Top colleges report fewer Black and Hispanic students in wake of Supreme Court ruling

Black and Hispanic admissions have fallen at elite universities since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action, according to a new database that also finds fewer applicants divulging their race.

Trade publication Inside Higher Ed compiled self-reported data from 28 top universities — including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — for their fall 2023 and fall 2024 entering classes. It found Black and Hispanic enrollments dipped in this fall’s class, the first admitted since the ruling, even as White and Asian headcounts rose on some campuses.

At Brown University, Inside Higher Ed found the share of Black freshmen fell from 15% to 9% while Hispanics dropped from 14% to 10%. White students increased from 43% to 46% of the entering class and Asian-American students jumped from 29% to 33%.

In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon admitted 1,807 full-time students out of roughly 34,000 applications this fall. The database shows applicants from underrepresented minority groups plunged from 16.4% to 8.5% of incoming students, while the share of all non-White students fell from 52.2% to 48.3% of the class.

Black enrollment dropped by 2.3 percentage points, Hispanic and Latino enrollment fell by 5.5 percentage points, and White student enrollment dipped by 0.4 percentage points at the private campus. Asian enrollment increased by 4 percentage points and the share of students choosing not to report their ethnicity increased by 2 percentage points.

“This data follows trends reported by many other highly selective institutions,” said Chuck Carney, Carnegie Mellon spokesperson. “Efforts are already in progress to enhance outreach and recruitment across all populations.”

The share of Asian-American students dipped at other top schools, including Yale and Duke.

“For the majority of institutions, incoming class diversity has remained relatively stable over the past two years,” Liam Knox wrote in a summary for Inside Higher Ed. “And while the general trend points to an overall decline in Black and Hispanic enrollment — in particular among the Ivies and small, highly competitive liberal arts colleges — a few key factors make it difficult to draw broad conclusions about the Class of 2028.”

Mr. Knox said discrepancies in how schools count international applicants and a surge in students skipping the ethnicity box on college applications rendered the findings “inconclusive.” He pledged to keep updating the interactive database as more colleges report their figures.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in June 2023 that colleges could no longer afford special preference to underrepresented minorities in college applications. The decision ended a decades-long practice of prioritizing racial diversity over academic performance in predetermined enrollment quotas.

According to Inside Higher Ed, the share of “no race listed” students increased by an average of 4 percentage points on campuses that reported it, up from less than 5% last year. It doubled from 4% to 8% of entering freshmen at Harvard, tripled from 1.8% to 7.7% at Princeton and jumped from 3.3% to 6.7% at Tufts.

“For many colleges in this data set, that increase is greater than the change in underrepresented minority representation for most colleges, which raises a crucial question: Are the numbers going down because fewer of those students are being admitted, or because they’re less likely to report their racial identity?” Mr. Knox said.

Legal scholars and higher education insiders offered mixed reactions to the ruling. Some racial justice advocates criticized the Inside Higher Ed database for whitewashing its fallout.

“We cannot use the term ’relatively stable’ if there is an actual drop in Black and Hispanic enrollment in top-ranked schools, unless we are just ready to accept the idea that they didn’t belong there in the first place,” said Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.

He said fewer Black and Hispanic applicants matriculated this fall precisely because “students are scared to report their race.”

“For example, one major university that I work with only has one Black person in their honors program,” Mr. Dibinga added in an email. “They did not realize that until all the students showed up for class.”

Gail Heriot, a University of San Diego law professor and independent commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said the database shows the need to determine which colleges have quietly defied the ruling before jumping to conclusions.

“The under-represented minority students who are attending colleges and universities that are complying with the law … will have a much better chance of excelling academically,” Ms. Heriot said in an email. “Students are not being done a favor when they are persuaded to enroll at a school where they are at a competitive disadvantage.”

