When the Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious admissions, the expectation — based on statistical modeling presented in court — was that the proportion of Black students at highly selective schools would go down and the proportion of Asian American students would rise.
That is what happened at many colleges and universities. But as schools have released data over the last few weeks, there have been some striking outliers.
At Yale University, for example, the share of Black students stayed the same. At Duke their percentage increased. And at Harvard, which was the target of a lawsuit charging it with discrimination against Asian students, the percentage of Asian students was unchanged, against the expectations of the plaintiffs.
The results have confused experts and admissions experts. They have also raised questions about admissions practices and who will get access to the nation’s most elite campuses in the future.
Black students have been most affected, their numbers declining at most highly selective schools. Still, the declines are not as great as some colleges and universities predicted, bringing new scrutiny to what methods universities are using to achieve a diverse mix of students and whether race-based admissions were necessary in the first place.
Confounding matters is the hodgepodge of ways universities have reported the data. Some have released little detailed information. Others changed the way they add up categories of students. Some have refused to release certain numbers, like the percentage of white students. Schools have cautioned that this is only the first admissions season post-affirmative action. They are still figuring out their approach, they say, and it could change in the future.
Which schools’ demographics saw big changes?
A tracker of about 50 selective schools developed this week by the organization Education Reform Now showed that the percentage of Black enrollment is down at three-quarters of the schools, with some campuses more affected than others.
The list of schools that have experienced declines in Black enrollment ranges from prestigious smaller colleges such as Amherst College, in Massachusetts, to highly selective Ivy League schools, like Brown and Columbia.
The percentage of Black students entering Amherst this fall dropped to 3 percent from 11 percent last year.
Michael A. Elliott, Amherst’s president, sent an email to the college community on Wednesday emphasizing the potential impact of the decline and describing what the school is doing to remediate it.
“Why did our demographics change so significantly while other institutions saw different outcomes?” Dr. Elliott wrote, adding that the question has “no easy answers.”
But he wrote that Amherst, long known for its efforts to recruit diverse students, has hired a new director of strategic access to devise new admissions strategies, is redesigning its admissions materials and marketing, and is starting new recruitment efforts, including joining a coalition of 31 institutions called STARS (Small Town and Rural Students) to increase rural recruitment.
At Brown University, the share of Black students dropped to 9 percent from 15 percent. Brown also had a fairly sharp decline in Hispanic first-year students, to 10 percent from 14 percent.
At Columbia University, the share of Asian students increased to 39 percent from 30 percent, while the share of Black students dropped to 12 percent from 20 percent.
The tracker developed by Education Reform Now compared this year’s data to an average of the past two years. James Murphy, the director of career pathways and postsecondary policy for the nonprofit group, cautioned that the data released by schools is, in some cases, not parallel, using different methods to count students.
Why was the data all over the place?
Even as some schools saw big changes, others saw little change, or the numbers went in the opposite direction than was expected. The numbers out of different institutions also contrasted with past years, when admission rates for various races and ethnicities did not change much either within or across schools, a pattern that the plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, cited as suspicious in the Harvard trial.
In a race-neutral system, the numbers could be expected to be more random.
And there are other wild cards in the mix. One is that more students declined to state their race on their applications. At Tufts, non-responders rose to 6.7 percent from 3.3 percent. At Harvard, they rose to 8 percent from 4 percent. At Duke, they rose to 11 from 5 percent, and at Brown to 7 from 4 percent.
Universities have also been quite opaque, offering little to no analysis of what their admissions offices think the numbers mean. The University of Pennsylvania released a percentage of students of color, but did not break it down by more precise categories of race and ethnicity.
Harvard recalculated its 2023 percentages to reflect only those students who had chosen to disclose their racial or ethnic identity, rather than all students, and compared those numbers to the same metric in 2024. As a result, the percentage of Black students in last year’s first-year class appeared higher, rising to 18 percent from about 14 percent. Harvard also declined to state the percentage of white students, consistent with past practice.
There were conflicting methodologies between universities. Some universities reported the data according to federal guidelines, in which every student counts once. Others used a “self-reporting” system, in which students who checked more than one race or ethnicity could be counted in more than one racial or ethnic category, potentially increasing the percentages of Black of Hispanic students.
Are the new numbers reflecting reality?
Black students make up about 3 percent of the top tenth of high school students academically, according to data collected by Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long studied the effects of racial preferences and who is a critic of race-based admissions.
With preferences based on factors like parental income, wealth and level of education, as well as neighborhood poverty and school quality, and strong outreach, the share of Black students who qualify for admission to top schools grows to 5 percent, Mr. Sander said.
He believes some of the declines in Black students’ numbers — to 5 percent from 15 percent at M.I.T., or to 3 percent from 11 percent at Amherst — have brought those schools to where they should be.
The very top schools might be able to get numbers up to 9 percent using clues about race in the personal essay, he said. But numbers that stay above that “are almost certainly signs of cheating,” he said.
Many of the schools are reporting stagnation or decline in Asian American enrollment. He attributes that to the increase in students not reporting their race or ethnicity, which he suspects is happening mostly among Asian Americans. “Asian Americans know they’re the target,” he said.
He also cautioned that it is harder to interpret the data from schools that are not highly selective. “Once you get outside the top 20 schools, it gets really confusing trying to figure out what’s going on,” Mr. Sander said. “But I feel pretty confident that at the very top what we’re seeing is either compliance or noncompliance.”
What will it all mean for the diversity on campuses?
The proportion of Black first-year students enrolled at Harvard this fall has declined to 14 percent from 18 percent last year — a drop that the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, an organization of 2,400 alumni, students, faculty and staff that has supported affirmative action, described as “huge.”
“Any drop in an already small number can dramatically impact the campus environment for students of color, and students are already reporting negative effects,” the group said.
But some experts put a positive spin on the new data. It shows a way forward for diversity under the new regimen, argued Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
“There were predictions that the Black population could fall to 2 percent at some universities and 6 percent at Harvard, and that did not happen,” Mr. Kahlenberg said. “I want there to be racial diversity on campus. I think it showed it was possible to achieve that without racial preferences.”
Schools like Amherst, Harvard and Yale said they had expanded their recruitment efforts in small towns and rural areas and to students from low-income families, and intended to do more.
Critics of race-conscious admissions have said they are prepared to litigate if they believe that schools are violating the rules.
Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, said, “Many observers fear that a deluge of litigation could soon rain down on some of the nation’s premier universities.”
One area for litigation could be the personal essay. The court allows students to state their race in their essays, if it was germane to some life experience. Mr. Kahlenberg said that it could become problematic if essays are used as a way to elevate the applications of only certain groups. If, for example, equal consideration were not given to Asian American students who had overcome discrimination or to white students who had overcome poverty.
One lesson learned from states like Michigan and California, which had already banned affirmative action, is that the data can change over time. The University of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles saw their percentage of Black students plummet at the outset, and then gradually rise again.
The post Affirmative Action Was Banned. What Happened Next Was Confusing. appeared first on New York Times.
