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Fewer students in this fall’s class of college freshmen chose to disclose their race or ethnicity in their applications to some top schools, data shows.
The pattern, which is nuanced and only affects a sliver of the nation’s universities, is among several early indications of the potential impacts of the Supreme Court’s decision last year that has effectively prohibited colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions.
Highly selective universities, which do not enroll the majority of U.S. college students, were most likely to consider race in admissions prior to the decision. Admissions at most colleges were unaffected by the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling, however, the fraction of institutions impacted by it includes some of the wealthiest and most well-resourced schools. Among these campuses are Ivy League universities, which offer some of the best returns on investment and the most generous financial aid policies for students with the greatest need.
Since the 2023 decision, many Americans have anxiously waited to see how or if the racial and ethnic makeup of freshman classes would change at the most sought-after colleges. Those numbers have been slowly trickling in from different campuses since the beginning of the fall semester.
The results are preliminary and it’s tricky to compare the disparate data. But they present some troubling throughlines, which may or may not be related to the Supreme Court’s decree, including a downturn in enrollment of Black and Hispanic first-year students at several high-profile institutions. Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are a handful of the schools that saw enrollments of those demographic groups drop. Other colleges, including Northwestern University and Yale University, showed gains, not losses, in the same types of students.
A USA TODAY review and a new data analysis published by the nonprofit advocacy group Education Reform Now show another apparent trend: At many selective colleges, a greater number of students chose not to identify their race or ethnicity on their applications. For example, at Pomona College, a small private school about 30 miles east of Los Angeles, an average of 3.7% of incoming freshmen did not indicate their race in 2022 and 2023, according to Education Reform Now’s analysis. Among the school’s 2024 applicants, 6.9% did not disclose their race. Similar jumps in the percentages of students who didn’t check a box were recorded at Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and other schools.
At this early stage, it’s tough to pin down why the numbers look the way they do. But the data says something about how some students may be changing their approach to college admissions, said Carson Byrd, a researcher who studies race in higher education at the University of Michigan.
“It shows how much people are still unsure exactly what the SCOTUS decision means for them and how it might impact them,” he said.
Why did some students not self-identify?
Even after the Supreme Court ban on affirmative action, many colleges continued to ask students to self-report their race or ethnicity on their applications for other reasons apart from the admissions process. Schools often intentionally double-count students who report they belong to more than one racial identity group.
When colleges announce the demographics of their incoming classes every fall, they use that bolstered data to signal their eagerness to create diverse student bodies. They want to demonstrate they’re welcoming places, said James Murphy, the director of career pathways and post-secondary policy at Education Reform Now.
“It matters a lot for people of color and students of color who are looking at these institutions and saying, ‘Do I belong here?’” he said.
Rather than trumpeting their campus diversity this fall, many colleges swiftly identified shortcomings before blaming them squarely on the Supreme Court. Last month, Murphy compiled a tracker using data from many selective schools – a tool that has many disclaimers and notes of caution to users. Schools often calculate data about their student demographics differently, he said, so juxtaposing them can be a daunting task.
“These numbers are not as clean as I would like them to be,” he said. “In many cases, the tracker is comparing apples and pears.”
Black student enrollment dips at selective schools
While it’s difficult to track outcomes, some students say they already feel a difference at their campuses.
According to Murphy’s tracker, Black student enrollment at Amherst College, a small private school in Massachusetts, dropped nearly 75% from its average the previous two years. A scathing open letter written this month by Amherst’s Black Student Union called on alumni to cease donations to the school until the college’s administrators provide a more aggressive approach to shoring up the number of Black students on campus.
“We were paraded as symbols of diversity, yet when it mattered most, we were abandoned,” the organization wrote.
Avery Cook, a junior at Amherst and a member of the BSU, said she chose to go to the liberal arts college in part because the competitive high school she attended in New York City didn’t enroll enough students who looked like her. But this fall, she said, the change in the campus atmosphere is undeniable.
“Amherst is such a small school that a decline in diversity this steep – you can see it and feel it,” she said.
Michael Elliott, Amherst’s president, said the school is committed to regaining ground.
“Other institutions have seen a similar impact, and all colleges and universities are evaluating the outcomes of this first admission cycle under the new legal standard,” Elliott and other administrators wrote in a joint message to students and staff in late August. “At Amherst, we will continue and deepen our ongoing efforts – in accordance with the law – to reach and recruit students from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.”
Past affirmative action bans offer important context
Amherst, like other schools, saw a slight rise in new students who declined to disclose their race this year. Zachary Bleemer, an economics professor at Princeton who studied California’s ban on race-conscious admissions at public universities in the 1990s, said a similar trend emerged then, too.
In California’s case, nearly all the students who didn’t report their race ended up being white or Asian, Bleemer found. Ultimately, his research showed that the state’s controversial law, Proposition 209, caused freshman students from under-represented minorities to “cascade into lower quality colleges.”
“When California banned race-based affirmative action, that pushed thousands of Black and Hispanic students into relatively less selective universities in subsequent years,” he said.
It remains unclear whether diminishing student diversity at some schools will persist on a larger scale in the coming years. According to Bleemer, the impacts of affirmative action bans are often most dramatic in the first year they go into effect.
At a dinner with reporters in Washington, D.C., this fall, several prominent college presidents spoke frankly about how the Supreme Court’s ruling on race-conscious admissions has weighed on them. John Bravman, the president of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, called it a “statistical fact” that the decision is “changing our populations.” Yet he cautioned against drawing larger conclusions.
“We’re in the early days,” Bravman said. “Let’s see where the numbers go.”
