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- PaperETS Research Report Series30 Dec 2025
Graduate Admissions After Affirmative Action: Results From the ETS/NAGAP 2024 Admissions Survey
Reginald Gooch, Sara Haviland
A survey of graduate admissions officers in 2024 reveals expected impacts of the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on race-based affirmative action, particularly on holistic admissions practices aimed at diversity. The findings indicate uncertainty and concern about maintaining diversity in graduate programs.
Original abstract
On the tail of changes to testing policies and other graduate admissions practices through the COVID-19 era, 2023 saw a further major change in the admissions landscape through the U.S. Supreme Court’s striking down of race-based affirmative action in admissions processes through the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) cases. The ETS Research Institute and NAGAP, the Association for Graduate Enrollment Management, partnered on research to understand how this ruling is affecting interest holders and, in particular, how it has affected practices of holistic admissions, which have often been defined with respect to the explicit goal of promoting diversity (see, e.g., Glazer et al., 2014). This research note focuses on the viewpoints of graduate admissions officers and department leaders surveyed in 2024 on the effects they expected to see from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action in admissions processes and on the reactions that they were seeing at their own institutions. Suggested citation: Gooch, R., & Haviland, S. (2025). Graduate admissions after affirmative action: Results from the 2024 ETS/NAGAP Survey (Research Notes). ETS. https://doi.org/10.64634/5s9fnm23