Admissions offices make consequential decisions about individual lives. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, the question is no longer whether legal standards apply to admissions. It is whether institutions know how to meet them.
Legal training teaches you to distrust unexplained discretion. Admissions offices exercise a great deal of it. I practiced law in Nigeria, where statutory rules govern university access, before shifting to doctoral research in comparative and international higher education. That move across disciplines left me with a question I have not been able to set aside: why do we expect so little procedural accountability from processes that shape so many lives?
A practitioner’s perspective. That question is not rhetorical. Growing up in Nigeria, I watched some of my peers navigate the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board process, a national system that determines university access for hundreds of thousands of students each year. The system is fairly transparent although it has its own peculiar challenges, but applicants seeking admissions into colleges, either publicly funded at the state or federal or privately owned institutions know the rules, the requirements for entry are published, and outcomes are sometimes traceable. My doctoral research in comparative and international higher education has shown me that United States institutions can learn something from Nigeria’s legibility, even as U.S. colleges and institutions preserve the flexibility that holistic review allows. The starting point is applying a legal lens to what U.S. schools already do.
What a legal lens requires. A legal lens is not a compliance checklist. It is a structured method for examining whether policies are internally coherent, whether their justifications hold under scrutiny, and whether applicants can meaningfully understand the rules governing their futures. Institutions applying a legal lens to admissions ask three questions: Are our criteria clear? Are they applied consistently? And can we explain our decisions if challenged?
These are not questions most admissions offices are trained to ask. Columbia Law professor Susan Sturm has argued that second-generation discrimination operates through facially neutral processes that systematically disadvantage already marginalized groups. A legal lens makes those processes visible. Institutions that want to avoid that pattern need to build the habit of asking whether facially neutral criteria are producing unequal outcomes, and why.
Apply procedural fairness standards. Procedural fairness has a practical test: do applicants understand the rules, and are those rules applied consistently across cases? Institutions should be able to answer yes to both. In practice, most cannot. Criteria shift between cycles, rationales go unexplained, and training for admissions readers varies widely within the same office. A legal approach begins by documenting criteria, standardizing reader training, and building an internal review process for borderline cases.
The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard removed race as an admissible criterion but intensified scrutiny of everything else. Institutions must now justify their holistic criteria on grounds other than diversity. Research by Bastedo, Howard, and Flaster (2016) found that selective institutions claim to evaluate students’ achievement in context, crediting applicants who maximize available opportunities even in under-resourced schools, but that this contextual promise is inconsistently honored in practice. Closing that gap is precisely what procedural fairness standards are designed to do.
Audit strategic outcomes for process consistency. True administrative accountability goes beyond consistent application; it requires examining whether the chosen criteria produce unintended, distorted outcomes in practice. Higher education leaders should proactively audit enrollment metrics annually, treating the results as a diagnostic tool to ensure that facially neutral criteria are measuring genuine applicant merit rather than structural advantages. Identifying these distortions allows institutions to defend their criteria objectively and explain them clearly to the public.
As Michael Sandel argues in The Tyranny of Merit, credentialism makes inequality appear earned rather than inherited. Admissions criteria embed assumptions about whose preparation counts as legitimate. An annual process consistency audit surfaces those assumptions. Institutions that conduct one regularly will find themselves better positioned to defend their criteria legally and to explain them publicly, both of which matter more now than they did before 2023.
Structure and document discretion. Holistic admissions require judgment. Legal frameworks do not eliminate discretion; they structure it responsibly. Institutions should require readers to document the rationale for consequential decisions, calibrate judgment across readers through regular norming sessions, and create a clear process for flagging cases where individual bias may be distorting outcomes. Unguided discretion tends to reproduce the assumptions of whoever exercises it.
UCLA Law professor Jerry Kang and colleagues have documented how unconscious associations shape evaluative judgments in ways that can parallel explicit discrimination in their outcomes, even when evaluators act in good faith. Structured discretion, with written rationales, calibration protocols, and supervisory review, is the institutional equivalent of what legal systems use to constrain judicial bias. Admissions offices should adopt the same logic.
Learn from global legal frameworks. American institutions are not the only ones grappling with admissions accountability. Many higher education systems, particularly in Commonwealth and civil law countries, operate under statutory admissions frameworks with published criteria, formal appeals processes, and regulatory oversight. These systems are not perfect, but they offer a model of what accountability looks like when it is built into the process rather than imposed after litigation. As federal immigration policies tighten and international student pathways experience increased bureaucratic enforcement, internal procedural legibility within the university becomes a critical stability tool.
A comparative perspective is especially useful for enrollment professionals who work with international applicants. Students from systems governed by transparent statutory criteria arrive expecting legibility. When they encounter American holistic review with no published rationale, the opacity is not just confusing; it is a signal that the institution has not considered how its process appears from the outside. Institutions serious about global enrollment should close that gap.
Build legal expertise into admissions. Most admissions offices do not include staff with legal training. That gap is increasingly costly. Institutions should consider embedding or formally consulting legal expertise at three points: policy design, reader training, and post-cycle review. This does not require hiring a full-time attorney. It requires treating legal analysis as a standard input into admissions governance, the same way institutions routinely consult finance, communications, and enrollment management expertise.
Higher education lawyers have long argued that proactive legal engagement reduces institutional risk more effectively than reactive litigation management. Commissioning a procedural audit of the admissions process, conducted or reviewed by someone with legal training and published transparently, is a concrete first step. For applicants with no recourse when a decision seems arbitrary, procedural seriousness is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is basic respect.
The case for interdisciplinary leadership. Admissions and enrollment are policy domains with real distributional consequences, contested criteria, and accountability gaps that courts are actively probing. Institutions need leaders who can analyze rules, evaluate structural impacts, and design processes that hold up under scrutiny. Scholars and practitioners trained in both law and higher education are well-positioned to provide that leadership.
Legal expertise does not replace educational knowledge. It deepens it. Grounding admissions in principles of procedural fairness, equal treatment, and documented accountability strengthens institutions that depend on applicant trust. The standard to meet is not just surviving a lawsuit. It is building a process that would be defensible even if one were filed. Institutions that are serious about that standard should start now: commission a procedural audit, publish the findings, and hire people who can read both an applicant file and a legal brief.
Jacob O. Sule is a doctoral student in comparative and international higher education in the Department of Advanced, Leadership, and Policy at Morgan State University, Baltimore, USA.