They will hear it in the session that begins next October, with a decision likely by June 2023.
Considering the current makeup of the court, and if what happened at the UC’s immediately after the UC system dropped race as a consideration in admissions is any indication, this could have a significant impact on URM admissions to highly selective colleges. This could be seen possibly as early as the admissions cycle for the high school graduating class of '24, since the decision will be released before the application process begins in the summer and fall of '23 for entry in September '24.
Assuming that the Supreme Court bans consideration of race, which I believe is likely to be the outcome, highly selective public colleges might move to the model of automatically accepting the top 5% of GPA for every high school in the state to fill some large percentage of the seats, in order to maintain some balance of URM representation in the class without specifically considering race, and then have another portion of the spots for open competition for all, including in-state <top 5% of class, OOS, and international students.
I don’t know what the highly selective private colleges might do. Even if they give preference according to economic status (which can be very difficult to accurately determine, given the large off-the-books economy in the US), there are so many very high achieving first generation immigrant kids whose families are not well off, along with non-first gen kids who come from poor families who are not URM yet have very high application stats. Even going test-blind for the SAT/ACT will not be enough to cloak the difference between a student with a very high GPA plus National Merit, plus a string of 5’s on AP exams, plus very high level academic awards and ECs, and a student with a very high GPA from a high school with low academic standards, who lacks those indicators of high achievement.
We could be seeing a very different field for college applications 18 months from now. If I were a high-achieving URM applicant or the parent of one, who is eyeing admission to highly selective private colleges, and is a member of the high school class of '2024, I would be seriously considering the possibility of accelerating high school in order to apply for admission in the fall of 2023, instead of fall of 2024. Usually all it takes is planning to double up on English in junior year, since most high achievers will have met all the other requirements in math, history, science, and foreign language by the end of junior year.
This is not about who deserves or doesn’t deserve admission to the top colleges in the country. This is about planning for the very likely reality that the field for college admissions is very likely about to change significantly, probably 18 months from now.