If you had been hoping for a quick and clean conclusion to the end of the race-conscious admissions era, well, too bad. That’s just not how this will work.
Many observers have been eager to see the results of the first college-admissions cycle since the U.S. Supreme Court effectively banned the consideration of an applicant’s race in June 2023. What does the racial and ethnic composition of freshman classes look like at the nation’s most selective colleges this fall? A partial answer is emerging now that dozens of prominent institutions have, in some form or another, released their data.
It’s a mixed bag of results. The proportion of first-year students from underrepresented minority groups — especially Black students — declined at most of the big-name colleges that previously considered race, just as many experts had expected. But the declines were greater at some institutions than others. Oh, and hold the phone, folks: Some subgroups of underrepresented students decreased in size at many big-name colleges, while other institutions saw increases. It’s important to keep that variance in mind.
What do these outcomes really tell us about the effects of the court’s decision? It’s a difficult question to answer at this early stage. After all, the past year was an especially tumultuous one for colleges, thanks in part to the federal-aid crisis. What the Supreme Court’s justices decided last summer is hardly the only variable that shaped enrollment outcomes.
Also, it’s early. Many colleges in the public eye had been relying on race-conscious admissions in pursuit of diversity goals for several decades; they had to stop using that tool just 15 months ago. For some admissions leaders, it feels more like 15 minutes. And their adjustments have just begun. As tempting as it is to grasp onto a big, sweeping conclusion about what the lasting impact of the court’s decision will be for all institutions, doing so would be premature.
But let’s set those caveats aside for a moment and look at some data, starting with the two institutions whose race-conscious admissions practices Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) successfully challenged in court. At Harvard College, 14 percent of freshmen identify as Black, down from 18 percent last year, and 16 percent identify as Latino, up from 14 percent.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 7.8 percent of freshmen are Black, down from 10.5 percent, while 10.1 percent are Latino, down just slightly from 10.8 percent. And 25.8 percent of incoming students are Asian American, up from 24.8 percent.
Some highly selective colleges reported striking demographic shifts. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 16 percent of freshmen identify as Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander, a drop of nine percentage points — or 36 percent — from the previous year. Forty-seven percent are Asian American students, an increase of six percentage points. And white enrollment stayed about the same as last year.
At Amherst College, 3 percent of freshmen are Black, down from 11 percent last year, and 8 percent are Latino, down from 12 percent. Columbia University welcomed a first-year class in which 12 percent of students are Black; last fall, 20 percent were. Brown University saw the proportion of Black students decline to 9 percent, from 15 percent last fall; the share of Latino students fell to 10 percent, from 14 percent.
It would seem, then, that prohibiting the nation’s colleges from considering an applicant’s race and ethnicity has had an immediate impact on campuses. Anyone who knows their higher-ed history probably remembers that when states have banned public universities from using race in admissions, as California became the first to do way back in 1996, enrollments of underrepresented minority students declined, especially at the most selective institutions.
But wait a second. At Duke University this fall, the proportion of Black and Latino freshmen held steady. The same was true at Yale University, where, as it turned out, the proportion of Asian American freshmen declined. The University of Virginia also saw a small decline in Asian American students, a slight drop in Black students, and an increase in Latino students.
And at Harvard, Asian American students account for 37 percent of the incoming class, the same as last year, a result that perhaps surprised SFFA and its supporters, who surely expected that number to rise. Though the proportion of Asian American students increased at some institutions, including M.I.T., Brown, and UNC-Chapel Hill, it declined at others, such as Duke, Princeton, and Yale.
But guess what? All of the numbers above might shift around next year and then again the year after that.
It’s only natural to try and make sense out of the first round of demographic data in the race-neutral admissions era. Yet that’s more easily said than done. A recent article in The New York Times stated that the variance in enrollment outcomes had “confused experts and admissions officials.” But is that right?
Several enrollment experts told The Chronicle they were neither confused nor surprised by the data they’ve seen. “I don’t think you could find anyone in the profession who is actually surprised by the numbers, or who would be surprised by the variance,” said Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). “In any given year, those numbers could go up or down. What I am surprised by is that more people aren’t thinking about how complex and nuanced all of this is. It’s not just one variable that determines the composition of a class; it’s an extraordinary number of variables. And so we shouldn’t be creating a national narrative right now.”
Pérez, who previously led the enrollment office at Trinity College, in Connecticut, isn’t underplaying the potential long-term impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on higher education. He worries that many colleges might become — and remain — less racially diverse as a result. But one year’s worth of data, he said, simply can’t deliver the last word on the matter.
Jonathan Burdick, a longtime admissions leader and a former vice provost for enrollment at Cornell University, has similar thoughts. “These numbers have always been volatile, because the percentages and the actual raw numbers at most of these places are pretty small,” he said. “So just a few students, one way or another, can really change a percentage. These numbers reflect some realities, but in a one-year experience that’s highly volatile, I don’t think they predict anything about the future, or even a trend for one institution.”
Burdick suspects that at least some of the variance among colleges can be explained by the differing strategic approaches they took to maintaining diversity in the wake of the court’s decision. “Some places were pretty prepared and started doing some things a couple years ago to try and mitigate this,” he said. “But some places were caught pretty flat-footed and didn’t really prepare as well as they might have.”
