The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a four-decade-old state scholarship program for minority students violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, ending a legal fight that stretched across three levels of Wisconsin's judiciary and drew directly on the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 landmark decision banning race-conscious college admissions.
The Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program, created in 1985, awarded grants of up to $2,500 per academic year to financially needy Black, American Indian, and Hispanic undergraduates at private Wisconsin colleges. The program was later expanded to cover students admitted to the U.S. after December 31, 1975, who were former citizens of, or had ancestors from, Laos, Vietnam, or Cambodia, as well as students at Wisconsin technical colleges. In the 2021-22 academic year, the state allocated $819,000 to fund it.
None of that mattered to the court. The fatal flaw, as WisPolitics.com reported, was simple: the Higher Educational Aids Board used race as the sole factor in deciding who received the money.
Justice Annette Ziegler, a conservative, wrote the opinion for the court. She acknowledged the importance of educational access, then drew a hard constitutional line. In her opinion, Ziegler stated:
"Ensuring that all public educational opportunities are offered to all students is vital to a free and fair nation. The schoolhouse doors should be open to all. But before the government may impose a race-, national origin-, ancestry-, or alienage-based remedy, it must demonstrate through previous government-sanctioned discrimination, regulatory discrimination, legislatively demonstrated statistical findings, or otherwise that the problem it seeks to remedy actually existed when the statute was passed."
HEAB tried to argue the scholarship addressed retention and graduation gaps among minority students. The court rejected that defense. Ziegler found no evidence that retention and graduation rates were part of the original reason the program was created four decades ago. The agency could not show that the problem it claimed to be solving had actually been documented when the legislature enacted the statute in 1985.
The court also applied the narrow standard left open by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling, the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which held that if race is used at all, it must be just one factor in a highly individualized, holistic review. Wisconsin's program did not come close to meeting that standard. Race was not one factor among many. It was the only factor.
What made the ruling notable was not just the outcome, but the unanimity. Chief Justice Jill Karofsky and Justices Susan Crawford and Rebecca Dallet, all described in reporting as liberal members of the court, concurred in the result, even as they signaled deep discomfort with the legal framework that compelled it.
Karofsky, in a concurring opinion joined by Crawford, wrote that the program could be constitutional "under an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that honors its purpose, to combat oppression." She acknowledged what she called "the historical and persistent reality that educational opportunities in Wisconsin have not been and are not currently equal."
But she conceded she was bound by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 precedent. Her concurrence posed a question rather than an answer:
"Why have we not learned from our past? Why are we not willing to recognize the harms this country has caused to those who are marginalized, disempowered, or disenfranchised?"
That is a fair question to ask. It is not, however, a constitutional argument, and Karofsky did not pretend otherwise. She voted to strike the program down.
Justice Dallet wrote a separate concurrence, joined by Karofsky and Crawford, noting that while HEAB had failed to demonstrate a compelling interest in this case, "the result may be different for other laws with greater factual support." In other words, the liberal justices left a door open, but this program could not walk through it.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been the site of sharp legal battles in recent years, but this time the ideological divide produced agreement on the bottom line, if not the reasoning.
The case reached the state's highest court after winding through two lower courts. A Dane County circuit judge originally upheld the program's constitutionality in late 2022. But the 2nd District Court of Appeals reversed that decision, with a three-judge panel ruling unanimously that the state could no longer spend taxpayer dollars on the scholarship. The appellate panel cited the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling and found it did "away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race."
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative legal organization, represented the plaintiffs throughout the litigation. Dan Lennington, WILL's vice president and deputy counsel, called the ruling a "major win for students." As Newsmax reported, Lennington went further, stating that "race cannot be used to dole out scholarships and other financial aid" and that "taxpayers can now challenge many other race-based programs in state court."
That last point deserves attention. The ruling's logic does not stop at one $819,000 grant program. Any state-funded program in Wisconsin that uses race as the sole eligibility criterion now sits on shaky constitutional ground. WILL has signaled it intends to press the advantage.
State Sen. Dora Drake, a Milwaukee Democrat who said she received the grant herself while a student at Marquette University, wasted no time announcing her next move. Drake said she will introduce legislation next session to reintroduce a similar program, this time geared toward students based on income and ZIP code rather than race.
Drake argued that disadvantaged communities "need more resources, not fewer." The sentiment is understandable. But her proposed workaround drew immediate criticism. State Sen. Eric Wimberger responded sharply, as Just The News reported: "Giving benefits based solely on race presumes someone has individual personal characteristics simply because they belong to a race category. That is stereotyping and racism at their plainest and simplest."
Wimberger added: "The Court is right today to call race-based government policies for what they are: odious."
The question of whether a ZIP-code-based program would survive legal challenge is separate from whether it would be good policy. If the new criteria are genuinely race-neutral, they may pass constitutional muster. If they function as a racial proxy, drawn to produce the same racial outcomes by different means, they will face scrutiny of their own.
Courts across the country have grappled with similar questions since the Supreme Court's 2023 decision reshaped the legal landscape. That ruling, which ended race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, has already prompted states and institutions to search for alternative legal frameworks, with mixed results.
The core principle at stake is straightforward: the government cannot hand out public money based on a person's race unless it meets the most demanding constitutional standard. HEAB did not try to meet that standard with evidence of past government-sanctioned discrimination. It offered a general appeal to diversity and retention. The court said that was not enough.
This is not a radical legal conclusion. It follows directly from the U.S. Supreme Court's own reasoning. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in the 2023 case, stated that "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." The standard demands individualized review, not categorical sorting.
Wisconsin's scholarship program did the opposite. It sorted applicants into racial categories and awarded money accordingly. No holistic review. No individualized assessment. Just a checkbox.
The pattern of unanimous rulings on constitutionally grounded cases reflects something broader: when the legal question is clear enough, even justices who disagree on philosophy can agree on the answer.
WILL's Lennington is right that this ruling opens the door to further challenges. Wisconsin is not the only state that has maintained race-based financial aid programs created decades ago, before the legal ground shifted. Programs designed in the 1980s under a different constitutional framework now face a different set of rules.
The practical effect on students who relied on the grant is real. The program served financially needy minority undergraduates at private colleges and technical schools. Those students will need to find other sources of aid. Whether Drake's proposed income-and-ZIP-code alternative fills that gap, and whether it survives its own inevitable legal challenge, remains to be seen.
What is settled is the principle. The legal battles over race-conscious government action are not slowing down. They are accelerating. And the courts, including courts with liberal majorities, are reaching the same conclusion: race alone is not a constitutionally permissible basis for distributing public resources.
The schoolhouse doors should be open to all. That was Justice Ziegler's phrase, and not one member of Wisconsin's highest court disagreed.
When even the justices who wish the law were different vote to enforce it, that tells you the argument is over. The only question left is whether the politicians who lost it will accept the answer or spend the next session looking for a cleverer way around it.