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What raises questions is the wide variation in how the ruling has affected universities, even within the same tier of selectivity. While some elite universities saw large drops in their Black and Hispanic enrollment — exactly what many predicted would happen — others saw no change, or even increases, in those populations. Further clouding the issue, universities have reported their demographic data in inconsistent ways, and some haven’t reported numbers at all. This pattern of varied results and opaque reporting raises the question: Are some elite universities finding ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling? Some observers have argued that they clearly are, while others suggest they are not. Still others caution that it is too early to tell.
At face value, the more highly ranked a school is, the more suspicious it is to see no change in its underrepresented-minority (URM) enrollment. This is because racial preferences — at least at the undergraduate level — primarily affect where students attend college, not whether they go to college at all. Hence, schools outside of the very top tier should expect diversity declines from their own removal of affirmative action to be partially, if not fully, offset as a result of fewer minority students being admitted to the schools ranked above them. Minority students shut out of Harvard and MIT, the theory goes, would be admitted to schools like Emory or Georgetown, and so on down the line. This redistribution effect should help maintain diversity at schools below the very top, and far enough down the selectivity ladder, could even increase it.
However, several warning signs suggest some universities may not be fully complying with the court’s ruling. First, many highly ranked universities previously argued in amicus briefs that their diversity goals could not be achieved without explicitly considering race. Yet these same institutions now claim to have maintained their desired diversity levels without any explanation beyond saying that they took a harder look at their files. Second, on average, schools with the smallest drops in URM enrollment also show the smallest increases in socioeconomic-diversity measures like first-generation status and Pell Grant eligibility. This pattern runs contrary to evidence that upweighting socioeconomic factors is one of the most effective race-neutral ways to maintain racial diversity. Such discrepancies lead longtime observers of college admissions to question whether these institutions have truly abandoned race-conscious admissions or are merely obscuring their continued use.
There would seem to be only two possibilities to explain the maintained diversity results seen by Princeton and a few other elite institutions. First, they could be taking applicants’ race into account directly, and thus breaking the law. Second, they could have found ways of identifying race by proxy — a strategy that is legally ambiguous at best. A way of operationalizing the latter would be to put large weight on, for example, a high-school prize for which only Black students are eligible. An organization that does not accept government funds could offer such a prize, providing universities who do receive government funding a way of screening for race without actively doing it themselves.
Some of the maintained diversity could be explained as a second-order effect: As MIT accepts fewer URM students, this leaves more eligible URM students for Princeton to admit. But this effect shouldn’t outweigh the first-order impact of removing racial preferences at top institutions like Princeton, especially given the lack of increased emphasis on socioeconomic factors. The pattern is even more striking at Bowdoin College, in Maine, which reported gains in URM enrollment while simultaneously showing a five-percentage-point drop in first-generation enrollment.
The variation in results across schools likely stems from different strategic responses to uncertainty in the post-SFFA landscape. In this first admissions cycle after the ruling, schools have had to make admissions decisions without knowing how their peer institutions would respond to the change. If University A expected others to respond aggressively — legally or otherwise — then that school would need to be especially aggressive itself to maintain its URM enrollment. And the more aggressively other schools behave, the less likely legal attention would focus on University A. Institutions like Princeton that saw little to no change in their URM population may have expected a more aggressive response by their competitors, while schools like MIT may have expected their peer institutions to have a stricter interpretation of the law than what actually occurred.
The revelation of peers’ strategies is likely to drive convergence in admissions outcomes in the upcoming admissions cycle. Schools like MIT, having already demonstrated substantial changes in their admissions patterns, have established a defensible baseline for compliance. Meanwhile, institutions reporting suspiciously stable or improved diversity metrics face increasing pressure to demonstrate genuinely race-neutral admissions processes. Princeton, Yale, and Duke will likely find it difficult to maintain their current demographic patterns in subsequent admissions cycles without raising red flags for potential enforcement action.
Enforcement decisions also will also affect universities’ willingness to comply with SFFA moving forward. Under the Biden administration, enforcement would likely only come from additional lawsuits brought by organizations such as SFFA. But Trump’s recent election suggests increased scrutiny ahead. Note that the Department of Justice supported SFFA in the Harvard case in the lower courts when Trump was president, but worked against SFFA at the Supreme Court when Biden was president. Those currently pushing the boundaries of compliance may find themselves exposed to investigation and potential penalties under a different administration with different priorities.
The current situation is further complicated by inconsistent and often opaque reporting of racial demographics. While Princeton deserves credit for providing clear, mathematically coherent statistics that sum to 100 percent and are consistent with federal reporting mandates, many institutions have muddied the waters with overlapping categories, selective reporting of certain groups, or complete omission of key demographic data. This is not the way to rebuild trust.
To rebuild trust in higher education — particularly among skeptical conservatives — universities must embrace transparency in their admissions data. This means standardized and real-time reporting of demographic categories, clear documentation of methodological changes, and consistent disclosure of socioeconomic indicators alongside racial demographics. Competition has historically incentivized colleges and universities to withhold or obscure their admissions data for strategic advantage. This culture of opacity must give way to one of open collaboration if elite academic institutions hope to regain public confidence in the fairness and legality of their admissions practices.