Merit-based admission means choosing students by what they have shown they can do: grades, coursework, test scores and the other evidence a college counts as achievement. No selective college actually ranks its applicants on a single number, though. Princeton receives more than 35,000 applications a year, and its admissions dean estimates that about 18,000 of those applicants are qualified, roughly nine times the number of offers the college can make. Its president, Christopher Eisgruber, wrote in 2023 that the university admits every student on merit, judged against its mission, and that trying to rank applicants from best to worst is an error.
The debate over merit and diversity in college admissions is, at bottom, a debate over what should count as merit. Since June 2023 the law has settled one part of it: colleges may no longer weigh an applicant’s race. The other parts, including test scores, legacy preference and how much a hardship or a talent should count, are still being argued, and the answers shape the advice high school counselors give students every fall.
What does merit-based admission mean?
In its narrow form, merit-based admission ranks applicants by measurable achievement and admits them from the top down. Several countries run admission to public universities this way, sorting candidates by an exam or a school-leaving score. American selective colleges use a broader definition. They read grades and scores as evidence of academic ability, and then they weigh other kinds of achievement as well: a job held through high school, an instrument mastered, a hardship overcome, service to a community.
So the useful question for a student is not whether a college admits on merit. Nearly every college says it does. The useful question is which achievements that college counts, and how much each one weighs.
Merit-based admission and holistic review
Most selective American colleges use holistic review, also called holistic admissions, which means that admissions officers read the whole application rather than sorting by a formula. Grades and the difficulty of a student’s courses usually carry the most weight, followed by test scores where a college uses them, and then essays, recommendations and activities. Holistic review is how a college can admit a student with slightly lower scores who has shown unusual drive, or decline a student with perfect scores who has shown little else.
Supporters of a narrower merit standard see holistic review as a problem rather than a definition. They argue that the more a decision depends on judgment, the harder it is for applicants to know why they were admitted or rejected, and the easier it is for a college to favor the applicants it prefers. Supporters of holistic review answer that a single number measures opportunity as much as ability, because students from well-funded schools have more chances to take advanced courses and prepare for tests.
The case for merit and the case for diversity
Both sides of the debate are responding to real concerns. Those who favor admitting on academic merit alone argue that it is the fairest standard: every applicant is measured the same way, the most prepared students fill the seats, and admission rewards work rather than background. They also point out that a preference for one group is a disadvantage for another, which was the heart of the case against Harvard.
Those who favor weighing diversity argue that a college is not only sorting individuals but building a class. Students learn from classmates whose lives differ from their own, employers and communities need graduates who can work across those differences, and a school that admitted only by scores would mostly reward the advantages some students had before they ever applied. Many in this camp now focus on economic background and first-generation status, which the law still allows colleges to consider.
The Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023
For more than four decades, the Supreme Court allowed colleges to consider race as one factor among many. It upheld that approach in 2003 and again in 2016, when it ruled for the University of Texas in Fisher v. University of Texas.
On June 29, 2023, the Court reversed course. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its companion case against the University of North Carolina, it ruled that both schools’ race-conscious admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. The vote was 6 to 3 in the North Carolina case and 6 to 2 in the Harvard case, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sat out.
Can students still write about race in their college essays?
Yes. The opinion left one opening: a college may consider how race has affected an applicant’s life when the applicant writes about it, as long as the college weighs the experience and the qualities it shows, not race itself. Harvard and other colleges added essay questions about the contribution an applicant would make to campus. Where the line falls between an applicant’s experience and race as a category remains unsettled, and federal guidance since 2025 has narrowed it further, as described below.
What has changed since the ruling
The first classes admitted under the ruling showed what was at stake, though the change was not the same everywhere. The declines were sharpest at highly selective private universities. At Harvard, Black enrollment fell from 18 percent of freshmen in 2023 to less than 12 percent the next year, and at Princeton from about 9 percent to roughly 5 percent, according to an Associated Press analysis of 20 selective colleges summarized by Stateline. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Black students made up about 5 percent of the Class of 2028, down from an average of 13 percent in recent years, NBC News reported, and about 6 percent of the Class of 2029, according to The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper.
