After the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions in 2023, Black enrollment at MIT dropped from 15% to 5% in a single year. At Yale, Black and Latino students fell from 30% to 23%. At Stanford—my alma mater—the Class of 2029 saw Black enrollment fall from 7% to 5.8% and Hispanic enrollment drop from 15% to 12.4%, while Asian and White enrollment rose to their highest percentages in three years.

This wasn’t an accident. It was the predictable result of pretending that “race-neutral” policies can produce equal outcomes in a society built on racial hierarchy.

I know this personally. I’m an alumnus of both A Better Chance and Stanford—part of a pipeline that was built deliberately sixty years ago by two men who understood something we’ve been taught to forget: if you want different outcomes, you have to deliberately intervene.

In 1962, John M. Kemper told TIME magazine that Phillips Academy Andover should be a “national public school”—recruiting talented youth “of all races, religions and incomes.” Charles E. Merrill Jr.—son of the Merrill Lynch founder—was running Commonwealth School in Boston, which he’d founded in 1957 with an explicit mission to serve “students from underserved communities, particularly African Americans.”

In February 1963, they convened 23 New England prep school headmasters at Andover and founded A Better Chance (ABC)—a deliberate pipeline to identify talented Black students and place them in elite institutions that had historically excluded them.

Here’s what matters: they didn’t pretend to be neutral. They said: These institutions are gatekeepers. They have excluded Black students for generations. We are going to deliberately change that.

They understood three things:

ABC placed its first 55 scholars in 1964. By the 1970s, thousands of students who would have been filtered out by “neutral” admissions got into institutions that shaped American leadership.

I know this because I lived it. ABC found me because someone deliberately looked in places the “neutral” system ignored. That pipeline led me to Stanford. I went on to earn an MBA from USC Marshall through the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management—another deliberate inclusion program—and became a CFA charterholder. At every stage, intentional programs opened doors that “neutral” systems would have kept closed, not by lowering standards, but by actively searching for talent in places the system had been designed to ignore.

That’s what intentional inclusion does. It doesn’t lower the bar. It removes the barriers that kept capable students from ever reaching the bar in the first place.

For 40 years, universities using race-conscious admissions saw rising Black, Latino, and Native American enrollment. Not because they admitted unqualified students, but because they actively searched for qualified students in places the “neutral” system ignored.

Then came Students for Fair Admissions. The Court ruled that any consideration of race—even as context—violates the Constitution. Within one admissions cycle, minority enrollment dropped nationwide.

The mechanism is simple: When you remove race from consideration in a structurally unequal system, admissions defaults to metrics that reward access to opportunity—SAT scores (correlated with family income), AP courses (available at well-funded schools), legacy status (rewards historical exclusion). Those metrics don’t measure merit. They measure who already had advantages.

Now, watching Stanford’s enrollment numbers shift back toward pre-civil rights patterns, I’m seeing in real time what happens when institutions stop looking. The Class of 2029’s demographics aren’t reflecting a sudden change in student capability. They’re reflecting a return to the system’s default: serving the same communities it always served.

While Merrill and Kemper were building pipelines into elite institutions, another network spent 60 years building the opposite. The Pioneer Fund financed academics arguing racial disparities were biological. Political operatives engineered “colorblind = fairness” messaging. The Council for National Policy coordinated donors and litigators. Christian Right leaders built the moral permission structure. The Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society built the judicial pipeline that produced the 6–3 conservative majority.

The playbook: Take a system built to exclude. When forced to change, reframe any effort to counteract exclusion as itself discriminatory. Call it “reverse racism.” Claim the Constitution requires “colorblindness.” Then watch as “neutral” policies restore the hierarchy.

The SFFA decision is part of a broader rollback. Shelby County (2013) gutted the Voting Rights Act. In November 2025, Alito paused a ruling that found Texas had engaged in racial gerrymandering, letting unconstitutional maps stay in place for the 2026 midterms. DEI programs have been banned in multiple states. The legal gains of the civil rights era are being systematically dismantled.

The question isn’t whether race-conscious or race-neutral admissions is “fair.” The question is whether we’re going to be honest about power.

Merrill and Kemper were. They saw gatekeeping institutions, acknowledged those institutions had excluded Black students for generations, and used their power deliberately to counteract that exclusion. They didn’t pretend the system was neutral. They said: the pipeline is broken, we see who it serves, and we are going to build a different one.

When you inherit 300 years of structured disadvantage and then refuse to see race, you’re not being neutral. You’re freezing the existing hierarchy in place.

The SFFA enrollment drops prove it. When you stop looking at race in a society built on racial hierarchy, you don’t get equality. You get the same people who always had access keeping access—while everyone else is told the system is finally “fair.”

Race-neutral isn’t neutral. It’s the policy equivalent of “I don’t see color”, a statement that sounds virtuous but functionally means "I refuse to see the structure I benefit from."

The pipeline runs both ways. You can build for inclusion like Merrill and Kemper did, or you can build for exclusion while calling it fairness. But you can’t do nothing and call it justice.

The only question is which pipeline we’re going to keep funding.