After Affirmative Action Ban, Numbers Emerge on Campuses

Last summer, a Supreme Court ruling squashed affirmative action at colleges and universities across the nation, with the majority deciding that taking race into account during the admissions process was a form of discrimination. Now, the numbers are in at Harvard on the fallout from that decision, with the enrollment of Black students seeing a "moderate but notable" shift. Per data released Wednesday, the school's current freshman class is 14% Black, while last year's entering class was 18% Black—a drop by more than one-fifth, reports the Harvard Crimson.

• Meanwhile, Hispanic students rose 2 percentage points, from 14% to 16%, while Asian-American students held steady at 37%. The Ivy League was one of two defendants in the 2023 SCOTUS case and had argued that racial diversity on campus made the educational experience better for everyone.
• Reuters notes there's been somewhat of a "mixed picture" at other elite schools after the ruling. While Yale and Princeton, for example, didn't really see any significant enrollment changes in Black and Hispanic students, other schools experienced "precipitous declines," including MIT, which saw the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Native American, or Pacific Islander students drop from an average of 31% over the past four years to about 16% this year. Brown and Amherst also saw noteworthy plummets in enrollment of Black students.

• Harvard had argued previously that ripping away affirmative action would result in "badly compromised" student diversity, per the New York Times. But the paper notes what actually went down "is more nuanced and complex than predicted," and that Harvard has undertaken other ways to keep diversity at the forefront, including bolstered recruitment initiatives, boosting financial aid, and sending admissions staff to 150-plus cities.
• Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at the school, says that Harvard will keep on adhering to the law, but that "we will continue to work tirelessly to pull down barriers to a Harvard education, and ... to deepen even further our commitment to broad-based diversity."

(More affirmative action stories.)