As universities have released demographic information about their new freshman classes — the first cohort affected by last year’s Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action — advocates for colorblindness are crying foul.
Though some schools have reported substantial demographic changes — including reduced Black and Hispanic representation and increased Asian American representation — not all schools have seen much change in these directions, if any. Yale, Princeton and Duke, for example, reported declines in Asian American enrollment; all three also reportedly kept Black and Hispanic enrollment near the same levels as the prior admissions cycle.
Affirmative action’s defenders long framed the policy as a crucial diversity tool, while its critics argued that it often harmed Asian American students. If it turns out that not much has changed at certain schools, critics are wondering, are those schools failing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling?
Last month, Students for Fair Admissions, a legal group founded in 2014 to challenge affirmative action in schools (and the plaintiff organization in the key Supreme Court cases), raised the stakes: It sent letters to Yale, Princeton and Duke, accusing them of circumventing the court’s decision and threatening litigation. The letters were surely a warning shot to other schools, too.
But these patterns in admissions data are not the smoking gun that critics suggest. They do not necessarily imply failure to comply with the court’s decision. Indeed, it is difficult to draw any conclusion from them at all. There are at least three perfectly legal and very plausible explanations for why schools’ racial composition might not change the way critics of affirmative action expected — and, apparently, wanted.
The first possible reason is that schools do not admit students in a vacuum. They compete for them. Why did fewer Asian American students enroll this year at Yale, Duke and Princeton? Perhaps they went to other elite schools instead (such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which saw a rise in Asian American enrollment). On balance, taking the higher-education landscape as a whole, the elimination of affirmative action probably will reduce racial diversity at elite schools. But at individual schools, in a competitive admissions marketplace, we should expect widely varied and hard-to-predict effects.
The second plausible explanation for the schools’ demographics has to do with the statistics themselves: Duke and Princeton had a large rise in the number of students declining to identify themselves by race. (Yale does not report this figure.) If that rise was concentrated among Asian American students, it could explain the apparent drop-off in their numbers.
I don’t know about these three schools specifically, but there’s evidence that this phenomenon is occurring more generally. This year I commissioned a survey of recent college applicants (from the cycles before and after the affirmative-action ban), focused on teasing out changes in the race-related information they gave schools. Among Asian American applicants, there was a statistically significant 13-point drop in the share who reported identifying their race via application check boxes, according to my ongoing analysis of the survey. No other groups showed a statistically significant change.
The third possible reason the critics’ suspicion is unfounded is the most important: It is perfectly lawful for universities to seek to preserve racial diversity. Even if it turns out that colleges are deliberately seeking to keep Black and Hispanic students well represented, this would not in itself raise a legal problem. (It would be a problem if they were specifically seeking to exclude Asian American students.)
The Supreme Court didn’t bar colleges from promoting racial diversity. It barred a particular means of doing so: affirmative action. When admissions committees evaluate individual applicants, they may no longer give weight to an individual’s race, but many race-neutral policies also affect racial diversity, and those policies remain lawful. For example, since socioeconomic status is racially correlated, giving an admissions boost to poor applicants or eliminating legacy preferences can improve racial diversity. So can other policies, like geographic preferences or changes to standardized testing requirements or athletic recruiting.
If schools like Yale, Duke and Princeton are using such policies to ensure racial diversity, that wouldn’t run afoul of the Supreme Court’s decision. The court never suggested that aiming for racial diversity was unconstitutional — to the contrary, it described many efforts to do so as “commendable” and “worthy.” The court even said that colleges do not have to be entirely blind to an applicant’s race, so long as the way they consider it is tied to the individual’s qualifications, rather than simply group membership. (Thus, colleges are free to consider essays about race-related experiences, which might demonstrate strengths like resilience.)
To be sure, we can’t rule out the possibility that some schools are maintaining surreptitious affirmative action policies. But the admissions data aren’t good evidence of it.
It’s striking that colorblindness advocates, who have long decried a focus on demographic breakdowns, are now the ones watching those breakdowns like hawks. One wonders what diminution of racial diversity they would think sufficient.
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