The Wisconsin Supreme Court shut down a four-decade-old state grant program that awarded financial aid to college students based on their race, ruling unanimously that the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program violates the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.
All seven justices agreed the program must end. The court ordered the Higher Educational Aids Board, the state agency that administered the grants, to stop operating the program immediately. The case now returns to Jefferson County Circuit Court for entry of a formal injunction.
The ruling, handed down Thursday in Rabiebna v. Higher Educational Aids Board, affirmed a 2025 Wisconsin Court of Appeals decision and extended the reach of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-conscious college admissions nationwide. Wisconsin's grant program, as Newsmax reported, had been in place since 1985 and offered eligible minority students at private and technical colleges up to $2,500 per year.
Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler wrote the court's opinion. Her analysis struck at both pillars of strict scrutiny, the legal standard the government must meet when a law classifies people by race.
First, the court found HEAB never identified a compelling state interest. The agency pointed to student diversity, but the court held that diversity standing alone no longer qualifies as a compelling interest after SFFA v. Harvard. Justice Ziegler was direct:
"HEAB has not even identified any objectives or benefits it hopes to promote or achieve through diverse student bodies."
Second, the statute failed the narrow-tailoring requirement because race was the sole eligibility factor. The court noted that HEAB's statistical evidence dated only to 2015 and later. The agency produced no data from the time of the program's enactment in 1985 showing that a retention crisis existed at Wisconsin's private and technical colleges, the very problem the grants were supposedly designed to fix.
The Wisconsin Legislature enacted the program in 1985, expanded it in 1987, and reauthorized the grants every two years. The statute even included a provision making students from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam admitted to the United States after December 31, 1975, eligible for the awards. For roughly four decades, race remained the deciding factor for who received taxpayer-funded aid.
The ruling was unanimous in result, but not in reasoning. The court's three liberal justices, led by Chief Justice Jill J. Karofsky, split off in a separate concurrence. Karofsky argued that a properly supported program could survive a Fourteenth Amendment analysis that honors what she described as the amendment's anti-oppression purpose.
At oral argument, Karofsky pressed the plaintiffs' counsel on racial disparities in housing, healthcare, and education, suggesting the door should remain open for race-conscious government programs backed by stronger evidence. The concurrence amounts to a reservation, not a dissent: even the liberal wing could not defend HEAB's threadbare justification.
That a court with a locked-in liberal majority reached a unanimous result here tells you how weak the state's case was.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the conservative legal organization that brought the suit, framed the decision as a precedent with implications well beyond one grant program. Dan Lennington, WILL's managing vice president, said the ruling opens the courthouse doors to challenges against other race-based state programs.
"This is a major win for students. Race cannot be used to dole out scholarships and other financial aid."
Lennington added that it was "also a big win for taxpayers, who can now challenge many other race-based programs in state court." He did not specify which programs might be next, but his language signals that WILL sees the decision as a template.
At oral argument, WILL attorney Luke Berg told the court that the worst discrimination is "when the law treats individuals differently based on their race." The court's opinion effectively adopted that principle as binding state law.
The immediate practical question is what happens to students who were counting on the grants for the coming semester. HEAB declined to say how it would wind down the program or address students already relying on the funds. The agency's silence leaves recipients in a difficult spot, and raises questions about whether the Legislature will act to create a race-neutral replacement.
The court did not specify a transition period. The mandate orders HEAB to stop operating the program, and the case returns to Jefferson County Circuit Court for the injunction that will make that order enforceable.
The Wisconsin ruling fits a broader pattern of courts enforcing equal-protection principles against race-based government programs in the wake of SFFA v. Harvard. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 decision did not merely end race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. It reset the legal framework for any government action that sorts Americans by race.
Unanimous court decisions, whether at the state or federal level, carry particular weight because they strip away the argument that the outcome was driven by ideology. When the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously in recent terms, the decisions have often reflected a consensus that the legal question was not close.
The same dynamic played out in Wisconsin. HEAB's defense was so thin, no data from the program's founding era, no articulated objective beyond a vague appeal to diversity, that even justices sympathetic to race-conscious policy could not salvage it.
State supreme courts have become increasingly active battlegrounds on questions of constitutional rights and government overreach. Arizona's high court has dealt with its own contentious rulings, and the U.S. Supreme Court's recent redistricting decisions have underscored how consequential these judicial outcomes are for governance at every level.
The most damaging detail in the opinion is what HEAB failed to produce. The agency had four decades to build a record justifying the program. It never did.
When challenged in court, HEAB offered statistics that went back only to 2015, thirty years after the program began. It presented no evidence from the mid-1980s showing that minority students at Wisconsin's private and technical colleges faced a retention problem severe enough to warrant a race-exclusive remedy. The court found this gap fatal.
The program's design compounded the problem. Unlike admissions programs that once used race as one factor among many, Wisconsin's grant statute made race the sole qualifying criterion. There was no holistic review, no individual assessment, no alternative path for a non-minority student facing identical financial hardship. If you were the wrong race, you were ineligible. Period.
That bluntness made the program an easy target under strict scrutiny. And it raises a fair question: why did the Legislature reauthorize a program every two years for four decades without ever requiring the administering agency to justify it?
Lennington's post-decision comments suggest WILL intends to use the ruling as a launching pad. If race-based grant programs violate the Fourteenth Amendment, the same logic applies to other state-funded programs that use race as a gating criterion, contracts, hiring preferences, set-asides.
The U.S. Supreme Court has shown it will not stretch standing or legal arguments to reach a desired political outcome, even under intense pressure. Wisconsin's high court followed a similar discipline here: it applied the law as written, found the program wanting, and ordered it shut down.
Whether the Wisconsin Legislature responds by creating a need-based replacement program, one that helps struggling students regardless of race, remains an open question. So does the fate of current grant recipients heading into the fall semester with no word from HEAB on a transition plan.
For four decades, Wisconsin handed out taxpayer money based on skin color and never bothered to prove it was necessary. The court finally asked for the receipts. There were none.
