Some Colleges are Still Requiring Diversity-Related Admissions Essays
“College Transitions, an admissions consulting firm, identified 19 colleges with optional or required diversity essays”
Progressives in higher education do not want to let this go, and they’re just doing what they want to do.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Are Diversity Essay Prompts Disappearing? Not Yet.
Two years after the Supreme Court banned the use of race in college admissions decisions and in the wake of the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, colleges’ use of diversity- and identity-related supplemental essay prompts is patchy.
After a boom in prompts about applicant’s identities, several universities have scrapped the essays entirely for the 2025–2026 admission cycle. Still others, especially selective universities, have kept the prompts, saying they are the best way to get to know their applicants.
Kelsea Conlin, who oversees the college essay counseling team for College Transitions, an admissions consulting firm, identified 19 colleges with optional or required diversity essays last admission cycle that either had dropped or reworded those prompts this year.
“I’ve seen very few colleges that still require students to write about diversity; the prompt may still be on their application and students have the opportunity to write about it, but it’s an optional essay,” she said.
Diversity-related essays often ask students to describe how they’ve been shaped by their community, culture or background, sometimes prompting them to describe how those identities will bring something new to a campus. Others ask students to discuss or reflect on issues like diversity, social justice or antiracism more broadly.
In the majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts said it was acceptable for students to continue discussing race in their essays: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
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Comments
The subhed of this post is so misleading as to be outright dishonest.
Compare:
with:
The source says exactly the opposite of the subhed. And the substance of the quoted article is that very few colleges are still requiring such essays. Also, the colleges are not “just doing what they want to do”; as the quoted source concludes, SCOTUS explicitly permitted them to do exactly this.
Thank you for saying that. I was thinking I needed more coffee, since I couldn’t make the article match the headings.