Three years ago this Sunday, the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The 6-3 ruling ended race-conscious college admissions and told universities, plainly, that the Equal Protection Clause means what it says. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Harvard's and UNC's admissions programs lacked measurable objectives, employed race negatively, involved racial stereotyping, and had no defined endpoint. The Court had said as much in Grutter v. Bollinger back in 2003, with a 25-year runway attached. The runway expired. The programs didn't.
That's the part most post-mortems skip. SFFA wasn't a surprise. It was a ruling long overdue.
The more interesting story is what happened next — and where the ruling is going now.
What Colleges Did
Some schools did what the Court required. They restructured admissions around socioeconomic factors, expanded outreach to underserved high schools, ended legacy preferences, and built holistic review processes that evaluated extracurricular achievement, first-generation status, and class rank without racial categories. That's the legal path. It's also the honest one.
Other schools found the exit ramp Roberts left in the opinion — that colleges may still consider how race affected an applicant's life if tied to a specific quality the student brings — and turned it into a highway. Johns Hopkins prompts applicants to discuss elements of their identity, including sexuality and community. Rice explicitly mentions "racial identity." Sarah Lawrence cited the ruling directly and invited applicants to discuss how race influenced their development. Several schools heard the carve-out as permission to ask about race without calling it a race question.
The Department of Justice noticed. In May 2026, the DOJ completed a year-long investigation and determined that UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine had illegally considered race in admissions, intentionally discriminating against white and Asian American applicants. That investigation isn't a sideshow. It's the enforcement mechanism the ruling requires to have any teeth.
The Corporate Front
SFFA was an education case. The Equal Protection Clause applies to state actors. Title VI applies to recipients of federal funds. Private employers operate under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which is a different statute with different doctrines. The ruling, on its face, doesn't reach corporate DEI programs.
Justice Gorsuch's concurrence made that distinction harder to maintain. He pointed out that Title VI sits "just next door" to Title VII and contains "essentially identical terms," and that the reasoning the Court applied to one is difficult to quarantine from the other. Plaintiffs' counsel read the concurrence. Litigation followed. America First Legal has sent letters to dozens of companies threatening suits over DEI programs it characterizes as unlawful race-based employment decisions under Title VII and 42 U.S.C. § 1981, the post-Civil War statute that guarantees equal contract rights regardless of race. Thirteen Republican state attorneys general wrote to Fortune 100 CEOs in July 2023, urging them to end what they called race-based initiatives, citing SFFA as the relevant standard.
Job postings with "DEI" in the title or description dropped 23 percent after SFFA, reversing a nearly 29 percent increase from 2020-21. Shareholder activists — often backed by conservatively funded groups — have demanded DEI policy retractions and so-called reverse racial audits. The legal risk calculus changed, and corporate boards updated their math.
None of that means corporate DEI programs are categorically unlawful. SFFA raised the standard of scrutiny and narrowed the justifications courts will accept. "Diversity for diversity's sake" won't survive judicial review the way it once might have. Programs that avoid zero-sum racial classifications carry less legal exposure than those setting numerical diversity targets or tying pay to racial outcome metrics.
The Legislative Track
More than 100 bills targeting DEI programs have been introduced in 30-plus states since SFFA. Republicans introduced federal legislation to ban all DEI programs in the executive branch and cut federal funding to educational institutions that maintain them. Several states moved to defund DEI offices at public universities entirely.
Nine states had already prohibited race-conscious admissions at public universities before the SFFA ruling. The Court caught up with what those states had been doing for years — some for decades. California banned affirmative action by ballot initiative in 1996. The data from those states is the natural experiment: it didn't produce the collapse in minority enrollment opponents predicted, though it shifted enrollment patterns at elite flagship campuses. That evidence now frames the post-SFFA debate over what race-neutral alternatives actually produce.
Three Years In
The landscape three years after SFFA looks roughly like this. Highly selective institutions are under the most pressure — they had the most aggressive race-conscious programs, they face the most litigation attention, and they have the most reputational exposure when enforcement actions arrive. Institutions that never used racial preferences aren't affected at all. The middle range is working through the gap between legal compliance and institutional culture that has built up over thirty years of Grutter-permitted programs.
The enforcement question is the one that determines whether the ruling actually changes anything. A Supreme Court decision with no compliance mechanism is an editorial, not law. The DOJ investigation at UCLA&'s medical school is a signal of what enforcement looks like. More will follow. Institutions that redesigned around socioeconomic proxies for racial diversity, or that built essay prompts explicitly calibrated to produce racial information through the back door, are making a bet about how seriously the government intends to police the distinction the Court drew.
My own take, for whatever it's worth from someone who isn't a lawyer but has spent three decades watching institutions comply with regulatory requirements only to the extent they're enforced: the bet is riskier than it looks. Courts are now more likely to scrutinize racial classifications, and the institutional memory of why Grutter's 25-year endpoint was ignored will not help any defendant trying to explain why they redesigned their essay prompts to extract racial information that the ruling said they couldn't use.
The SCOTUS ruling is now three years old. It hasn't finished making changes yet.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.