The Supreme Court ruling allows race to be considered if an applicant’s essay meaningfully shows that their race contributed to their life so that they can offer a unique quality to the university. Applicants who would have been accepted into Harvard before the decisions will know that they need to do this, and will do so when applying. I expect that Harvard will treat this as letting them essentially do the same as before.

@Gabrielle There's the smart money I was hoping for! FWIW I don't expect it to go on exactly as before. It would might play badly if the numbers didn't budget at all. It's kind of clear from the data that Harvard had a 10% target from 2014-2020 (decision years, not class years) and raised it to 15% in 2020. I wouldn't be shocked if they went down to 13% (population-representative), but would be if they went all the way back to 10%. One issue is they portrayed the explicit consideration of race as applying very rarely, so too dramatic a shift harms their credibility (in addition to going against their interest)

@Gabrielle

Didn't want to bet in this market, but think it's fairly badly mispriced. Will divest the moment it looks like there won't be an objective resolution criteria (i.e. Crimson and Harvard stop publishing official numbers).

@MattReardon Agreed it is badly mispriced.

Surprised this is so high when the percentage has stabilized above 15% in the last few years and the ivies continue to signal that they will circumvent this ruling. To below 10% would be a remarkable drop

@Davida Yeah that’s never gonna happen

@Davida Well, they were below 10% just 6 years ago. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch that the ruling would set them back six years. But I wasn't aware they were signaling that they would circumvent the ruling. What are they saying they'll do?

@JosephNoonan Sure, and you could very well be right (32% was low enough to close out my position just now) - it's indeed the fun of the market. And I don't know the intricacies of Harvard itself, but I had messaging from before the ruling like this in mind (an idea whose fate seems less certain now) and related platitudes. But again you could very well be right. I personally also factor in some level of, they clamp down on the reporting and release of this statistic.

@JosephNoonan Part of what motivated me to make the market was this insta-response Harvard sent out. If I wanted to meaningfully trade here, I'd bid down to ~15%

@MattReardon I think it's possible for Harvard to dip below 10%. Princeton is at 8-9% each year, for example, and they aren't as aggressive with AA--they've been recruiting minority students through other means for a while now.

@jeremiahsamroo I would consider 8% to be a hard floor though.

@jeremiahsamroo I think the market is priced appropriately as is.