What’s New
The incoming freshman class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s most selective institutions, will be significantly less racially diverse than in years past, according to data released on Wednesday by the college.
MIT’s dean of admissions, Stuart Schmill, attributed the decline to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which prohibited colleges that receive federal funding from considering race in admissions.
“Following the SFFA decision, we are unable to use race in the same way, and that change is reflected in the outcome for the Class of 2028. Indeed, we did not solicit race or ethnicity information from applicants this year, so we don’t have data on the applicant pool,” Schmill told MIT News. “But I have no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-matched applicants from historically underrepresented backgrounds who in the past we would have admitted — and who would have excelled.”
Less than one in six incoming MIT freshmen, or 16 percent, identify as Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander, which represents a drop of nine percentage points, or 36 percent, from previous classes.
Asian American students account for almost half, or 47 percent, of the incoming class, an increase of six percentage points over their share from 2020 to 2023. White enrollment stayed almost unchanged.
Background
MIT’s freshman classes from 2020 to 2023 were more than one-fourth Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander, according to campus officials. (According to the U.S. Department of Education, 45 percent of students in American public schools are Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander.)
Each of those groups experienced a drop in enrollment at MIT, but no group was hit harder than Black students. They make up 5 percent of the 2024 incoming class, less than half their share of a typical such class over the previous four years. The proportion of Latino freshmen slid about two percentage points.
“We expected that this would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT,” Schmill said. “That’s what has happened.”
We expected that this would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT. That’s what has happened.
MIT said it tried in years past to balance both diversity and the high academic standards required for admission — two factors it does not view as mutually exclusive.
Two-thirds of Black and Latino students attend a high school where students of color compose a supermajority (75 percent) and that doesn’t offer classes like physics, calculus, and computer science, according to the Education Department, the college pointed out. Those classes are necessary for admission to MIT.
“Many people have told me over the years that MIT ought to care only about academic excellence, not diversity. But every student we admit, from any background, is already located at the far-right end of the distribution of academic excellence,” Schmill told MIT News. “Unfortunately, there remains persistent and profound racial inequality in American K-12 education. … This means that carrying the diversity of American public schools forward into higher ed is difficult from the word ‘go.’”
What’s Next
Colleges that want more diverse student bodies will face an almost insurmountable challenge in trying to address racial disparities without considering race in admissions, according to Dominique J. Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware.
“It’s very challenging without court reform to correct a lot of these trends,” Baker said.
MIT and other selective colleges have also decided to not look at the demographic makeup of their applicant pool. Without such data, colleges can’t tell if fewer Black or Latino students applied, or if admitted minority students enrolled at another campus, according to Baker. She believes that by choosing to not collect and examine applicant data, those colleges are only compounding the damage done by the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative-action policies in admissions. Colleges decided not to collect data based on what Baker said was a “conservative” reading of the SFFA ruling, which said only that such demographic information could not be used to “influence admissions decisions.”
“A majority of policies that are being developed now are coming from a place of fear,” Baker said. “And the people it ultimately harms are the students.”
In the end, she said, this is not an MIT story but a story about how higher education will shift in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision.
“This is a sign to me of how colleges and universities engage in racial justice and social justice.”
