The share of students who identified as Black at Harvard dropped this year after a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturned race-conscious admissions, according to data released by the school Wednesday.
A decline in the share of Black and Latino students had been predicted during the high-profile lawsuit, in which university officials said race was just one factor of many considered in reviewing applications but that if it were stricken from consideration, their classes would be less diverse.
The number of students in Harvard’s incoming class of 2028 who identified as Hispanic or Latino increased slightly, from 14 percent last year to 16 percent this year.
The share of students identifying as Asian held steady at 37 percent.
Last year’s ruling overturned decades of legal precedent and forced the country’s most selective colleges to change the ways they evaluate applicants. Based on the experience of public universities in states that had previously enacted bans, many experts predicted significant declines in the number of Black and Hispanic or Latino students at selective schools. The decision rippled through many other facets of life beyond college admissions, with legal challenges to programs intended to diversify private companies, government contractors and others brought by advocates arguing for race-neutral policies.
It will take time to gauge the impact of the ruling on higher education — especially as many other factors influence where students apply and enroll in college, including the bungled rollout of a new federal financial aid form this year that left many families waiting for information about where they could afford to attend. (Some selective schools also use another form, which allowed them to get aid offers out more quickly.) The data that schools have been slowly releasing this fall is often incomplete, without raw numbers or without including the share of students who chose not to disclose their race.
Thus far, early data released by a small number of highly selective schools have been mixed. Some reported drops in diversity, while others did not.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose admissions practices were also challenged in the high-profile Supreme Court cases, 10.5 percent of first-year and transfer students enrolling last fall identified as Black or African American, while this fall, 7.8 percent did. There was a slight decline in the share identifying as Hispanic or Latino, from 10.8 percent to 10.1 percent, and a slight increase in those identifying as Asian or Asian American, from 24.8 percent last fall to 25.8 this year.
Princeton and Yale universities released data last week indicating that their share of Black and Latino students had held steady, as did Williams College, the University of Virginia and Duke University.
The University of Pennsylvania did not release detailed demographic data about the incoming class, but the proportion of students reported under the blanket term “underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds” fell by two percentage points compared to last year, Whitney Soule, the school’s dean of admissions, said in a written statement. However, the total share of students of color in the incoming class is the same as last year, at 57 percent.
But MIT and Amherst College both reported sharp declines.
And Brown University — which also saw a notable increase in the percentage of students who did not report a race or ethnicity — also reported a sizable drop in diversity. Last year 27 percent of Brown’s incoming freshman class came from historically underrepresented groups; this year 18 percent did, according to the school.
Logan Powell, associate provost for enrollment and dean of undergraduate admission, pledged to expand existing partnerships and recruitment efforts and add additional measures aimed at increasing diversity. “Expanding race-neutral strategies to encourage outstanding and increasingly diverse incoming classes will remain our priority moving forward,” Powell said in a written statement. “When our student body is both exceptionally talented and representative of a broad array of experiences and perspectives, the Brown educational experience is enriched for all students, and we can make an even greater impact through our scholarship.”
The share of Black or African American students also sank at Columbia University, from 20 percent last year to 12 percent this fall. The number of Latino and Hispanic students declined from 22 percent to 19 percent this year, while those identifying as Asian American or Pacific Islander rose from 30 percent to 39 percent.
A spokesperson for Columbia Undergraduate Admissions said Wednesday, “Although we cannot say for sure, the Supreme Court’s decision was likely a factor in the demographic changes this year — both because it required colleges and universities to modify their admissions processes and also because it affected whether and how students addressed their backgrounds in their application materials.”
In announcing the profile of the incoming class, university officials wrote, “What remains consistent — throughout up and down variations in many demographic and socioeconomic categories — is Columbia’s deep commitment to enrolling students who come from diverse backgrounds.”
At Harvard, while admissions readers no longer had access to applicants’ answers about race and ethnicity, nor to aggregate information for the pool, the school continued and undertook multiple race-neutral efforts to diversify the class. Those included generous financial aid — almost a quarter of the students in the incoming class will attend without their parents paying anything, according to Harvard — and outreach to small towns, big cities, historically Black colleges and universities, military academies and other sites.
The class of 2028 has 1,647 students. Twice as many students chose not to disclose their race or ethnicity this year — 8 percent of the class, compared to 4 percent last year. And by multiple other measures, the class was diverse, drawn from 91 countries, all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with about one in five students qualifying for federal Pell grants earmarked for lower-income families.
William R. Fitzsimmons, the school’s longtime dean of admissions and financial aid, said Harvard’s community is strongest when the school brings together students from different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. “And our community excels when those with varied perspectives come together — inside and outside of the classroom — around a common challenge by seeing it through another’s perspective,” he said in a written statement.
