The Administration’s approach has come in two reinforcing forms: guidance that warns schools not to use indirect indicators of race, and a transparency regime that demands new admissions reporting.

A February 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—signed by Acting Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor—casts a wide net over what the Department considers impermissible. It argues that institutions may not use students’ “personal essays,” “writing samples,” “participation in extracurriculars,” or “other cues” as a means of “determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students.”

Chalkbeat, covering the letter and its implications, distilled the message into a plain warning: using personal essays or extracurriculars to predict race and extend preferential treatment is illegal, the letter said.

Then, in August 2025, the Administration moved from warning to measurement. Under a Trump-ordered policy described by the Associated Press, colleges would be required to submit admissions data intended to demonstrate they do not consider race. The Administration’s memo cited the “persistent lack of available data” alongside concerns about “hidden racial proxies,” including personal statements.

The federal mechanism is leverage: institutions that rely on federal student aid programs operate under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, and the memo contemplates action if schools do not provide “timely, complete and accurate” data.

Jon Fansmith, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, told AP he doubted the order would have much practical impact, given restrictions on collecting race data in admissions and the likelihood students may decline to report race even when asked post-enrollment. “Ultimately, will it mean anything? Probably not,” he said—while warning that the order sustains an accusation that some students are being “preferenced… at the expense of other students.”

ACE’s own summary of the policy likewise described the reporting expansion—framed as “transparency”—as focused primarily on applicants’ race, alongside other academic metrics.

What makes this moment distinct is not simply that Washington is collecting more data. It is that the Administration is making a conceptual claim about where discrimination “hides”: not only in checkboxes or explicit preferences, but in the narrative texture of an application—an essay written at 1:00 a.m. in a bedroom where the student’s life is finally quiet enough to be turned into sentences.

Eight students, one new anxiety: whether to disclose

In the first admissions cycle after Students for Fair Admissions, the anxiety did not arrive all at once. It crept in quietly, disguised as prudence. It appeared in late-night group chats, in hastily revised drafts, in the new advice counselors slipped into meetings with the casualness of people trying not to alarm anyone. You can still write about race, students were told. Just be careful how you frame it.

The Hechinger Report’s close reading of more than 50 essays, paired with interviews of newly admitted students, revealed how that caution played out in practice—not as silence, but as calibration. Students did not abandon identity. They learned to edit it, rearrange it, or translate it into something that sounded less like a claim and more like a credential.

Jaleel Gomes Cardoso’s choice—to center Blackness explicitly—was the outlier that proved the rule. He knew the risk, felt it in his body as he typed, and wrote anyway. “It kind of worried me about talking about race,” he said, explaining that the Supreme Court’s ruling had turned the subject into something fraught, something newly legible as too much. The fear was not abstract. It was procedural: Would an admissions reader see his essay as insight—or as evidence?

Others took different routes.

One student interviewed by Hechinger described drafting an essay about growing up bilingual in a Spanish-speaking household, then deleting the opening paragraph that named her ethnicity outright. She worried that specificity might overshadow the broader theme she wanted admissions officers to see: adaptability, responsibility, translation as a skill. Race did not disappear from the essay; it was diffused, braided into anecdote rather than declared as context.

Klaryssa Cobian, a first-generation Mexican American student from Los Angeles, made a more explicit pivot. She initially considered writing about cultural identity, then chose instead to foreground economic hardship. “Brown people can be rich,” she told Hechinger, explaining why race alone felt insufficient—and potentially misleading—without the material realities that shaped her daily life. Her decision was not to erase race, but to subordinate it to class, in part because class felt safer, more legible, less likely to be misread as a prohibited signal.

Another student, a Black applicant from the Midwest, described reworking an essay about organizing a Black Student Union. On an early draft, he framed the group as a response to racial isolation at his predominantly white school. On the final version, the word Black appeared only once. The rest of the essay emphasized leadership skills, event planning, conflict resolution. “I didn’t want it to sound like I was asking them to take pity,” he said, in a phrasing that betrayed the new emotional economy of admissions: identity, stripped of grievance, presented as competence.

Common App data suggests that this was not an isolated instinct. In the post-SFFA cycle, about 12 percent of applicants from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups used at least one of dozens of identity-related phrases in their essays, with Black applicants doing so at higher rates than white applicants. The numbers do not show a collapse of disclosure. They show selectivity—students choosing which parts of themselves to name explicitly, and which to leave for inference.

Counselors noticed the shift immediately. Some warned against strategic overcorrection. In Washington Post reporting, Scott Albert Johnson cautioned students not to “shoehorn” race into an essay simply because they believed it might now matter more. Others, like Rafael Figueroa, moved in the opposite direction, urging Native Hawaiian and Native American students to articulate identity more clearly than they might have before, precisely because the formal consideration of race was now barred.

Between those poles—don’t force it, don’t hide it—students were left to navigate an unresolved question: Who decides when identity becomes a proxy?

For many, the anxiety was not about rejection alone, but about misrecognition. Would an admissions officer understand a story about a segregated neighborhood as context—or as code? Would a reference to church be read as community engagement, or as a racial marker? Would writing about discrimination suggest resilience, or invite suspicion that resilience itself was being leveraged?

One student put it bluntly: “It felt like I had to write a lawyerly version of my life.” Every paragraph needed a defense; every detail needed a justification beyond its truth.

What unites these eight students’ stories is not a single strategy, but a shared unease. The personal statement, once imagined as the freest space in an otherwise rigid process, has become the most scrutinized. Students still tell their stories—but now they do so with an awareness that the reader may be weighing not just narrative quality or insight, but compliance.

In that sense, the anxiety is not simply about whether to disclose race. It is about whether disclosure itself has been redefined—from an act of self-representation into something closer to a risk assessment.