Conservative analysts say there is already evidence of defiance. They pointed to numbers in the database showing that shares of Asian students fell by 6 percentage points at Yale and Duke this fall, even though the Supreme Court case involved claims of discrimination against Asian American applicants.

“Such drops in Asian-American admissions would not be possible under true race neutrality,” said attorney Lance Izumi, an education policy analyst at the free-market Pacific Research Institute.

Mr. Izumi, a past president of the Board of Governors of the California Community College under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, predicted that “a second set of lawsuits will likely be necessary” if those numbers do not change.

Mixed success in diversity

Many colleges last year revised their admission programs to emphasize color-blind strategies for attracting Black and Hispanic applicants that would not violate the ruling.

Those strategies include favoring top graduates at public high schools in diverse ZIP codes, scanning application essays to identify disadvantaged students and offering direct admissions to public school students who maintain good grades.

While those policies have had mixed success in maintaining Black and Hispanic enrollment levels, several colleges said they admitted record numbers of low-income students this fall.

At the flagship University of Virginia, Inside Higher Ed found the share of underrepresented minorities — including Asian-Americans — held steady at 18.6% this fall, even though non-White students dropped from 40.2% to 38.8% of the entering class.

Deputy spokesperson Bethanie Glover credited increased financial aid and a program the public university launched to target “Virginia high schools with high rates of socioeconomic disadvantage and low rates of UVA applications and enrollment.”

“Students who may not have believed college was an option were encouraged to apply to UVA thanks to this program,” Ms. Glover said.

At Tulane University in New Orleans, the share of White students fell from 68% to 64% this fall, Asian-Americans decreased from 6% to 5% and Hispanics fell from 14% to 12%. Black students rose from 5% to 6%.

Tulane spokesman Michael Strecker said the private school nevertheless experienced historic growth in low-income and first-generation students after committing itself to “strictly adhering to the Supreme Court’s ruling.”

“Our decrease in racial diversity in the Class of 2028 was disappointing, but modest,” Mr. Strecker said. “We remain committed to enrolling students with the strongest academic credentials and the strongest impact outside the classroom.”

In the Northeast, the database found the share of White students entering private Boston University held steady at 29% this fall while Asian students grew from 18% to 21%. Black students dropped from 9% to 3% of the new class and Hispanics dipped from 13% to 12%.

Peter Wood, a former associate provost at Boston University who leads the conservative National Association of Scholars, said such changes show the Supreme Court correctly ruled that affirmative action policies discriminated against qualified Asian-American applicants.

“The findings vindicate the ruling, because where the universities have taken the ruling seriously, the ethnic composition of the freshmen classes has changed dramatically,” Mr. Wood said. “That shows that the court was right to see that universities were relying on illegal racial preferences to achieve the demography they wanted.”

The other universities included in the Inside Higher Ed database are Amherst, Boston College, Bowdoin, Cal Tech, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Emory, Haverford, Johns Hopkins, Middlebury, Pomona, Princeton, Rice, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Washington University in St. Louis and Williams.

Roughly a dozen of these schools responded to emails from The Washington Times to confirm their enrollment numbers. The others — including Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford — did not.

According to experts on both sides of the issue, diversity proponents are likely to keep pushing the limits of the high court’s ruling.

“As a Latino licensed psychologist, I see diversity as essential in higher education,” said Eugene Dilan, a California-based business consultant specializing in equity, inclusion and diversity. “It enriches learning by encouraging students to challenge biases, build empathy and develop global competencies.”

William A. Jacobson, a Cornell law professor who has argued that intellectual diversity fosters a better learning environment than racial diversity, said the Supreme Court decision upheld the right of “each individual … to be treated fairly and equally” in college admissions.

Underrepresented minorities fell from 29.3% of last year’s entering class at Cornell to 19.6% this fall, as the overall share of non-White students dropped from 65.6% to 58.1%, according to the database.

“So there is nothing for anyone to do other than treat each individual as an individual, not as a proxy for group identity,” Mr. Jacobson said.