The share of Black students enrolled this fall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has dropped in the wake of the landmark Supreme Court ruling that rejected race-conscious college admissions, numbers released Thursday show.
The ruling was expected to result in a significant drop in the number of Black and Hispanic or Latino students, as happened in states that had previously barred preferences for applicants based on their race.
So far, some highly selective schools, such as MIT, have reported a drop in the number of students of color, but others, such as Yale and Princeton universities, did not.
Changes in campus diversity since the ruling remain unclear because only a small number of schools have disclosed information about the racial makeup of their new undergraduate classes, the first crop of students admitted after the decision. Harvard, one of the most closely watched, along with UNC, has not yet released racial information about its incoming class. Even the numbers that have been disclosed offer an incomplete picture — data from the schools often does not include raw numbers or comparisons to prior years. The schools’ reported numbers also don’t always reflect the number of students who did not report their race.
At UNC, 10.5 percent of first-year and transfer students enrolling in the fall of 2023 identified as Black or African American, according to university officials. This fall, 7.8 percent did. The share identifying as Hispanic or Latino dipped slightly from 10.8 percent to 10.1 percent. The number identifying as Asian or Asian American rose slightly, from 24.8 percent last fall to 25.8 this year. The number of White or Caucasian students held steady — 63.7 last fall and 63.8 percent this fall.
Princeton and Yale universities released data Wednesday indicating that the numbers of Black and Latino students in their entering classes is similar to the numbers that enrolled last year. At Princeton, 9 percent of the Class of 2027 identified as Black; 8.9 percent of the Class of 2028 did. Ten percent identified as Hispanic or Latino in the Class of 2027; in the Class of 2028, 9 percent did.
The University of Virginia also did not see a major change. At U-Va., almost 10 percent of this year’s class identified as Hispanic or Latino, up 2.2 percentage points from the previous year. And 9.4 percent identified as Black or African American, 1.4 percentage points fewer than the year before.
On Thursday, Williams College’s president, in a message welcoming students, mentioned that 42 percent of U.S. students in its entering class identified as Black, Indigenous or people of color. Last year, the same percentage identified as people of color, according to a school website.
At Emory University, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students in the entering undergraduate class dropped slightly from 12.6 percent Black last year to 11.1 percent this year, and from 12.8 percent Hispanic to 11.1 percent.
At Duke University, there was little change. The school announced that 14 percent of the new undergraduate class is Hispanic or Latino and 13 percent is Black or African American. Those shares were 13 percent for Latino and 12 percent for Black students last year, according to the school.
At MIT, there was a sharp drop. In recent years, 25 percent of incoming undergraduates identified as Black, Hispanic and/or Native American and Pacific Islander. This year, just 16 percent did.
“We thought this might happen,” Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions, said recently based on decreases that happened at public universities where race-conscious admissions had been banned years ago. MIT’s recent results track those, he said, despite multiple efforts to increase diversity.
Part of the problem is the persistent inequity in opportunity in K-12 education, Schmill said, and that is most pronounced in science, technology, engineering and math. Black students and Hispanic students are less likely to attend high schools that teach calculus, physics or computer science, he said, referencing federal data.
Amherst College and Tufts University also reported declines. Using federal reporting guidelines, last year’s entering class at Amherst was 11 percent Black or African American; that dropped to 3 percent this year. (The numbers look different when using students’ self-reported identities rather than the categories the government uses; many people identify as more than one race. Thirty-eight percent of the incoming class identified as students of color. Last year, 47 percent did.)
At Tufts, which celebrated its most ethnically and racially diverse class in history last year, this year’s announcement noted a drop in the number of U.S. students of color, from about 50 percent last year to 44 percent this year. JT Duck, dean of admissions and enrollment management for the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering at Tufts, had pledged to respect the law but said in announcing the class that “the university’s vision of inclusive excellence continues to be mission critical and unwavering.” Referring to the 44 percent figure for students of color, he said, “While still higher than our figure of 38% in 2019, it represents a disappointing drop.”
Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and professorial lecturer at George Washington University who was an expert witness on behalf of the group that challenged race-based affirmative action policies at Harvard and UNC, said he was “struck by the dramatic variation” this year. While some predicted a disastrous impact, he said, “we have growing evidence that the picture is much more complicated.”
It will take time to understand the impact of the ruling, many experts said, partly because other factors influence the composition of each class — including who applies and who can afford to attend.
Another major factor in this year’s admissions was the botched rollout of the federal financial aid form called the FAFSA.
A news release from UNC noted that as at other universities, “the U.S. Department of Education’s challenges and delays in the FAFSA application process may have had an impact on Carolina’s incoming class. Many students may not have had the information they needed about their eligibility for financial aid until very late in the admissions cycle. The University does not know the extent those issues had on its applicant pool.”
Many highly selective schools use an additional financial aid form that allowed them to prepare financial aid packages more quickly this spring than schools that were reliant on the FAFSA.
Kahlenberg said there are two possible explanations for schools that have been able to maintain diversity: Schools adopted race-neutral strategies, such as giving more consideration to students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged or providing more generous financial aid. “The other possibility is that some universities are cheating,” he said, using a narrow window the Supreme Court opened for considering race through essays in a way the justices had not intended.
Several schools that had maintained racial diversity also had launched or bolstered initiatives to make education more affordable. Almost a quarter of U-Va.’s class qualifies for Pell Grants for lower- and middle-income students, according to the school. U-Va. also worked to help students navigate the FAFSA delays. Stephen Farmer, U-Va.’s vice provost for enrollment, said in announcing the class that it is perhaps the most socioeconomically diverse in the university’s history.
Those schools touted their commitment to financial aid: At Yale, more than 58 percent of students in the class are getting need-based financial aid. Most students from families with income up to $100,000 don’t pay anything to attend Princeton, the school noted.
At some schools, there have been dramatic increases in other measures of diversity in recent years, such as students who are the first in their families to go to college, veterans, students from rural areas and community-college transfers.
In recent decades, some universities adopted admissions policies that provided benefits to Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants, Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton, wrote in a policy brief in which he studied the impact of affirmative action bans on those underrepresented minorities. Ten states banned such affirmative action practices at public universities before the Supreme Court’s decision last year, and the biggest impact tended to be at the most selective schools. The largest proportional declines in enrollment of underrepresented minorities in the first year after the state bans took place happened at the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Washington, with respective drop-offs of roughly 50, 40 and 30 percent, Bleemer wrote.
Bleemer said he was most surprised by U-Va.’s diversity numbers, since they held steady; UNC’s decline is in line with some other selective flagships, he said. As more schools release numbers, he said, people will learn whether MIT’s declines were typical.
“It increasingly looks like an outlier,” he said.
