DEEP READS
After affirmative action, a White teen’s Ivy hopes rose. A Black teen’s sank.
Cole Clemmons aimed higher. Demar Goodman aimed lower. They both wrestled with feelings of fear, anxiety and self-doubt after the Supreme Court remade college admissions.
(William DeShazer for The Washington Post, Alyssa Pointer for The Washington Post)
By Hannah Natanson
Nov. 18 at 6:05 a.m.
Human read|Listen30 min
Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.
On the day affirmative action fell this summer, Demar Goodman phoned his best friend the second he got home from Georgia Tech, where the 17-year-old Black rising senior was conducting epidemiology research.
“So,” Demar said. “Safe to say Harvard is out, right?”
The Supreme Court had ruled that morning in an ideologically split decision that colleges could no longer use race-based affirmative action when weighing applicants. A majority of the justices found that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.
The ruling upended the world of college applications, sending admissions counselors, teachers, parents and students scrambling to understand what the history-making decision meant, on a personal and practical level, for them.
No one Googled, questioned and second-guessed more than this year’s crop of incoming high school seniors — seniors like Demar in Atlanta and, 400 miles west of him in Tennessee, 17-year-old Cole Clemmons.
Cole learned of the Supreme Court decision while surrounded by other teens also attending a University of Memphis international studies program. “Whoa, this is crazy,” Cole muttered to his Korean American roommate, holding up the New York Times alert on his iPhone.
“This is going to help me,” Cole remembers his roommate whispering mid-lecture. And Cole, who is White, realized it might boost him, too.
College-bound students navigate affirmative action ban
5:24
After the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in college admissions last June, these two students reconsidered their college applications approach. (Reshma Kirpalani/The Washington Post)
Cole and Demar lived in different parts of the South and were total strangers to one another. Yet they were also alike: hard-working, eager and ambitious. Demar wanted to become a U.S. senator. Cole aimed to pursue a career in environmental science, or maybe international relations. Both were determined to make it to college. To a great college. Both aspired to the Ivy League.
Both were girding for senior years swollen with AP classes and after-school activities. Demar would serve as student body president. Cole would become head of Model United Nations. Both had long lists of target schools months, if not years, in the making. Both were seen by the numerous adults they’d befriended over their academic careers, from teachers to debate coaches to pastors, as exceptional.
And, after the Supreme Court’s decision, both would reconsider their applications. The difference was how.
How The Post reported this story
Over the summer, Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson sent a questionnaire to high school seniors nationwide asking for their thoughts on how the end of affirmative action affected their college ambitions. From dozens of submissions, she selected two students, Demar Goodman and Cole Clemmons, and — with their parents’ permission — spent half a year following the teens through their college application processes, checking in regularly by phone, over Zoom and in-person visits.The story aims to reflect the two students’ worries, hopes and decision-making as they navigate an application process upended by the Supreme Court’s historic ruling. It is not meant to suggest how admissions officers do their jobs, or how those changed after the decision. When Natanson finished reporting and writing the story, she reviewed the facts in it with Demar, Cole and their parents to ensure accuracy and also to make them aware of all the details being revealed.
1/2
End of carousel
Cole’s dream school had always been Columbia University, attractive for its academics, strong alumni network, diverse student body — the undergraduate population is 61 percent minority — and location in his favorite city, which he adored for its all-hours energy. It would be easier to get in now, he thought, with a frisson of discomfort. He’d never considered applying to other Ivies.
But on Aug. 1, the day the Common Application opened, Cole clicked into a separate Google search tab. He typed “prettiest Ivy League campus” and scrolled through images of illuminated stone archways, white-edged brick buildings and leafy quads aglow with fall colors. He paused over pictures of one school, whose blue-green trees and hills reminded him of Maine, his favorite state, and thought: What about Dartmouth?
Back in June, a month before, Demar waited on the phone for his friend to answer his query about Harvard.
“I think it’s too early to tell,” said 18-year-old Quentin Carter, a freshman at Morehouse College. Then he opted for a joke: “Well, at least they did it your year, not mine.”
Demar laughed — and in his head, crossed Harvard off the list. The school was just too selective, he felt, and without his race taken into account, he would never get in.
He didn’t bring up his second choice. But in the months to come, as deadlines inched and then hurtled closer, Demar would return to the unasked question: Was it still worth applying to Cornell?
CHAPTER I: WRITING
Cole
Sitting at his desk, a tumble of pillows from his unmade bed visible over his right shoulder, Cole clicked into a Zoom meeting and nodded hello to his eighth-grade English teacher. Alex Eichner, wearing a gray plaid shirt and transparent glasses, nodded back.
“We’re here,” Eichner said, “because you have an exciting journey in front of you. And hopefully, I can help out with that.”
Cole hoped so, too. Eichner was one of four adults he was counting on to usher him across the college finish line. His parents were two more. The fourth was his counselor for gifted students at Franklin High School, a teacher assigned to him as a high achiever since 10th grade. Eichner, though, would be paid several hundred dollars to help craft Cole’s Common Application essay, starting on that sunny Thursday morning in August, 83 days before the early decision application deadline for most schools.
Eichner asked Cole to “give me the profile, give me the scoop.” The teen leaned back, scratched his left shoulder and flashed a small smile.
“Okay,” he said, “so GPA, I have a 4.4.” The top ACT score. President of his high school’s Model U.N. program. Outreach officer for the Young Democrats. A filmmaker in his spare time, whose work was slated to be shown at this year’s All American High School Film Festival in New York. And, “I’m working on it right now, but I’m probably going to be president of our History Honor Society.”