In a decision handed down today, the United States Supreme Court banned the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The six conservative justices voted for the decision, the three moderate-liberal justices voted against it.

The media coverage stresses the likelihood that entrants to elite universities will become more Asian and more white, because of reliance on standardized tests, where those two groups typically have higher scores.

But we do not yet know how much it matters to eliminate official policies of affirmative action.

Most colleges in this country admit everyone who applies, so the elimination of affirmative action won’t change anything for them.

The elite colleges have many more applicants than openings. This is where the elimination of affirmative action is expected to matter. The top colleges often have five or ten times more applicants than spaces.

But selective colleges don’t rely solely on standardized test scores to fill their freshman class. They consider a variety of factors, including grade point average, the student’s participation in non-academic activities, students’ essays, and other factors. They may give preferences to fill their athletic teams, to provide enrollment for all majors, to recruit talented musicians, to accept “legacy” students, the children of alums.

In addition, growing numbers of selective colleges are test-optional, so the tests don’t matter for them.

After nearly 50 years of affirmative action, most elite colleges have internalized the norms of equity, diversion and inclusion. They have welcomed the diversification of faculty, students, and staff. How likely are they to abandon those norms? Not likely, in my view.

My own undergraduate college is led by a very respected African American woman; the director of admissions is also an African American woman. Harvard University has a new president, an African American woman. I doubt that the ethnic profiles of such institutions will change much if at all.

Conservatives have forgotten that President Richard Nixon started affirmative action. That decision was hotly debated but never abandoned until now. At the time, in the late 1970s, I questioned a system that gave points for skin color but in retrospect, I think Nixon’s policy was a great success. It generated a significant number of Black professional. That’s good for Anerican society.

I doubt that the decision today will curtail access to higher education for Black students, not even in the elite colleges that are the target of today’s decision. Diversity, equity and inclusion have become the norm.