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Should you answer Common App race questions after 2023?
How to approach optional race and ethnicity questions on the Common App after the 2023 ruling, and how writing about your own experience of identity differs.
SourceBased on what we at Aristo learned from the Stanford admissions office.
For years the race and ethnicity section of the application was treated as a strategic question, and since the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions it no longer is: colleges may not consider an applicant's race as such in deciding whom to admit. Many have changed their process so that admissions readers do not see the checkbox answers at all while reviewing a file, and the Common App allows colleges to hide them.
That leaves families with questions the old advice never answered: what the boxes are still for, whether a blank sends a signal, and what a student may still say about identity. Some older warnings matter more now than ever.
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