When the Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions policies this past June in the Students for Fair Admissions case , Chief Justice Roberts wrote that “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.” He surely predicted that colleges and universities across the country would revamp their essay prompts so as to try to get around the ruling — and, indeed, many have done just that.

The most audacious new essay topic comes from Sarah Lawrence College, which quotes directly from the majority opinion and asks applicants to “describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced, or affected by the Court’s decision.”

Other prompts of note from elite institutions include these two, both required: “ Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?” (200 words) and “Tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual and how that influenced what you’d like to pursue in college at [Johns] Hopkins ” (350 words).

I’m not against provocative questions — or answers. On the contrary. So here’s a different one that educational institutions might pose to potential students: “What limits would you place on free speech at [College X]?” After all, it is blindingly obvious that campuses, which incubate the decision-makers of the next generation, are a large contributor to the country’s free speech crisis: The latest College Free Speech Rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, released earlier this month, consider only four out of 248 colleges and universities to be “good” when it comes to upholding students’ and professors’ right to speak their mind. (Harvard is “abysmal,” Hopkins is “average,” and Sarah Lawrence is unranked.)

If young people not yet schooled in campus illiberalism answered the question honestly, my suspicion is that most, regardless of political leanings, would say that there should be few if any abridgments to the freedom of speech aside from those, like defamation and child pornography, that the Supreme Court has ruled are not fully protected by the First Amendment. There are, to be sure, reasonable arguments on both the Right and the Left in favor of certain restrictions, at both public institutions and private ones, and part of the appeal of a question about free speech, at least if the answer is permitted to be more than 200 words, is that prospective students would have the opportunity to offer nuanced opinions on a vital matter of public interest.

I first began to think of alternative essay topics a few years ago, when I was put in charge of the selection committee for a new scholarship to send recent college graduates to the University of Oxford: The John and Daria Barry Scholarship , which emphasizes the pursuit of truth. My colleagues and I devised the following prompt : “Describe in no more than 1,000 words an occasion when your opinion or position was unpopular or differed from the mainstream. How did you articulate your ideas and beliefs? What did you learn from this experience of disagreement?”

Reading the best responses was always eye-opening: Well-articulated and sometimes genuinely moving vignettes of what it is like to hold a conservative view about, say, abortion or gun control in a liberal environment — and vice versa. I see no reason why the same wouldn’t be true for a similar question posed to high school seniors.

Now, prompts about free speech and heterodoxy will work only if applicants are not afraid that admissions officers will hold their answers against them. And, of course, any essay these days, whatever the subject, might be written for free by a bot such as ChatGPT or at considerable cost by a tutor employed by wealthy parents.

That’s why there is, and should be, much more to college admissions than a given essay. But the de-emphasis on proctored national tests, coupled with backdoor ways of introducing race into decisions, ought to be a source of real concern.

What I’d like to see is more rigor on two fronts. For one, it makes no sense to approve of “holistic” admissions but reject potentially valuable information, such as test scores. (A topic for another day: rather than the SAT and the ACT, I advocate Jeremy Tate’s Classical Learning Test , now accepted by the State University System of Florida.) In addition, students should be given the chance to shine through in-depth answers to truly interesting essay questions.

Joshua Katz is a senior fellow for the American Enterprise Institute.