Perhaps it’s tempting to think of the post-SFFA era in terms of a simple equation: If you take away X, then Y happens. But it helps to remember that not all colleges are the same, and that their varying admissions policies, practices, and priorities continue to play a large role in shaping the racial and socioeconomic diversity of their incoming classes. As profound as the Supreme Court’s decision was, colleges, Burdick says, have many “levers.”
There’s the recruitment lever. To what extent did a given college overhaul its outreach strategies after the court’s decision? Did it visit more low-income high schools? Pull back from affluent suburban high schools? Did it create or expand partnerships with national and community-based organizations that serve Black and Latino students? The answers might matter.
There’s the admissions lever. Did a particular college feel comfortable giving any weight to information applicants might have shared about their racial identity and experiences in their essays — or not?
And then there’s the financial-aid lever. Did College X revamp its array of financial-aid strategies in hopes of enrolling a more socioeconomically and racially diverse class more substantially than College Y did?
“If you’re comparing two colleges side by side that look, to the outside world, a lot like the same place, but had very different results,” Burdick said, “then it’s probably some combination of those levers going one way at one college, and the other way at the other.”
This year’s outcomes might prompt a college to rethink one or more strategies going forward. “There’s likely to be a reaction at a college that’s posting either very poor numbers or very good numbers,” Burdick said. “I think the desire to be more diverse is universal. Colleges will regroup and figure out how to do what they want to do better. They’ll reinforce what they think worked well, and leave other things behind.”
In a moment when admissions numbers might seem to speak loudly, enrollment leaders at many highly selective colleges are saying almost nothing. Some have been quoted in their institution’s news releases and blog posts, but most are not talking with journalists on the record about this fall’s numbers. After all, they know that their colleges remain under threat of further lawsuits from SFFA, which has vowed to monitor admissions outcomes at 100 colleges to ensure that they’re complying with the Supreme Court’s decision.
On Tuesday, SFFA said it sent letters to the general counsels at Duke, Princeton, and Yale stating that it was “deeply concerned that you are not complying” with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard case. The letters, which were signed by Edward Blum, SFFA’s president, questioned why the proportion of Asian American students in each college’s incoming class had declined this fall. The letters ask the respective institutions to provide details about how their admissions policies might have changed since last summer: “Without that information, SFFA will conclude that you are circumventing the Supreme Court’s decision. SFFA is prepared to enforce Harvard against you through litigation. You are now on notice.”
Pérez, at NACAC, recalled speaking with an admissions dean a while back who described the bind enrollment officials now find themselves in: “They said, ‘If people see in this year’s data that our class is more diverse, then we’ll probably get sued, and if those numbers have dropped, we’ll be obliterated by our internal constituents.’ And so, there is no winning.”
In this environment, perhaps it’s not surprising that some high-profile institutions haven’t released their admissions data yet. And it’s fair to guess that some almost certainly won’t publicize it at all. “I think some colleges are just going to sit on it until this recruiting and application cycle is over,” Burdick says. “They don’t want to have bad news going out that their campus is suddenly a little less friendly and welcoming to Black or brown students.”
Moreover, some institutions are skimping on specifics. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, announced that 57 percent of the students in its incoming class identify as students of color — and 23 percent are from “races and ethnicities historically underrepresented in higher education.” If you want more precise numbers, you just might have to wait: The data colleges submit to the Common Data Set won’t be publicly available for months yet, and the U.S. Department of Education won’t release demographic data on this year’s incoming classes until the fall of 2025. Meanwhile, Harvard once again isn’t reporting the number of white students in its freshman class.
Further complicating everything: Not all institutions are describing their data in the same way, which can make apples-to-apples comparisons iffy. Some colleges have shared disaggregated numbers on race and ethnicity; others haven’t. Some institutions have presented their percentages the same way that they report it to the federal government, which counts each student once; others use self-reported data that allows multiracial students to be counted in more than one demographic group.
Also, some colleges have seen an increase in students who don’t disclose their race.
To help sort through this mishmash, Education Reform Now, a nonprofit advocacy group, created a tracker that compares just-released enrollment percentages with an average of the percentages for the previous two years. In a recent blog post, James Murphy, the organization’s director of career pathways and postsecondary policy, cautioned that while the numbers might be useful, they don’t tell you everything — including why a particular set of changes occurred.
“We have little data on who applied to these colleges and who was admitted,” Murphy writes. “The tables do not show us anything about what policies and practices changed and what stayed the same at these institutions, whether it be recruiting, financial aid, yield strategy, or evolving missions. It is entirely possible that an institution that saw significant changes did so in spite of their efforts, not because of them, or that the changes would have been even more extreme if they had stayed with the status quo.”
Amid the counting and comparing that’s happening right now, let’s not forget that there are humans behind these numbers — and that there’s a deeply felt impact when those numbers surface. In a recent column published in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, Dalevyon L.J. Knight, a Black sophomore at the university, said the data held “a palpable weight.” Though some observers see a 4-percentage-point decline as small, he wrote, “for many Harvard students like myself, the stakes could not be higher.”
The story about the aftermath of ending race-conscious admissions is already a messy one. And for better or worse, the story is just beginning.
