Ban on Affirmative Action: Black freshmen at Harvard University in decline

However, it may be too early to draw conclusions about the extent to which the Supreme Court's ban on race-conscious admissions policies will affect diversity at top colleges. Student Enrollment at Princeton University in New Jersey and Yale University in Connecticut remained largely stable, baffling both supporters and critics of affirmative action. Many universities have not yet released demographic data on their incoming classes.

“It's very different right now,” says Natasha Warikoo, a sociology professor at Tufts University who has written books on affirmative action in college admissions. Warikoo says she's most concerned so far about the percentage of black students who drop out at several colleges.

“Affirmative action in the early 1960s was really about giving space and opportunities to African-Americans in particular because they had been excluded from elite higher education in the past,” Warikoo said. “That's where it came from, and they are the ones most affected today, which is very concerning to me.”

Spokespeople for Princeton and Yale did not immediately respond to interview requests.

Harvard reported that 37 percent of its freshmen are of Asian descent, the same number as last year. The share of Hispanic or Latino freshmen rose two percentage points to 16 percent, while the share of Native American students fell to 1 percent from 2 percent a year ago. Less than 1 percent of Harvard's freshmen identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, which is no change from last year.

According to Harvard, 8 percent of students in the class of 2028 did not report their race or ethnicity this year, compared to 4 percent last year.

Zachary Bleemer, a Princeton University economist who studies higher education, said schools in California experienced a similar trend after the state banned affirmative action in 1996. Bleemer noted that it was “almost exclusively” white and Asian American students who chose to withhold information about their race and ethnicity.

A Harvard spokesman would not disclose the percentage of white students in the class of 2028 and declined to make an official available for an interview. About 32 percent of students at Harvard College identified as white last fall, according to university figures.

“Our community is strongest when we bring together students with diverse backgrounds, experiences and beliefs,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, in a statement. “And our community is defined by people with diverse perspectives – inside and outside the classroom – coming together to address a common challenge by looking at it from someone else's perspective.”

The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, whose race-conscious admissions policy was also struck down by the Supreme Court last year, recently reported that the percentage of black first-year students also declined, to 7.8 percent from 10.5 percent a year ago. The percentage of Asian or Asian-American students at UNC rose slightly, while the number of Hispanic students declined slightly. The number of white students remained about the same.

“It's too early to see trends because we only have one year of data,” said Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment, in a news release. “We are committed to complying with the new law. We are also committed to ensuring that students in all 100 counties from all demographics across our growing state feel encouraged to apply, have confidence in our affordability, and know this is a place where they feel welcome and can succeed.”

Last June, the court ruled in a case against Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill that colleges were prohibited from considering race when evaluating prospective students' applications, effectively ending racially based promotion of minorities. Experts had expressed concern that the move could harm diversity at elite colleges across the country, as evidenced by events that took place at highly selective colleges after the nationwide bans went into effect.

Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, who filed the lawsuit against Harvard and Chapel Hill, wrote in an email to the Boston Globe that he found it “baffling” that some schools largely maintained diversity. ““because these colleges wrote in their 2022 joint amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court that maintaining the racial composition of their incoming class would not be possible without implementing the kind of racial discrimination banned by the Supreme Court.”

Students for Fair Admissions claimed that universities discriminated against Asian Americans in the admissions process.

The court ruling did not end the holistic admissions policy in which top universities consider a range of factors beyond academic training, including applicants' life experience and the challenges they have overcome.

To mitigate the expected impact of a ban on affirmative action, competitive schools across the country have stepped up their outreach efforts to high schools in low-income areas. They have partnered with nonprofits that work with low-income, rural, and freshman students and have added essay questions to give prospective students a Opportunity to give insights into their lives.

According to Harvard, 20 percent of freshmen are the first in their family to attend college, which is consistent with recent years.

The Harvard spokesman also declined to disclose what percentage of freshmen are children of alumni or donors.

Some higher education observers wonder whether colleges that have reinstated standardized testing since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic will enroll fewer students of color. Earlier this year, several top schools, including Dartmouth College and Yale, reinstated testing requirements that had been suspended during the pandemic after new research showed that exams like the SAT are a good indicator of academic success and can help identify low-income students with high potential. Some students and racial equity advocates remain skeptical.

“As more institutions reinstate testing, fewer students of color will likely be admitted,” said Angel Pérez, executive director of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “That concerns me, and I hope it's a wake-up call for higher education: Do we really want to add yet another layer of complexity for marginalized students?”

Officials at MIT, which said last month that the proportion of first-year students of color had fallen by 9 percentage points, rejected the notion that testing would harm diversity.

“[T]”The class we admitted under the test requirement last year had the highest proportion of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in MIT's history because the common tests helped us identify objectively well-qualified students who lacked other ways to demonstrate their preparation,” said Stu Schmill, the university's dean of admissions and student financial services, in an interview posted on the university's website. “As I explained then, standardized tests are certainly not perfect, but they are less unequal in important ways than other things we can consider.”

Schmill also said that the “persistent and profound racial inequality in the American K-12 education system” is a problem.

Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is critical of affirmative action, said in an interview that the decline in the number of black students at several top universities underscores “a really serious problem of the academic divide.”

“We should point out that the decline in black enrollment highlights the deficiencies of the K-12 system,” Sander said. “Now we should turn our attention back to how we can improve the treatment of minorities.”

Higher education observers said there will likely be a “cascading effect” in which black students not accepted to the nation's most selective universities enroll at other institutions. UC San Diego, for example, has attracted black and Hispanic students who would not have been accepted to more competitive universities like UCLA without affirmative action, Bleemer said. The most selective universities typically see the largest declines in black and Hispanic student enrollment after affirmative action bans, Bleemer said.

“If one college loses, someone else has to win those students,” Bleemer said.

You can reach Hilary Burns at [email protected]. Follow her @Hilarysburns.