The Supreme Court ruling in 2023 banning race-conscious college admissions led to declines in Black and Latino admissions at highly selective universities. At many other schools, the opposite occurred, according to a new analysis.
Overall, freshmen enrollment of underrepresented minority groups increased by 8 percent at public flagship universities. The analysis, by a nonprofit organization, Class Action, concludes that those schools were among institutions that benefited as a result of higher rejection rates for Black and Hispanic students at the nation’s 50 most selective schools.
At those top 50 schools, Black freshmen enrollment was down by 27 percent and Latino enrollment down by 10 percent.
The data from Class Action, which works to promote equity in education, was based on 2024 federal enrollment figures released in January covering more than 3,000 colleges and universities.
Data released publicly by a smaller number of schools have hinted that highly selective schools admitted fewer Black and Latino students following the Supreme Court decision, but the report was one of the first efforts to analyze the impact of the decision on enrollment demographics across a broad swath of the nation’s colleges.
While the data covers only freshmen enrollment the first year after the Supreme Court decision went into effect, it bolsters the prediction by some education experts that the decision would create a chain of consequences. Highly qualified Black and Latino students, who might have been admitted to the Ivy League and other similar schools before the Supreme Court decision, enrolled in less-selective schools as a result of the decision, potentially leading to a “cascade” of less qualified minority students enrolling in even less selective institutions.
Some research suggests that the phenomenon, called a “cascade” effect and identified in California following a statewide ban on affirmative action in 1998, may have long-term effects on employment opportunities and earnings for the students who ended up in the least selective institutions.
The new report concludes that the Supreme Court decision reduced the number of students of color at institutions with the highest graduation rates and largest median incomes after graduation, a result that the authors said could lead to persistent racial inequities in income.
While public flagship universities were the biggest beneficiaries of the shift, four-year public colleges overall also gained, with Latino freshman enrollment increasing 7 percent and Black freshman enrollment growing 4 percent.
Many four-year private schools with less selective admission requirements than the Ivy League also saw big increases. They included Syracuse University, where Black enrollment grew by 17 percent and the University of Miami, where Latino students increased by 45 percent.
The data show a significant impact on the demographics of the nation’s very top schools.
Black freshmen enrollment declined by 2 percentage points at the 12 schools known as the Ivy Plus, which includes the eight schools in the Ivy League as well as Duke, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago. But that represented a 25 percent drop in the share of Black students in the freshman class, the report noted.
James S. Murphy, senior fellow for Class Action, said portions of the 2024 data seemed surprising even though some of the shifts had been predicted.
“I was stunned when I saw things like the University of Mississippi seeing large gains in enrollment of Black students and the University of Miami seeing a big boost in Latino students,” he said.
In addition to Mississippi, which saw a 50 percent increase in Black freshman enrollment, other big jumps included Louisiana State University, where Black freshman enrollment increased by 30 percent. At the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the University of South Carolina, Latino enrollment increased by more than a third.
At the University of Mississippi, a school that has worked to eliminate historical vestiges of racism, the change has not gone unnoticed by students.
Lamarcus Lenoir, a sophomore from Tupelo, Miss., said he noticed it when he arrived on campus in fall 2024.
“My friends and I mentioned how many Black students there were and how surprised we were,” Mr. Lenoir, 19, who is Black, said in an interview. He recently wrote an opinion piece on the topic for the campus newspaper, The Daily Mississippian.
Officials for several of the universities, which have been under pressure from the Trump administration not to promote minority enrollment, did not respond to requests for comment.
One surprising finding was that Black student enrollment declined overall at historically Black colleges and universities, despite increases at a smaller set of the most prestigious H.B.C.U.s.
Some experts had predicted overall increased enrollment at those schools as a result of the Supreme Court decision, in the case known as Students for Fair Admissions. Dr. Murphy said he was not sure of the reason but speculated that the cost of some of those schools, many of which are private, drove Black students to public flagships instead.
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
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