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The choice faces every one of Harvard University’s 25,000 students and more than 400,000 alumni: say in casual conversation that your university was a “school near Boston” or insert the fact that you are, or were, at the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institution of higher education — and risk appearing that you are boasting.

Asked last year what advice he would give to a senior, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana told the student newspaper, The Crimson, “Don’t gratuitously drop the H-bomb.”

As the Wall Street Journal noted, “The H-bomb … is the thermonuclear act of saying aloud that one attends or attended Harvard.”

Attending Harvard isn’t just a matter of pride. It has real-world consequences. Graduates of Harvard and other Ivy League schools earn significantly more than most college graduates –— the credential opens doors. Maybe the best confirmation of that is that eight out of the nine Supreme Court justices went to law school at either Harvard or its Ivy rival, Yale.

For some, those doors will be shut after the conservative majority on the Supreme Court killed the use of affirmative action in college admissions Thursday, ruling that the consideration of race by Harvard and the University of North Carolina — and by extension, any college other than the military academies — is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Like last year’s ruling on abortion, the decision was not a surprise. As Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, noted, “For nearly five decades, affirmative action in university admissions has been as much of a target as Roe v. Wade was” among the conservative legal establishment. “Just as (former President Donald) Trump took credit for the overruling of Roe, he can take credit for the three appointments that helped guarantee the end of affirmative action in higher education.”

Bill Bramhall/Tribune Content Agency

Summer Tan, a rising sophomore at Harvard, wrote, “This ruling will affect generations to come, keeping many students from gaining access to the academic spaces that I have benefitted from. … the Supreme Court has jeopardized the intellectual and academic diversity that my peers, professors and I value: The very same diversity that has made this nation great.”

Ana Fernandez, a recent graduate of Wellesley College, argued that there are serious flaws in the way affirmative action is being used. “At many elite colleges, minority student representation is skewed toward students from privileged socio-economic backgrounds regardless of their racial or ethnic identities. According to researcher and author Richard Kahlenberg, 71% of Black, Latino and Native American students at Harvard … come from college-educated homes with incomes above the national median. In fact, they hail from the most advantaged fifth of families in their respective racial or ethnic groups. Are these the students who truly need a leg up in admissions?”

In 2003, the court upheld the use of affirmative action in admissions but said the practice would no longer be needed in 25 years. The court’s decision moves up that clock by five years, as Lanhee Chen wrote. “The court’s decision Thursday is consistent with its view that race-based preferences should and would have a limited shelf life. And, as the decision notes, the significant majority of America’s colleges and universities do not use race as a factor in admissions, while three of the country’s most populous states (including California) have already outlawed it. While it may be tempting to argue that today’s ruling constitutes a significant deviation from existing precedent, and will usher in a sea change in how college admissions are conducted, the reality is very different.”

The new decision, Peniel E. Joseph observed, “represents an enormous setback to efforts to create greater opportunity in a country riven by White racial privilege, class distinctions and outright hostility towards Blacks and other historically marginalized and underrepresented groups.”

The debt bomb

The court followed up its momentous ruling on affirmative action Thursday with another sweeping decision on Friday. It threw out President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, which would have relieved all of the remaining debt owed by 20 million people and reduced the median amount owed by another 23 million from $29,400 to $13,600.

“The court made the right decision,” wrote Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. “If the administration had won, Biden and future presidents would have been empowered to use vague statements to usurp Congress’ constitutional control over the federal budget. Moreover, because of the context for this decision, it also would have allowed the president to abuse emergency powers for partisan ends.”

Clay Jones

The write-off of $430 billion in loans “would have been a waste of taxpayer funds when the US is already facing a looming fiscal crisis, a regressive policy in that it helps the relatively affluent (former college students) and potentially inflationary by infusing vast amounts of additional cash into the economy,” Somin added.

To Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, the court’s decision was a huge overreach — “the latest decision that shows the conservative majority of the Supreme Court is deploying whatever tool it can come up with to invalidate what it considers bad policy.” Democratic government isn’t designed to work this way, she observed. “The unelected justices aren’t supposed to veto policies they don’t like just because the policies strike the justices as unwise.”

For more on the court:

Timothy Holbrook: The Supreme Court leaves door open to widespread discrimination

Nicole Hemmer: Another not-as-bad-as-it-could-be decision from America’s highest court