The Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated a state-funded scholarship program that distributed financial aid to college students based on their race, ruling that the nearly four-decade-old grants violated the Equal Protection Clause. The decision lands another blow against race-conscious government programs in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The program at issue, the Wisconsin Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program, offered grants of up to $2,500 per academic year to students who are Black American, American Indian, Hispanic, or from certain Southeast Asian backgrounds. Wisconsin Public Radio reported the program disbursed $440,433 to 770 students during the 2023, 2024 academic year.
Taxpayer plaintiffs represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative legal group, brought the challenge. The court sided with them, finding the state had failed to demonstrate a compelling interest that would justify sorting applicants by ancestry. For supporters of colorblind law, the ruling is a clean win. For the Evers administration, which ran the program, it is a rebuke the governor's office has yet to publicly answer.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court's opinion leaned heavily on the Harvard precedent, citing it repeatedly. The justices made clear they viewed racial classifications with deep suspicion, writing in their opinion:
"At the heart of the Equal Protection Clause is the principle that race-, national origin-, ancestry-, or alienage-based discrimination is unconstitutional except in the most extraordinary instances."
The court went further, invoking the principle that individuals must be judged on their own merits:
"The Constitution requires that every person 'must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual, not on the basis of race.'"
And the justices left no ambiguity about how they viewed the state's racial sorting:
"Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."
The Evers administration had argued that the grants served compelling interests, equalizing educational opportunity and improving retention rates among groups with higher college attrition. The court rejected both arguments, finding insufficient evidence in the legislative record that disproportionate dropout rates at private and technical colleges were tied to race in a way that justified handing out money by skin color.
That last point matters. The program was enacted in 1985 and expanded in 1987. Nearly four decades later, the state still could not produce the evidentiary record needed to survive constitutional scrutiny. The court did not buy the premise that good intentions alone satisfy the Equal Protection Clause.
Perhaps the most revealing detail: liberal justices on the court, including Chief Justice Jill Karofsky, did not dissent. Wisconsin Public Radio reported that liberal members of the bench emphasized their reluctant agreement, citing a duty to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
Karofsky wrote separately, making clear she did not share the majority's enthusiasm. She acknowledged what she described as persistent inequality in Wisconsin education:
"Despite this longstanding commitment to education, Wisconsin still grapples with segregated and unequal educational opportunities."
She added that "many students of color in Wisconsin leave high school and enter college with distinct disadvantages," and attributed those gaps to "a reality where past state-sponsored racism continues to affect educational opportunities, and systemic racism continues to rob non-White people of equal educational opportunities."
Those are strong claims, but even Karofsky did not dissent. She concurred in the result. That tells you something about how firmly the legal ground has shifted since the Harvard decision. When Wisconsin's liberal-leaning court majority agrees to strike down a race-based program, the constitutional argument is not close.
Dan Lennington, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty attorney who represented the taxpayer plaintiffs, celebrated the ruling as a "major win." He posted on X that the decision provides far more than a single program's end:
"Wisconsin Supreme Court holds that [Gov. Tony] Evers Admin cannot offer scholarships based on race. This is a huge win for equality & provides a ROADMAP for Wisconsin Taxpayers to challenge many other programs worth BILLIONS."
That word, "billions", signals that WILL sees this ruling as the opening move, not the final one. If the same Equal Protection logic applies to other state programs that distribute benefits by race, the legal exposure for Wisconsin's government could be enormous.
Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education, echoed the sentiment in her own X post. She framed the ruling in the simplest possible terms:
"The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Wisconsin got the message. Their Supreme Court just ruled the governor cannot administer scholarship opportunities based on race."
That line borrows directly from Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion in the Harvard case. It has become a rallying cry for the colorblind-law movement, and now it has been applied by a state supreme court to a state spending program, not just a university admissions policy.
The Wisconsin ruling did not happen in a vacuum. The 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision sent shockwaves through higher education nationwide. AP News reported that the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling struck down affirmative action in college admissions with support that crossed ideological lines. Nine states had already banned affirmative action before the decision, California first in 1996, Idaho most recently in 2020.
What Wisconsin's court has now done is extend that logic from admissions to direct financial aid. The grant program did not merely consider race as one factor among many. It used race as the eligibility gate. You either belonged to a listed racial category or you did not qualify. The court found that approach constitutionally indefensible.
The practical stakes for students are modest in dollar terms, $440,433 split among 770 recipients is roughly $572 per student on average, well below the $2,500 cap. But the legal principle is anything but modest. If a state cannot hand out scholarship money by race, it raises immediate questions about every other race-classified benefit program on the books.
The Supreme Court has issued a series of consequential rulings in recent terms that have reshaped the boundaries of government power. The Wisconsin decision fits squarely in that pattern, a state court taking federal precedent and applying it to dismantle a program that state officials had defended for decades.
Several questions hang over the ruling. The Evers administration has not publicly responded. It is unclear whether the governor's office will seek any further legal action or simply let the program die. The vote breakdown among the justices, whether this was unanimous or merely a strong majority with reluctant concurrences, has not been fully detailed in available reporting.
Lennington's reference to "many other programs worth BILLIONS" raises an obvious follow-up: which programs, and how soon? If WILL files additional challenges, the Evers administration could face a cascade of litigation targeting race-based state spending across multiple agencies.
There is also the question of what happens to students who were counting on these grants. The program's termination is immediate in legal effect, though the administrative wind-down remains unclear. For 770 students who received aid last year, the dollars were small. The signal, however, is large.
The broader trend is unmistakable. Since the Harvard ruling, courts at every level have been reconsidering race-conscious government action with fresh skepticism. Programs that survived for decades under older precedent now face a legal environment that demands hard evidence, not historical generalizations, to justify treating citizens differently because of their ancestry.
Chief Justice Karofsky's concurrence is worth reading carefully. She blamed "systemic racism" for the educational gaps the grant program was designed to address. But even she could not find a legal basis to uphold a program that sorted applicants by race with no individualized assessment and no evidentiary record tying the racial categories to the specific problem the state claimed to be solving.
That gap between rhetoric and evidence is the story. For nearly forty years, Wisconsin spent taxpayer money on a program whose constitutional foundation was never solid. The state enacted it in 1985, expanded it in 1987, and never built the record that would justify it under serious judicial review. When the review finally came, the program collapsed.
The ruling also carries implications beyond Wisconsin. Other states with similar race-classified grant programs will now face pressure, from taxpayers, from legal organizations, from their own courts, to justify those programs under the same strict scrutiny. Justices across the ideological spectrum have shown increasing willingness to hold government actors to the plain text of constitutional guarantees, even when the policy at stake is politically popular.
Gov. Evers's silence is notable. His administration ran the program. His lawyers defended it. And now his court, a court with a liberal majority, has told him it was unconstitutional all along. If there is a response forthcoming, it has not arrived.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court did not break new philosophical ground. It applied a straightforward idea: the government cannot hand out money based on the color of a citizen's skin. That idea is older than any grant program. It is written into the Constitution.
What changed is that courts are finally enforcing it, and even the justices who wish they didn't have to are admitting the law is clear.
When both sides of a state supreme court agree that a race-based program cannot stand, the debate is not about law anymore. It is about whether officials will keep looking for workarounds or start treating every citizen equally. The Constitution already answered that question. Wisconsin's court just made sure the state heard it.
