still texts and hangs out with every couple of months. The same year, he took a job at a family-owned sushi restaurant blocks from his mom’s house, learning from its owners about their country’s cooking and culture, far from anything he knew.
By his senior year, Cole had come to believe that surrounding yourself with people from different backgrounds was the only way to keep a flexible mind. To avoid developing the blind convictions he saw people spout in Instagram comment fights about politics or sports, a narrow-mindedness that drove him nuts.
It was one of the reasons he worried about the end of affirmative action. The demise of race-conscious admissions, Cole felt, was a net negative for America. Campuses everywhere, he feared, might start looking a lot more like his high school.
It would be easy to write about his passion for diversity, because it was real. He just hoped colleges would believe him, because many White teens, Cole guessed, would be saying the same thing.
Demar
Just home from school, Demar crossed the living room to his sister’s old bedroom, flicked on one bulb of the standing lamp by the window and assumed the position: kneeling by the side of the bed, one knee up, the other on the floor. Arms folded, elbows resting on the mattress. He wasn’t sure why, but this was the only place, and position, from which he felt comfortable working on college applications.
Demar pulled the laptop from his backpack and opened it, navigating to the Common Application website. He unlocked his Galaxy phone and pressed the screen a few times, calling up his friend Quentin’s contact. His left hand snaked to a Rubik’s cube adrift in his bedsheets as he waited.
“Okay, just to clarify,” Demar said, putting the phone on speaker, “we’re applying to Howard right now.”
Only Demar was applying. But Quentin had directed Demar through every step of the process, from the moment he launched a Common App account over the summer to now, the day in early September when he planned to submit his very first full application, to Howard University, which he viewed as the pinnacle of Black excellence — and which sat smack in the middle of the city where Demar wanted to build his life and his political career.
Demar couldn’t afford to pay someone for help, not that he wanted to, because he liked to figure things out on his own. The admissions counselor at South Atlanta High School was most helpful in reminding Demar of upcoming deadlines, which he was tracking anyway, and besides, she had dozens of other students to manage. Demar’s parents had both attended online college, which was different. His sister hadn’t gone to college but to a vocational training program in Atlanta.
More on affirmative action in college admissions
Various other adults Demar trusted — from his pastor to local nonprofit leaders to a state representative — all said they wanted to make sure he got into a good school. But those people were decades away from their college applications. Things were so different back then: Acceptances and rejections actually came in the mail!
Quentin was the only person Demar knew who had just applied to, and gotten into, his dream school, Morehouse. Quentin, Demar figured, would lead him right. And Quentin, aiming to be the college guide he himself never had, was determined to fulfill his friend’s trust.
They got to work. Soon, Demar had a question about how to format his resume. “Wait,” he said, “can you copy and paste from a Word doc?”
“If you can’t,” Quentin said, “you would just download it as an image. Like a PDF.” That worked.
Reading to Quentin as he went, Demar answered questions asking whether he previously applied to Howard (“No”), whether he had visited campus (“No”) and how he learned about Howard (“I mean, who hasn’t heard of Howard University?”).
The other two-syllable school whose name starts with an “H” went unmentioned, although at one time Demar had thought of little else. Demar spent the years between sixth and 11th grade daydreaming about the school in Cambridge, Mass. The breeding ground for his political heroes — Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy — Harvard came to symbolize his shot at the future he craved: serving on the Atlanta City Council and, ultimately, in the U.S. Senate. Privately, Demar thought of Harvard as “the politician school.”
Cornell emerged as his second-favorite Ivy. It had a stellar law school, which he speculated might be easier to get into if he also attended undergrad. Plus, Demar thought Upstate New York, with its resplendent fall foliage, was gorgeous.
He researched the two Ivies’ selectivity during his junior year and compared their acceptance rates to his string of A’s and B’s and, later, his score in the 85th percentile of ACT test takers. He realized it might be a reach, but believed he had a better chance with affirmative action, which schools had said for years allowed them to consider race as one of a number of factors. Demar thought he had a shot right up until the June morning he learned of the Supreme Court ruling.
Before the decision, he planned to write some of his college essays about growing up Black in a poor part of Atlanta. About attending an underserved high school with a reputation for drug use. About making do with subpar materials, out-of-date technology and people’s prejudices. About how he persevered, rejoicing at every academic accolade because it disproved assumptions about who he could be and what he could achieve.
In its majority ruling, the Supreme Court decreed an applicant can still write about “how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” But in dissent, another justice called the caveat “lipstick on a pig,” deriding its usefulness.
Colleges nationwide scrambled to consult lawyers over the wording of essay prompts about topics like identity, while the Biden administration released a seven-page memorandum trying to explain when and how race could be weighed, noting, for example, that the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra could legally write of his feelings about the milestone.
To Demar, though, showcasing his race felt useless. Admissions officers, he believed, had no real incentive to care about it anymore.
The Common Application essay Demar had just completed made no mention of skin color. Instead, it focused on his collection of flag lapel pins, which he kept in a black-velvet box on his bedroom dresser. His love for lapel pins, Demar wrote, symbolized his passion for politics — and America.
