Wisconsin Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Race-Based Scholarship Program

The Wisconsin Supreme Court — one of the more progressive state high courts in the country — issued a unanimous ruling on June 19, 2026, striking down a 1985 state law that reserved need-based scholarships exclusively for Black American, American Indian, Hispanic, and certain Southeast Asian undergraduate students at private and technical colleges. The decision marks a significant expansion of the Supreme Court's 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College ruling into state-level scholarship programs.

Justice Annette Ziegler authored the majority opinion, holding that the Constitution demands every person be treated as an individual rather than as a member of a racial group, and that Wisconsin cannot use race as a factor in distributing educational opportunities. The case was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative legal group that challenged the four-decade-old grant program on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.

Perhaps the most telling detail was the concurrence from Chief Justice Jill Karofsky, a member of the court's liberal majority, who criticized the 2023 SFFA precedent but conceded she was bound by it when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment. The fact that even liberal justices felt compelled to strike the program down underscores how sweeping SFFA's reach has become.

The Wisconsin ruling follows a similar decision from the Iowa Supreme Court just one week earlier, where justices found that a scholarship reserved for Black University of Iowa students studying physical sciences was unworkable under SFFA. The back-to-back rulings suggest a growing judicial consensus at the state level that race-restricted public scholarship programs are constitutionally untenable — and that state legislatures that haven't already repealed such programs may soon have the decision made for them by the courts.