The picture is different at less selective colleges. Black and Hispanic enrollment rose about 8 percent at public flagship universities in the fall of 2024, the same Stateline report found, as some students who might once have enrolled at the most selective schools went elsewhere. edCircuit reported in 2024 that early data at a number of colleges showed steady minority enrollment, and researchers say it may take years to understand the full effect.
The federal government has since gone further than the Court. In July 2025, the Justice Department issued guidance to colleges and other recipients of federal funds warning that criteria which look neutral, such as diversity statements or essays, are unlawful if they are used as a proxy for race, according to a summary by the law firm Morgan Lewis. In August 2025, President Trump directed the Education Department to use its college data system to track whether colleges consider race, and the department added a new requirement for four-year colleges to report detailed admissions data, including race, gender, test scores and financial aid. A coalition of 17 states led by Massachusetts sued in 2026 to block the requirement, arguing that it threatens student privacy and overburdens colleges, while federal officials say the data are needed to confirm that colleges are following the Court’s ruling, Stateline reported.
Test scores are back at some colleges and optional at most
Race is not the only part of merit under review. Most selective colleges dropped their testing requirements during the pandemic, and a few prominent ones have brought them back. Dartmouth reinstated its requirement in February 2024 after an internal study found that low-income applicants who withheld strong scores were being rejected when the scores would have helped them. Most of the Ivy Plus universities have done the same: eight of the 12 require scores for fall 2027.
Most colleges went the other way. For fall 2027, 2,021 of the 2,182 ranked four-year colleges that have announced a policy are test-optional or test-free, and 161 require scores, according to FairTest, which tracks admissions testing. For a student, that means the question is no longer whether colleges want scores in general, but whether each college on the student’s list does, and whether that student’s scores would help.
Legacy preference is losing ground
Legacy preference, the advantage some colleges give the children of alumni, is the clearest case of a factor that is hard to defend as merit. Colorado banned it at public colleges in 2021, and since 2023 California, Maryland, Illinois and Virginia have restricted or banned it as well. California’s law, which took effect in the fall of 2025, reaches private nonprofit colleges, though Stanford kept its legacy preference and accepted the loss of state financial aid instead, covering the gap with its own scholarships, Higher Ed Dive reported in September 2026.
Most of the change has come from colleges themselves. At least 92 colleges dropped legacy preference after the 2023 ruling, and by 2025 it was still used by 62 public and 358 private institutions, according to the nonprofit Education Reform Now, as reported in the same article. A federal ban has been proposed in Congress but has not advanced. Each of these changes moves the definition of merit, and each has been argued in much the same terms as the debate over race.
Should college admissions be based solely on merit?
Whether college admissions should be based solely on merit depends on what merit is taken to include. Most people agree that admission should reward merit; they disagree about what counts. If it means grades and test scores alone, a purely merit-based system would be simple to explain and hard to manipulate, but it would also reward the head start that some students had in better-funded schools. If it means achievement measured against the opportunities a student had, it can find talent that a single number misses, but it depends on judgment that applicants cannot see.
The law now rules out race as a factor, and most colleges have stopped requiring test scores. Between those two lines, each college still decides what it counts as merit, which is why two colleges with similar rankings can reach very different decisions on the same student.
What this means for high school counselors and students
For counselors, the practical work is helping students understand that each college defines merit differently. A student should check whether each college on the list requires, recommends or ignores test scores, and decide college by college whether to send them. The transcript remains the strongest part of nearly every application, so the courses a student chooses in ninth and tenth grade matter more than many families realize.
Essays carry more weight than they did before 2023, and they are also more scrutinized. Students can write about their own experiences, including experiences shaped by race, background or hardship, and colleges can weigh what those experiences show about a student’s character and drive. Counselors can help students write honestly about what they have done and what it taught them, rather than writing to a category. edCircuit has also looked at how AI is changing the college application and at the challenge of identifying gifted students from poverty, which raises the same question of how talent is recognized long before a college reads an application.
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