“My service is guided because I don’t see the country the flag represents today, I see the country the flag should represent,” he had written.
That essay was ready to go. But now, Demar read on his computer screen, Howard was asking for more. He scrolled to a section of the application labeled “Writing,” which displayed an optional question asking how he would contribute to the diversity of Howard’s campus, and another asking what he intended to study.
“Wait a minute,” he said to Quentin, voice rising, “I thought for Common App you just write one essay and give them out to all the schools.”
Quentin explained that colleges sometimes request essays in addition to the Common App personal statement. Demar hadn’t known that.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, we’ll come back to that.” He would have to finish applying to Howard another night.
CHAPTER II: WORRYING
Cole
A month into the school year, a guidance counselor called Cole to her office. He sat down across from her. She handed him a slip of paper.
“You’re a National Merit semifinalist,” she blurted, grinning, before he could finish reading.
Cole scanned the paper: “Congratulations!” it announced. “You have qualified as a Semifinalist in the 2024 National Merit Scholarship Program.” He was among 16,000 semifinalists nationwide, Cole read, meaning he could compete for one of the 7,140 college scholarships offered by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. Students win spots as semifinalists based on their performance on the Preliminary SAT, or PSAT, which most take their junior years. Finalists and winners are selected after they submit an application, an essay, their grades and their SAT scores.
Cole smiled back at the counselor. He was happy but not surprised: He had scrutinized the qualifying scores from previous years and guessed his high PSAT score would place him in contention.
A few days later, Cole was in study hall with a friend when the teen turned and asked, “You know USC gives half tuition to National Merit finalists, right?”
He hadn’t known about the money.
It wasn’t just the University of Southern California, Cole discovered, plunging into his own research. Dozens of schools offered financial awards to National Merit semifinalists, finalists and winners. The University of Alabama granted up to five years of tuition to National Merit finalists.
That night, sitting in the bedroom at his mother’s house where he normally worked on college applications, Cole pulled up the Google spreadsheet he’d started to track his targets — “My Colleges,” he’d titled it — and added entries for USC and Alabama.
Money was a worry. Cole’s parents, who are divorced, both have good jobs: His dad runs a small home improvement and remodeling business, and his mom has a corporate role with a major office supplies business. Cole knew he qualified as middle class. He would not receive much, if any, financial aid. Yet his mother and father could not afford full tuition at some of the pricey, prestigious schools he coveted. Columbia costs almost $90,000 a year and, like most other Ivy League schools, offers no merit-based aid.
Recently, he’d sat down with his parents to talk through his options. They had agreed he should try for Columbia, but that he should also apply for every merit scholarship he could find at other schools he liked. Come December, Cole would apply for federal student aid, known as FAFSA. After that, and after all the admissions decisions and awards came out, they would figure out what was possible.
Meanwhile, he was growing more curious about Dartmouth, another exorbitant Ivy League school.
Was it wrong to apply believing he had a better chance because affirmative action was gone? He’d been wrestling with the question. It would mark yet another advantage, Cole felt, in a life filled with them: from his race to his lovely hometown to the good public schools he attended. But Cole also knew his parents had worked hard to afford homes in Franklin, with its highly rated school system, its median income of $102,000 and its picturesque downtown packed with pricey boutiques.
And he had worked hard, too. The National Merit letter was the latest proof of that.
On Sept. 16, still not totally sure if he would apply, Cole added Dartmouth to the spreadsheet. Row A5. Right beneath Columbia.
Demar
Demar leaned forward in the community center basement, plastic chair squeaking on the linoleum.
“Mr. Jose, Mr. Rivers,” he said, “I’m sure my mom sent you — Penn State?”
Don Rivers, head of In The Action, a community program that mentors young men in Atlanta, had already heard the good news. He crossed his arms over his chest and beamed. Jose Awo, another mentor with the program, smiled too.
Demar had gotten the notification a day earlier: He was in at Pennsylvania State University. It was his second acceptance. Oglethorpe University had sent a “yes” the week before. Neither was among his top choices. At this point, those were all schools clustered in D.C., including Howard, George Washington University and American University.
And Cornell. Which Demar still didn’t know if he was willing to try for. He had a while to decide: The deadline for regular decision applications to Cornell was Jan. 2. Students can apply to only one school through early decision, a program that gives them an edge over other applicants but requires they attend if admitted. Demar wanted to use that slot for American.
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Demar had been going to In The Action’s Saturday morning meetings for two years. He was one of the group’s brightest stars, and Rivers and Awo were confident he would become the fourth mentee to make it into a four-year college. Demar was less sure.
“There’s one thing I’m concerned about,” Demar said. “Both letters I got, they said nothing about financial aid.”
Just a few days before, Demar had given a presentation on student loans to another after-school mentorship group, the Dukes Foundation, whose acronym stood for “Developing Urban Kids with Etiquette and Self-Esteem.”
“In 30 years, college tuition has increased 498 percent,” he had told the dozen high-schoolers crammed in a classroom that Wednesday afternoon. “These numbers are really — they’re bad.”
