Students will hear from Ivies on Thursday. Will demographics change since the Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions?

Students who applied to the eight Ivy League universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, were to find out Thursday whether they got in.

They will also be the first group of students to be admitted following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to ban the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions, forcing colleges to find new ways to achieve diversity in their classes. Many other selective colleges in the Philadelphia area, including Dickinson, Haverford, Villanova and Swarthmore, have already released their acceptance decisions. The six other Ivies expected to announce Thursday were Brown, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell.

Over the next month or so, students will decide where they want to enroll. That freshman class — and, specifically, its demographics — will undoubtedly be compared with prior years’ to gauge what impact the court’s decision has had.

» READ MORE: What Philly-area schools are saying about the SCOTUS ruling to end race-based admissions in colleges

The court ruled in June that colleges could not use race as a factor in deciding whether students should be admitted. It overturned more than 40 years of admissions policy at many of the nation’s campuses, raising concern that it could reduce the number of Black and Latino students at many elite colleges and harm schools’ efforts to create diverse classes.

» READ MORE: Colleges are bracing for a court decision on affirmative action. Here’s what Princeton’s president is doing to prepare.

The lawsuits were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a conservative activist who has spent years battling affirmative action policies. Plaintiffs had accused both Harvard and the University of North Carolina of discriminating against Asian and/or white students through the use of race-conscious admissions policies.

Even before the court’s decision, considering race was already barred in certain states, including California and Michigan. In those two states, some colleges have reported a decline in Black and Latino students as a result.

» READ MORE: Penn students lament SCOTUS decision on race-based admissions: ‘All of our progress is disappearing’

Both Penn and Princeton declined to discuss the impact, as more lawsuits are expected to be brought against colleges in the coming months and years over their admissions practices.

But Whitney Soule, dean of admissions at Penn, said in a recent interview with the school’s alumni magazine that Penn had trained staff and adapted its process to adhere to the law.

» READ MORE: Colleges should shoulder the burden of SCOTUS admissions ruling, not students, say Philly college advisers

“Do we know the race or ethnicity of applicants, like we did before? No, we don’t,” she told the Pennsylvania Gazette. “Yet we’re reading every detail that they provide, and we’re trying to understand how they see themselves and how they want to contribute.”

Penn also collaborated more with Heights Philadelphia, an organization that helps Philadelphia school students get into and through college, said Sean E. Vereen, co-president of Heights. Penn’s provost, John L. Jackson Jr., also joined the Heights board, he said.

“There is already a long partnership there, but we’re also deepening that partnership,” he said.

Adam Nguyen, whose company, Ivy Link, advises students on getting into the Ivies and other elite colleges, said many colleges introduced new or altered essay questions to learn more about applicants.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. outlined in his decision a way that race still could come into play, particularly in the admissions essay portion of an application: “... nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”

Admissions experts said some students of color chose to write about their racial backgrounds as it related to their identities.

“There were students who spoke to it in their essays and really thought it was an important part of their identity,” Vereen said. “And I think there are some students [who had] some real trepidation ... and really did not talk about race in their application.”

Jess Lord, vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College, said that “probably more” students “made reference to many aspects of their identity including their race and ethnicity.” But, he said, “not substantially more.”

“We did consider it in the context of students connecting their racial identity to experiences they’ve had and qualities and characteristics they had developed that were in some way connected to their racial identity or their experience with that identity,” Lord said.

Nguyen said students were advised to weigh whether including it enhanced their narrative.

“We have to take each student and their background and look at the race component in the full context of who they are and what they achieved,” he said.

No, Penn’s Soule told the alumni magazine: “Anybody involved with application review and selection in Penn Admissions does not have access to any reporting or data fields that are related to race — in aggregate or at the record level. We just can’t see it.”

But the Common App, which many students use to apply to college, still gives students the option to indicate their race, but colleges are able “to hide (that is, “suppress”) the self-disclosed race and ethnicity information from application PDF files for both first-year and transfer applications,” a spokesperson said. “That means when they receive an application PDF from Common App, the race and ethnicity data will not be visible.”

Common App said it could not share how many colleges chose to suppress that information. Applications from underrepresented minority applicants increased 10% this year, Common App said.

It’s not clear when colleges will release that information. Some colleges may attain and release the information about their accepted students; others may wait until after May 1 when students declare whether they will accept the offer of admission and enroll; and others may wait even longer, until after the wait-list process when their final class is formed.

The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, reported this week that the university isn’t expected to release its details until this summer.

Under federal law, colleges eventually must report the racial makeup of their classes, and that’s when a comprehensive look at colleges’ admitted classes will be possible.

“You will get data maybe in the fall,” Nguyen said.

When Penn issued a statement on its acceptance decisions last year, it did not give a racial breakdown. But the school said the group collectively represented “the most diverse group of admitted students in Penn’s history in terms of racial and ethnic background, socioeconomic diversity ... and those who are the first generation in their family to attend a four-year college or university.”

What the university will say this year remains to be seen.

“I’m concerned that this will have a negative impact on the racial diversity of the incoming class,” said Lord, the Haverford dean.

Heights’ Vereen, who worked in admissions at Penn from 2008 to 2012, predicted declines in diversity at more selective colleges on a national level.

“It’s a little bit of the Wild West for the next couple years,” he said. “Everyone is trying to calibrate to what is the new reality.”

Given Penn’s strong commitment to students in the Philadelphia area, those declines may be tempered there, he said.

Nguyen also predicted a dip in diversity, at least in the first year.

“When the [court] decision came out, colleges were scrambling to respond,” he said.

Cara McClellan, a Penn associate practice professor of law, said last year that the percentage of students from underrepresented groups at Harvard was expected to drop by 50% without race-conscious admissions. She worked on Harvard’s case at the appellate level for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and at that time, Black students made up 14% of Harvard’s incoming class, and Latino students and students from other underrepresented groups made up another 14%.

But John E. Jones III, president of Dickinson College in Carlisle, said he is “guardedly optimistic” that the diversity of the class will be similar to last year, when 25% were students of color. Dickinson reached out to organizations, including Heights, for more assistance in getting students of color to apply, he said. It had even started doing that before the court decision, he said.

“Anecdotally, what we believe is that has been extremely helpful in getting our name out there and connecting us with students and that will add to the diversity on campus,” he said.