The dismantling of affirmative action by the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was framed as a return to a simple principle: that individuals should be treated as individuals, not as members of racial groups. On its face, that sounds not only reasonable, but overdue. If the law now requires that admissions committees stop sorting applicants into racial categories, then logically, every applicant is simply American. No prefixes, no qualifiers, no hyphenations. Just American.
But that clean abstraction collides almost immediately with the messy reality of how identity, merit, and opportunity actually function in medical school admissions. And for Indian applicants in particular, the consequences may be more complex—and more constraining—than either proponents or critics of affirmative action fully acknowledge.
For years, Indian American applicants have occupied a paradoxical space in admissions. On paper, they are often overrepresented relative to their share of the population, particularly in highly competitive pre-med tracks. This has led to their informal classification—sometimes explicitly, often implicitly—within the broader category of “overrepresented minorities.” The practical effect has been that Indian applicants are evaluated against a higher statistical bar, not because of anything intrinsic to the individual, but because of the performance of the group.
With affirmative action removed, one might assume that this dynamic disappears. If race can no longer be considered, then there is no longer a mechanism to treat Indian applicants as part of an overrepresented category. In theory, this should level the playing field. In practice, it may do the opposite.
READ: Sreedhar Potarazu |The jury just confirmed what we knew in 2015 about social media and children (March 26, 2026)
The reason lies in how admissions systems adapt when one variable is removed. The analysis published in JAMA makes clear that the physician workforce does not reflect the demographic composition of the country, and that diversity has been an explicit goal of admissions policies. That goal has not disappeared simply because the legal tools used to pursue it have been restricted. Institutions are still under pressure—social, institutional, and increasingly regulatory—to produce classes that reflect a broad spectrum of backgrounds and experiences.
At the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it is prepared to scrutinize admissions practices at several medical schools, raising the stakes for any policy that could be interpreted as a proxy for race. This creates a narrow corridor for admissions committees: they must avoid explicit consideration of race while still attempting to assemble a diverse class. The result is likely to be a shift toward race-neutral criteria that correlate with diversity—socioeconomic disadvantage, geographic background, life experiences.
And this is where Indian applicants may find themselves at a disadvantage. As a group, Indian Americans have relatively high median household incomes and strong educational attainment. Those are strengths in a purely meritocratic system, but they become liabilities in a framework that increasingly emphasizes disadvantage as a proxy for diversity. In other words, the removal of affirmative action does not eliminate group-based effects; it simply changes the axis along which those effects operate.
There is also a deeper philosophical tension embedded in the idea that everyone is now simply “American.” What does that actually mean in practice? Is identity erased, or merely ignored? If one parent is of Indian national, born and raised in the United States, and the other is of European descent, are their children Indian American, or are they simply American? And who decides? The law may choose not to recognize these distinctions, but society—and institutions—do not so easily discard them.
READ: Sreedhar Potarazu | Artificial intelligence or artificial temptation? Risks of training AI on human instincts (March 17, 2026)
The insistence on a singular American identity risk flattening differences that continue to shape opportunity. It assumes that once race is removed from the formal decision-making process, its effects dissipate. But the pipeline into medical school tells a different story. Access to advanced coursework, mentorship, research opportunities, and extracurricular experiences remains unevenly distributed. The JAMA Network Open analysis highlights how these disparities accumulate long before an application is ever submitted. By the time admissions committees review candidates, they are not evaluating raw potential, but the product of years of unequal inputs.
For Indian applicants, this creates a subtle but significant shift. Under affirmative action, their identity was visible and, in some contexts, disadvantageous because of overrepresentation. Without it, their identity becomes officially irrelevant—but their socioeconomic profile, educational background, and perceived lack of disadvantage may place them at a different kind of disadvantage in a system recalibrated to prioritize other forms of diversity.
Critics of affirmative action might argue that this is precisely the point. Admissions should reward achievement, not compensate for disparity. If Indian applicants are performing at a high level, then their representation in medical schools should reflect that performance, irrespective of broader demographic goals. From this perspective, the removal of affirmative action restores integrity to the process and eliminates the need for arbitrary balancing.
Yet even this argument raises uncomfortable questions. If the goal is a purely merit-based system, what counts as merit? Standardized test scores? GPA? Research output? These metrics, while seemingly objective, are deeply intertwined with access to resources. The idea that they can serve as neutral arbiters of talent ignores the structural conditions that produce them. And if admissions committees begin to de-emphasize these metrics in favor of more holistic evaluations, then the system is no longer purely meritocratic in the traditional sense—it is simply using different, less transparent criteria.
READ: Sreedhar Potarazu | Quantum vs AI: The urgent gap to be filled (March 24, 2026)
The irony is that in attempting to remove race from the equation, the system may become more opaque, not less. Applicants will be told that they are evaluated as individuals, but the underlying criteria will continue to reflect institutional priorities that are themselves shaped by broader social and political forces. Indian applicants, like all applicants, will have to navigate a process that is simultaneously more constrained in what it can say and more complex in how it operates.
The larger question is whether the aspiration to treat everyone as simply “American” is achievable, or even desirable, in a field like medicine. Medicine does not operate in a vacuum. It serves a population that is diverse in ways that matter—culturally, linguistically, historically. A physician workforce that does not reflect that diversity may struggle to meet those needs effectively. At the same time, a system that explicitly engineers representation risks undermining the principle of individual fairness.
The end of affirmative action does not resolve this tension; it reframes it. For Indian applicants, the path to medical school may become more challenging, not because they are being explicitly disadvantaged, but because the system is recalibrating around new definitions of diversity and merit—under the watchful eye of a federal government increasingly willing to intervene. And for all applicants, the question remains unresolved: in a country that insists on being colorblind in law, what does it actually mean to be American in practice?