A drop in the share of Black first-year students at two elite colleges this school year has provided an early sign that the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action could have an impact on racial diversity, at least at some of the nation’s more selective schools.
At Amherst College, the share of Black students decreased sharply — by eight percentage points — for this year’s entering class, according to data released on Thursday. It decreased more moderately at Tufts University, according to that school’s data. At the University of Virginia, which released its data on Friday, the percentage of Black students also dipped, but only slightly.
The new evidence comes after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a sharp drop in Black enrollment, by 10 percentage points, last week.
Amherst’s data showed that the percentage of white students enrolling rose sharply, while the percentage of Asian American students rose slightly.
The data contributed to an emerging, if still murky, picture about how last year’s Supreme Court decision barring race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities across the country could change higher education. Many of the highly selective universities that used affirmative action have yet to release numbers for the incoming class.
But the ruling has upended more than four decades of admissions practices, and supporters of affirmative action have warned it would have an immediate negative impact on diversity, with ripple effects throughout society. (The new numbers reflect enrollment rather than admissions because the Supreme Court prohibited admissions officers from looking at the race of applicants unless it came up organically, as part of a college essay, for instance.)
This week, Amherst’s admissions dean, Matthew L. McGann, was frank in addressing the effects of the court’s ruling in online missives to the class of 2028 and the broader Amherst community.
“As a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision, the incoming class is not as racially diverse as recent classes have been,” he said. “Other institutions have seen a similar impact, and all colleges and universities are evaluating the outcomes of this first admission cycle under the new legal standard.”
The percentage of Black students entering Amherst this fall dropped to 3 percent from 11 percent last year, and at Tufts, it dropped to 4.7 percent from 7.3 percent. Black students at the University of Virginia declined to 7 percent of the entering class compared to 7.9 percent last year.
White students entering Amherst rose to 39 percent of the class from 33 percent, and those entering Tufts went up to 49.3 percent from 46.8 percent. The percentage of Asian American students rose slightly to 20 percent from 18 percent at Amherst and slipped to 19.7 percent from 20.3 percent at Tufts.
The percentage of Hispanic students dropped to 8 percent from 12 percent at Amherst, and there was a similar decline at M.I.T. But confounding the picture, the share of Hispanic students actually rose slightly at Tufts and the University of Virginia. And at U.Va., the percentage of white and Asian students declined very slightly.
One expert in admissions data, Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the effect of the court decision on Hispanic students could be expected to be less than on Black students. He said admissions offices have historically given less of a preference to Hispanic students, and noted that the Hispanic college-age population has grown rapidly relative to white students.
M.I.T.’s data showed a sharp drop in the percentage of Black students, to 5 percent of incoming students from 15 percent, and a sharp rise in Asian American students, to 47 percent from 40 percent.
Critics of affirmative action have argued that the drop in racial diversity will be temporary, as universities look for ways to achieve diversity that correlate with race, such as socioeconomic status.
At U.Va., a public institution, the state had created partnerships with public schools in low-income communities statewide as part of a recruitment effort.
Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on the Supreme Court’s rulings on education, called the Virginia program a potential model.
“It is a fine example of how universities can be creative, consistent with the Constitution, to avoid the plummeting enrollment of Black students that some universities have already witnessed,” he said.
Still, he noted that many college admissions offices are struggling with how to respond without running afoul of the court’s ruling. In the absence of innovation, Mr. Driver said, “We stand on the cusp of what I fear will become a lost generation of Black students at many leading colleges.”
One small selective college, Emory University, reported only slight changes in the racial makeup of this year’s freshman class. The percentage of Black and Hispanic students entering this fall dipped slightly, but so did the percentage of white students. The percentage of students who are Asian or whose race was not known increased.
The new numbers were particularly striking at Amherst because it is known for its outreach to Black students. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 2022 that Amherst had topped its list of high-ranked liberal arts colleges enrolling the highest percentage of Black first-year students for 13 out of 28 years.
Amherst and fellow liberal arts colleges warned of dire consequences from the Supreme Court ruling in a court brief filed last year. In the brief, the school said a race-blind admissions policy would reduce the percentage of Black, Hispanic and Native American students by approximately half.
Mr. McGann, the Amherst admissions dean, expressed optimism about reaching a broad range of students in the future. “This process will take time, but we are very confident that we will continue to build a community that reflects the diversity of the world around us,” he wrote.
Tufts’s dean of admissions, Joseph Duck, who goes by JT, said the difference in the numbers year to year at Tufts was partly due to a doubling in the percentage of applicants who did not report their race or ethnicity. He cautioned against parsing the data too closely. “There are different ways to present the data, as we are seeing as colleges and universities begin to report their results,” he said.
“As for why certain groups went up or down, we’re continuing to examine the data,” he said.
Data for two institutions — Harvard and the University of North Carolina — have yet to be released. Their admissions practices were the subject of lawsuits by Students for Fair Admissions, an anti-affirmative action group, which led to the Supreme Court’s ruling in June of last year. The racial makeup of their freshman classes may offer the most significant indicator of the impact of the affirmative action ban.
The lawsuit against Harvard focused on Asian American students, arguing that the university had penalized them by holding them to a higher standard in an effort at racial balancing.
The numbers so far may present a skewed picture because they come from highly selective schools, according to Mr. Sander, who has studied the impact of affirmative action bans.
Mr. Sander predicted that the most elite institutions are likely to feel the impact of the affirmative action ban more than schools that are less selective. He predicted schools that provided a solid education but relied less or not at all on affirmative action would see an increase in Black enrollment.
“The students not admitted to the M.I.T.’s or Amherst’s of higher education are well-qualified to be admitted without a preference to other very solid schools,” Mr. Sander said.
Whatever someone thought of the Supreme Court decision, Mr. Sander added, it is part of what he called “a natural experiment” on the end of race-conscious admissions, with important implications for policymakers.
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