As American academia waits for a Supreme Court ruling that could strike down race-conscious admissions, colleges and universities are already scrambling to make plans for how to navigate a high court ban on affirmative action.

The country’s top universities are making no secret of their preference for race-conscious admissions, which give preference to minority applicants, or at least for a diverse student body. The question is how they could legally continue to do so in the face of an adverse court ruling.

This echoes the era after Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court cast aside separate but equal schools for black schools. Rather than standing in the schoolhouse door, as Governor Wallace once did to symbolize Alabama’s hostility to integration, schools are frantically trying to find an admissions formula that would produce a diverse body of students.

They are looking at workarounds, such as focusing on socioeconomic status rather than race per se, which could allow them to continue admitting the desired number of applicants from certain minority groups. 

While many colleges and universities have been silent on specific plans they may have, many admissions officers have been saying they will continue to advance racial diversity in their student bodies, no matter what the high court says.

The lawsuits before the Supreme Court — one against Harvard University and the other against the University of North Carolina — argue that race-conscious admissions violate the 14th Amendment rights of Asian students. 

Both challenges were brought by the group Students for Fair Admissions, which argues that both Harvard and UNC have adopted practices that result in Asian students receiving lower “personal ratings” from admissions officers. 

The suit against UNC also contends that white students’ rights were violated and that they received lower personal ratings under the university’s admissions system.

Students for Fair Admissions also claims UNC’s policies violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that no person based on their race may “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

The dean of admissions at Reed College in Oregon, Milyon Trulove, said in an interview with Oregon Public Radio that race-conscious admissions “has to be a criteria that we use in order to create these classrooms that help people survive out in our world.”

Mr. Trulove says that should the High Court accept the argument that affirmative action violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, one way to get around the decision and continue to consider race in admissions is for universities to stop accepting taxpayer money, though he admits that it is not an option for most small colleges. 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a storied science, technology, engineering, and mathematics institution that boasts 97 Nobel laureates among its alumni — says there is a “great deal at stake” in the coming court decision and that it will find a way to admit a racially diverse student body. 

“MIT will follow the law,” the school’s president, Sally Kornbluth, recently insisted in a letter to the MIT community. “But in advance of the ruling, I want to articulate clearly and unambiguously my commitment to building on MIT’s decades-long efforts to welcome a student body that is both unparalleled in its academic excellence and vibrantly diverse.”

Before the case was argued at the high court, a number of prestigious universities filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that racial diversity is critical to their mission of academic excellence. “Diversity fosters a more robust spirit of free inquiry and encourages dialogue that sparks new insights,” the brief states. 

“Diversity,” it continued, “encourages students to question their own assumptions, to test received truths, and to appreciate the complexity of the modern world.” The brief was signed by, among others, Duke University, Brown University, and Dartmouth College. 

The New York Sun queried more than 30 colleges and universities across the country, some public and some private. None responded to a set of questions about their plans for new admissions policies, including whether any were prepared to defy the Supreme Court outright and continue to use race as an admissions criterion. 

Portland State University says that whatever the Supreme Court decides, it will continue with its policies of considering race in admissions, though it did not specify how it would do so. The vice president of global diversity and inclusion at PSU, Ame Lambert, told Oregon Public Radio that the “legacy of racism in this country” demands that race be considered. 

American University, situated at the nation’s capital, has given the task of advancing the student body’s racial diversity to what it calls the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. The executive director of that center, Sara Kaplan, says that American University will continue to foster racial diversity within the school’s community regardless of the high court’s decision. 

Ms. Kaplan, a professor of literature, said in an interview with an in-house university publication that American University sees the potential end of affirmative action as a catalyst for the larger movement of racial diversity in higher education. American University will “rearticulate the important role of educational institutions in fostering racial equity” no matter the Supreme Court’s decision, she said. 

The new governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, is taking active steps to protect racial diversity in higher education. On June 15 Ms. Healey announced the establishment of a 42-member executive advisory board that she said would “keep Massachusetts welcoming and inclusive of all students.”

The advisory board will continue to meet over the coming year to advance these goals, though it has not been announced whether the meetings will be public as the members will be offering legal advice to the governor and her education secretary, Patrick Tutwiler. 

“The experts joining us on this advisory council are great thinkers and key leaders at the forefront of the fight for equity for historically underrepresented students in Massachusetts, and together we will figure out the best way to continue inclusivity and representation in education,” Mr. Tutwiler said in a statement. 

One report from Stanford University found that there are non-affirmative action policies that would allow institutions of higher education to maintain racial diversity in admissions. 

The report found that consideration of social and economic status combined with specific recruiting of racial groups — traveling to majority-minority communities by admissions officers — produces “comparable levels” of racial diversity as purely race-based admissions. 

Many court observers expect the court, which has a conservative majority, to hand down a ruling barring race-conscious admissions, after decades of affirmative action narrowly surviving court challenges. During oral arguments in October, the conservative justices at times offered scathing criticism of race-conscious admissions. 

Justice Clarence Thomas, the lone black man on the court, said that the term “diversity … seems to mean everything for everyone,” and questioned the value of the practice. Justice Samuel Alito also asked the school’s lawyers what the term “underrepresented minority” actually means. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who before her nomination to the high court served on the Harvard Board of Overseers, recused herself from the Harvard case due to potential conflicts of interest.