Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action as a factor in college admissions. The first results are in: minority enrollment is down at many colleges.
Harvard, Tufts and University of North Carolina all saw drops in Black students among their incoming freshman class, while schools like Amherst College and MIT saw their Black enrollment for the incoming freshman class drop by more than half. Tyrone Howard, a UCLA professor who studies race and education, says if these trends persist, schools will need to be more intentional about recruitment.
The data released by the College on Wednesday revealed moderate, but notable changes in the demographic composition of the Class of 2028. The share of Black students declined to 14 percent from 18 percent. The proportion of Hispanic students in the Class of 2028 increased by 2 percentage points to 16 percent from 14 percent in the Class of 2027, while the proportion of students who identified as Asian American remained fixed at 37 percent.
It almost halved in some places, like the University of Miami.
Preliminary data released by the University of Miami revealed Black student enrollment fell from 9% to 5% for the Class of 2028. This is the first class impacted by the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned affirmative action, preventing a race-conscious admission process.
According to the Washington Post, more than 40 schools ended or curtailed race-based scholarships worth at least $45 million.
The lawyers who won the case founded it and marketed it on the claim that affirmative action resulted in unfair outcomes for Asian-American students, whose academic excellence compared to other groups, including whites is not reflected in who gets into the best schools. Now these lawyers are learning to their dismay that as far as top U.S. colleges are concerned, the gates remain unequally guarded: Yale, Princeton and Duke Are Questioned Over Decline in Asian Students.
Asian American enrollment dropped to 29 percent from 35 percent at Duke; to 24 percent from 30 percent at Yale; and to 23.8 percent from 26 percent at Princeton.
Did they believe that getting rid of affirmative action would turn college admissions into a colorblind meritocracy instead of simply enabling the exclusion of others? Did they think affirmative action was about rewarding the undeserving? Didn't they know that leopards and faces come from the same God?