Demar knew his family didn’t make much. His dad cannot work for medical reasons, and his mother is a dietary aide at a rehabilitation center. He seized on In The Action and the Dukes Foundation — which has helped hundreds of Atlanta children get to and through college — partly because he thought groups like these could help him figure out not just how to get into college, but pay for it.
Rivers and Awo told him not to worry: In two months, he would complete his application for federal student aid.
“You gonna get more acceptance letters,” Awo said. “And, after December, we gonna sit down and look at the numbers and figure out what makes sense.”
Demar nodded. He didn’t say how unfair things sometimes felt.
He never thought much about affirmative action until it ended. He knew it would help him, but he also considered relying on race a flawed strategy. Clumsy. Although his race was part of him, it didn’t encompass all Demar was, or could be. Mostly, he wished it wasn’t necessary, although he believed it was, to right centuries of racial injustice. And now, he wished desperately that affirmative action still existed.
Demar didn’t care to discuss any of this with his parents. He had never broached affirmative action, or its end, with either of them. He already felt bad they had to help him navigate an application process they knew little about. He didn’t want to add to their stress.
Besides, nobody, not even his mother and father, could understand how much it would hurt to see a rejection letter from Harvard or Cornell, proof that he would never measure up to his political icons.
“So, where are we now with the Common App?” Awo asked.
“All that’s left is filling out a few more pieces of personal information here and there,” Demar said. “Transcript.”
He left the meeting without mentioning Cornell.
CHAPTER III: DECIDING
Cole
On a clear Sunday in late October, with his favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, leading the Los Angeles Rams, 10-9, Cole tore his glance from the television and highlighted the word “difference” in the essay he was preparing for the University of Michigan.
Cole’s father, Al, was in the kitchen preparing tater tots, shrimp skewers and chicken wings, part of the Sunday night football ritual.
The application prompt asked Cole to “Choose one of the communities to which you belong, and describe that community and your place within it.” Cole was happy with most of the 300-word paragraph, in which he described being raised “on Southern ideals” but later pushing friends and family to consider “diverse viewpoints.” He was struggling with his final sentence, though: “I feel that difference is more openly accepted in the South than people realize, and that is why other Southerners I interact with always take kindly to these ideas.”
“Oof,” Cole said, partly to the TV screen, where someone had just bungled a play. “Difference” sounded awkward, but he couldn’t think of another word.
He had worried, at first, about attracting attention to the fact that he was a White male living in a wealthy slice of the South. But, across months of answering essay questions that asked him to dissect and explain his identity, Cole had come to accept it.
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More than that: He was proud to be his parents’ son, the beneficiary of their hard work. He was proud of his own accomplishments, proud to have taken advantage of every opportunity and resource available. He wanted to keep doing so, because that, he felt, was the best way to give back.
And that had led him to another big decision, the week before. Cole ran a hand through his hair, huffed and gave up on the Michigan essay for the day. He clicked into the “My Colleges” spreadsheet.
There, nestled beneath Columbia and Dartmouth — both, now, confirmed targets — was another word: Harvard.
Demar
In Atlanta two weeks later, Demar was back in his sister’s bedroom, bent over the bed in his usual position. The computer screen before him reflected in his glasses, showing the application he had almost finished.
Demar stroked his chin with his left hand and scrolled with his right, reviewing the details one last time. Had he listed the correct teacher recommenders? Had he waived the application fee? Was he satisfied with his essays?
In one, he’d written about why he joined the student government in his under-resourced Southeast Atlanta district: so he could “bring to awareness not only the needs of my school, but our accomplishments and astronomical talent,” too. It is important, he had written, “to show that we are worth investing in,” because “if we won’t represent ourselves, who will?” And “this way of thinking,” he concluded, “is exactly what a Cornell student is.”
He had decided to apply after a successful student government meeting the month before. Looking out the window while driving home, Demar had felt atop the world. Then the thought struck: Why not? Why shouldn’t he try for Cornell? Even though Demar felt he probably wasn’t going to get in without affirmative action, there was always a chance.
Like all his other essays, Demar’s statement for Cornell left out the fact he is Black. He had written as close to the subject as he dared, figuring an astute admissions officer could see where he lived, the problems he faced at school, and put it all together. Without race, the piece was less powerful, Demar felt. Less real. He regretted the essay that could have been.
But the worst Cornell could do, Demar told himself, was say no. And suddenly, that didn’t seem so bad. The rejection, Demar realized, would not change who he was, or what he could do with his life.
Now, he clicked a button to certify that everything he had written was true. He clicked to indicate he understood that all offers of admission are conditional. He typed his name, giving his digital signature, and filled in the date, Nov. 3.
Demar leaned forward. He spread his hands apart and brought them back together. He hit submit.
About this story
Story editing by Adam B. Kushner. Video journalism by Reshma Kirpalani. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Video editing by Angela M. Hill. Copy editing by Anjelica Tan and Christopher Rickett. Design by Laura Padilla Castellanos. Project editing by Jay Wang.
