Mo Marie Lauyanne Kouame, 18, dreams of being an aerospace engineer and building spacecraft. This fall, she applied to MIT, Princeton, and Columbia.

For one college essay, she wrote about being homeless at 8 years old, when she came to the United States from France. She recalled watching her parents fight for help from the Department of Transitional Assistance and sleeping in hospital beds at Boston Medical Center when they didn’t know where else to go. That early experience changed her, she said.

“Homelessness,” she wrote, “taught me resilience.”

Kouame’s essay, which recounts how she learned to thrive as a low-income student of color “surrounded by classmates whose lives felt worlds apart from mine,” is about overcoming adversity.

That’s a theme the White House has identified as a problem in its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Over the past year, the federal government has flagged “cues” such as personal essays, along with narratives about “overcoming obstacles” and“diversity statements,” as being potentially unlawful: a stand-in for talking about race.

More than two years have passed since the Supreme Court ended race-conscious affirmative action, and the Trump administration has since demanded colleges submit data proving they don’t consider race in admissions. It has also expanded what it sees as “discriminatory admissions processes” to include considering a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, nationality, political views, and religious associations.

For Kouame, not writing about her identity felt “impossible,” she said in a Zoom interview, “because the things that I’ve gone through in life make me who I am now.”

Other students are weighing the pros and cons, said Ethan Sawyer, founder of College Essay Guy, which offers one-on-one coaching and free online resources through the admissions process. He added the key is “to step back and take stock” of what colleges are actually looking for. Essentially: “How will you be a valuable, contributing member of the community?”

Navigating the college admissions landscape has never been easy, but for the class of 2030 it’s particularly fraught. Plenty of advisers can be hired for a fee: Private consulting is a $3 billion industry, with parents paying tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to give their kids an edge. Community organizations, college-prep programs, and high schools are also on hand to assist students.

There’s no question it’s an uneven playing field, though this year there is one equalizer in the college admissions game: No one really knows what’s coming next.

In 2024, one year post-affirmative action, Black first-year student enrollment plunged at many prestigious colleges, and this fall Harvard enrolled fewer Black and Latino freshmen. Meanwhile, the Crimson reported that Harvard banned alumni interviewers from commenting on an applicant’s race, ethnicity, or national origin in their written evaluations.

College consultant Sara Harberson, in a blog post on her website, warned of a future where students are reduced to test scores and transcripts and admissions staffs are replaced by AI.

For now, it’s still a human process with human workarounds. Many colleges and universities encourage applicants to submit video introductions using platforms such as Glimpse. It’s a way for students to talk “more authentically
and off the cuff,” said Rachel Rubin, the Brookline-based founder of Spark Admissions, noting that in some cases, video can convey information about race and ethnicity.

Essay questions nudging students to describe their “lived experience” or their “community” proliferated after the Supreme Court ruling and became known as the Chief Justice Roberts Loophole‚ said Jayson Weingarten, a senior admissions consultant with the Manhattan-based Ivy Coach.

“A lot of students might read [a community prompt] and think, Oh, I’m in the band, I’m the editor of the paper, and I’m going to write about an activity,”he said, but other students “read between the lines of what admissions officers are asking — and they’re going to talk about their race, culture, ethnicity, heritage, socioeconomic status, anything like that.”

Weingarten said that after the flurry of executive orders and other memos targeting DEI earlier this year, “there was widespread speculation that many of America’s top universities would be desperate to avoid the crosshairs of the Trump administration” and abandon such prompts. However, most elite institutions have preserved them, he noted.

“It’s a quiet signal, but it’s an unmistakable act of resistance,” said Weingarten.

Sara Barber-Just, an English teacher and chair of the department at Amherst-Pelham Regional High School, said many of her students are answering a Common App question touching on identity. Theirtopics range from the strengths of being autistic to the musical influences of their Puerto Rican grandparents to accessing gender-affirming care as a transgender person.

“They write really beautiful essays about the experience of being human,” she said. “No president can stop adolescents from writing about their identity.”

And federal policies can’t stop adults from helping them. This spring the tutoring nonprofit 826 Boston rejected $250,000 in funding rather than comply with President Trump’s demands to eliminate DEI programming.

“By not accepting the money, we are able to continue to support students about anything that they want to write about, particularly their identities or historical oppression,” said 826 Boston executive director Corey Yarbrough, who hopes students will see “their perspectives matter, and someone out there cares and will listen.”

Some schools have added prompts to get at themes of viewpoint diversity.

Harvard and Columbia asked students to recall a time they disagreed with someone, and how they handled it. Kouame wrote about going to Ivory Coast in West Africa, where her family is originally from, and meeting a woman selling skin-bleaching cream.

“You’re not trying to change somebody’s point of view,” she said. “You’re just trying to inform them about what you think.”

Kouame worked on her college essays with Thrive Scholars, which assists high-achieving students from under-resourced communities. The Boston-based nonprofit Steppingstone also provided essay and college-prep support and helped her get into the prekindergarten-12 Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a predominantly white private school in Cambridge. When she started there, her family lived in Dorchester (they later moved to Belmont). She commuted to Cambridge, doing her homework on the bus ride in and contemplating outer space on her ride home on the T.

“The blur of city lights outside the window reminded me of distant constellations,” she wrote in her college essay, “and in that moving train car, my fascination with space was born.”

She submitted her college applications through QuestBridge, which has a full four-year “Match Scholarship” with various partners.

Other seniors are still finishing their applications before regular-decision deadlines in January.

Ella Daillie, a senior at Northampton High School with Iraqi and Yemeni heritage, marked herself as “white” and “Middle Eastern” on the CommonApp, which has an optional race and ethnicity question for research purposes.

She had a harder time deciding whether to mention her leadership in her school’s Students for Justice in Palestine club, following campus crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests. Daillie, who is Jewish, ultimately decided it was too important to omit from her applications to schools such as the University of Wisconsin and Grinnell College in Iowa.

“Like one of my friends says: ‘I don’t want to go somewhere that doesn’t want me there,’ ” she said. “I want to go to a school that wants me for who I am.”