After the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions last year, experts predicted two consequences: The number of Black students on campus at selective schools would drop, and the number of Asian American students would rise.
They were half right, at least according to early data. As schools begin to release demographic information for the first class admitted after the landmark decision, most elite universities, including Harvard University, Amherst College and the University of Virginia, are reporting lower enrollment for Black students — but only inconsistent gains for Asian Americans.
Out of 26 schools surveyed by Bloomberg, 19 reported a decrease in Black enrollment in this year’s incoming class, some by as much as 10 percentage points; at the remaining seven schools, the share of Black students was unchanged or rose by one percentage point compared with last year.
For Asian American students, though, there was no clear trend. Twelve schools reported an increase in Asian American students in the class of 2028, while 12 reported a decrease; the other two schools were unchanged. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University, the share of Asian American students rose sharply; at Duke University, Yale University and Bowdoin College, it fell significantly.
It will take better data and more time to understand the true impacts of the ruling that upended the admissions process at the world’s most competitive institutions. But the initial reports have raised new questions for parents, students, school officials and college counselors. Selective colleges are again facing calls to be more transparent about admissions practices and to standardize how they report demographic data to the public.
At Washington University in St. Louis, where both Black and Asian American enrollment fell this year, the president of the school’s Association of Black Students, Da’juantay Wynter, decried the shift.
“Affirmative action benefited everyone, and with it gone, it’s hurting everyone,” he said. “Wash U is a place that will produce the next lawyers, doctors and leaders, and everyone is better informed by the experiences that come from a diverse student body.”
Meanwhile, Students for Fair Admissions, which brought the original lawsuit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is threatening a new round of legal action, this time targeting schools where Asian American enrollment dropped. The group, founded by former stock broker and conservative activist Edward Blum, claims “it is not possible for these schools to obtain the racial outcomes for the class of 2028 that they have reported without using racial proxies that the Supreme Court forbids.”
In statements to Bloomberg News, Duke, Princeton and Yale said they complied with the law. Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, said that this year application reviewers did not have access to self-identified race or ethnicity data for applicants, and all individuals involved in the selection process received new training to comply with the ruling.
“The Harvard lawsuit in particular claimed that there was anti-Asian American discrimination happening and that the end of race-conscious admissions would change that,” said Natasha Warikoo, a sociology professor at Tufts University. To see a more consistent decline for African Americans students, she added, is “extremely troubling.”
Colleges and universities report student demographics to the US Department of Education, but publication of those official tallies typically takes years. In the meantime, schools often volunteer preliminary figures using definitions and methodologies that vary from the federal requirements.
University of Pennsylvania, for example, said that “students of color” make up more than half of this year’s incoming class, with “students of races and ethnicities historically underrepresented in higher education” comprising 23% — down two percentage points from last year. Some schools declined to report what fraction of the incoming class is White; given that students can also choose more than one race, it’s a figure that’s impossible to reverse engineer. (On the federal reports, schools assign each student to one category.)
Other schools changed the math. Harvard reported this year’s numbers — 14% Black, 37% Asian, and 16% Hispanic — as a share of domestic students who reported their race, rather than as a fraction of all first-year students, as it’s done in years past.
“Our community is strongest when we bring together students from different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs,” Harvard Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons said in a statement.
Students also seem increasingly unwilling to identify themselves on applications. At most schools, a greater number of students declined to indicate their race, further muddying the picture.
Chien Kwok, whose son is a junior at Manhattan’s top-ranked Stuyvesant High School, said the mixed results for Asian American students weren’t surprising. He’d like colleges to be more transparent about their admissions data, he said, but elite schools nonetheless feel more accessible.
“Before a school like MIT was a longshot of a longshot,” he said. “Now it’s just a longshot.”
Considering race in admissions has long stirred controversy. Schools have argued that it helps them build diverse student bodies. Detractors say the policies unfairly penalize White and Asian American students. Roughly half of American adults think race and ethnicity shouldn’t factor into admissions decisions at selective colleges, compared with one-third that do, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Supreme Court’s decision last year sent admissions officers into a tizzy, as they tried to find new ways to assemble an incoming class. Some amped up outreach to high school students from rural and low-income areas. Others sought to enroll more first-generation college students.
The University of Virginia, for example, removed checkboxes for students to identify their race and ethnicity and added essay questions inviting students to describe their backgrounds, broadly construed, a workaround of sorts explicitly approved by the Supreme Court. The school also removed a box asking applicants if they’re related to UVA alumni, so-called legacy status that’s often conferred an advantage. In this year’s incoming class, shares of Black and White students barely budged, with a slight decrease for Asian American students and a small increase for Hispanic students.
One-fifth of the 4,000 incoming students are the first in their families to attend college, making up “perhaps the most socioeconomically diverse class” in the school’s recent history, said Stephen Farmer, the vice provost for enrollment at UVA.
“There’s never going to be perfect proxies” for race, said James Murphy, deputy director of higher education policy at Education Reform Now, a non-partisan think tank. “If you want to enroll students of color, the best way to do that is to enroll students of color.”
So far this year, only a handful of institutions, including Tulane University, the California Institute of Technology, Bowdoin and Williams College, reported any increase in the share of African American students in their first-year classes.
Historic trends suggest the end of race-based preferences has the most severe consequences for Black student enrollment at competitive schools. After California banned affirmative action at state universities in the late 1990s, enrollees from underrepresented minority groups dropped by 50% or more at the system’s most selective campuses.
Universities have adopted race-neutral alternatives, the president and chancellors said in a brief to the Supreme Court, including outreach programs aimed at students from low-income families and efforts, at a cost to the system of more than $500 million.
Allen Koh, CEO of college counseling firm Cardinal Education, said he doesn’t encourage his Asian clients to disclose their race in their applications. For now, he said, that advice won’t change.
“A lot of these lawsuits were really more about moral principle, rather than having any sort of practical effect,” he said. “People who really understand admissions never thought anything was actually going to change for Asian American students.”
To contact the authors of this story:
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Craig Giammona
© 2024 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Learn more about Bloomberg Law or Log In to keep reading:
Learn About Bloomberg Law
AI-powered legal analytics, workflow tools and premium legal & business news.
Already a subscriber?
Log in to keep reading or access research tools.