New college admissions data for the first group of admitted students since the US Supreme Court sharply limited affirmative action last year suggests that the decision has had a negative impact on Black enrollment at some universities.
While some colleges have seen major fluctuations in the enrollment of students of color in the class of 2028, including notable declines among Black and African American students, the impact has appeared more muted elsewhere. Many universities have yet to release their data, however, so a more clear picture may emerge throughout the fall.
The most dramatic change was at MIT, which saw an 8 percentage point dropoff in Black and African American enrollment, down from 13 percent enrollment on average in the four years prior, and a 6 percentage point boost in Asian American enrollment, up from 41 percent. Washington University in St. Louis and Tufts University also saw a significant decline in Black and African American enrollment, which sank by 4 and almost 3 percentage points at each school, respectively.
Yale University saw no change in enrollment among Black and African American students, but it reported a 6 percentage point decline among Asian Americans.
And at schools such as the University of Virginia, demographic changes in enrollment were fairly negligible across demographic groups, moving no more than a few percentage points in either direction.
Nicole Narea/Vox
All that data should be taken with a grain of salt; with only a few dozen schools reporting on their enrollments, many of them selective private institutions, “we still can’t definitively speak to how racially diverse this first post-affirmative action class will be,” Michaele Turnage Young, senior counsel and comanager of the Equal Protection Initiative at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told Vox.
But so far, there isn’t much good news in the data for students of color. And many schools have yet to implement race-neutral policies aimed at fostering diversity in their classes, which would comply with the Supreme Court’s decision.
“I don’t see many steps forward. I see more steps backward,” said Wil Del Pilar, the senior vice president of Ed Trust, a think tank focusing on racial and economic barriers in American education.
What’s driving disparate outcomes post-affirmative action?
Experts in higher education policy have predicted since 2023 that the Supreme Court’s decision would hurt diversity on college campuses, starting with incoming first-years in 2024.
The Court’s 6-3 decision found that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race and other factors. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the way those universities’ admissions offices considered race was not narrowly tailored enough to meet the standard required by the Constitution, but he left open the possibility that race could still be considered in the context of essays describing an applicant’s personal experiences.
Experts have based their predictions about the impact of the ruling in part on what happened in the 1990s and mid-2000s, when states including California, Michigan, and Washington banned affirmative action at public universities.
“What we saw overwhelmingly at selective public institutions was significant decreases in the number of Black students enrolled, and most of those institutions, especially the most selective, never recovered,” Del Pilar said.
Preliminary 2024 enrollment figures suggest that at least some selective schools have seen similar declines in enrollment among students of color. According to Del Pilar, that’s because they largely haven’t overhauled what they value in admissions. “All we did was take one factor out without really adjusting for the other factors that continue to disadvantage students of color,” he said.
But the results vary, sometimes widely, by institution. At this point, it’s hard to say exactly what’s driving the differences in outcomes.
Some universities have tried to mitigate the impact of the end of affirmative action with race-neutral policies aimed at bolstering diversity. For example, Duke University unveiled a new program in 2023 to waive tuition for lower-income North and South Carolinians. UVA followed in December, waiving tuition for lower-income in-state admits.
That may be part of the reason those schools didn’t see dramatic fluctuations in the makeup of their incoming classes. Duke even increased the combined share of Black and Hispanic enrollment by one percentage point in its incoming class for 2024 compared to 2023.
Even predating the Supreme Court’s decision, many schools had also given applicants the option to write a “diversity statement” explaining how their background, including their race, may have impacted their life experiences. Schools may come to rely more heavily on diversity statements as part of a holistic admissions process going forward, though it’s not clear that they’re doing so just yet.
“I think that a lot of schools are certainly going to avail themselves of that option and utilize that experience,” Bryan J. Cook, director of higher education policy at the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, told Vox.
The Supreme Court’s decision didn’t just impact admissions deliberations but potentially also who’s applying where. After California banned affirmative action at public universities in 1996, Cook said, more students of color with the academic qualifications to apply to Berkeley or UCLA chose instead to apply to less selective California institutions.
If the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision has had a similar impact on where students choose to apply, selective institutions may have to work harder to recruit diverse applicants.
“Based on what we’ve seen thus far and the speculation after the ruling last summer, we would probably see more of an impact in the highly selective institutions in terms of what the makeup of the fall cohort looks like,” Cook said.
Some colleges — for instance, those participating in a pilot program launched in 2023 by the state of Minnesota — have tried to address the recruitment problem by increasing their direct admissions, in which students who meet certain academic criteria are automatically granted admission. But that’s not happening at the most selective colleges, where admission rates are often in the single digits.
“They continue to operate the way they’ve always operated,” Del Pilar said. “Unless institutions really begin to change where they’re recruiting, how they’re recruiting, who they’re talking to, their availability of need-based aid, we’re not going to see a ton of advances in enrolling a more diverse class.”