Outside the Beltway

Post-Affirmative Action College Campuses

More data shows a more complicated picture.

James Joyner · Saturday, August 31, 2024 · 12 comments

NYT (“At 2 Elite Colleges, Shifts in Racial Makeup After Affirmative Action Ban“):

A drop in the share of Black first-year students at two elite colleges this school year has provided an early sign that the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action could have an impact on racial diversity, at least at some of the nation’s more selective schools.

At Amherst College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the share of Black students decreased sharply — by eight percentage points — for this year’s entering class, according to data released on Thursday. It decreased more moderately at Tufts University, a larger private college near Boston, according to that school’s data. At the University of Virginia, which released its data on Friday, the percentage of Black students also dipped, but only slightly.

The new evidence comes after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a sharp drop in Black enrollment, by 10 percentage points, last week.

Amherst’s data showed that the percentage of white students enrolling rose sharply, while the percentage of Asian American students rose slightly.

The focus, as is so often the case in higher ed reporting, is on the extremely competitive schools that educate a tiny fraction of students but, alas, have historically been the feeding grounds for our most prestigious career paths. Regardless, the data thus far seem to show what we anticipated when the ruling came down: Asian enrollments would increase and Black enrollments would decline. But the percentages from school to school vary widely.

The data contributed to an emerging, if still murky, picture about how last year’s Supreme Court decision barring race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities across the country could change higher education. Many of the highly selective universities that used affirmative action have yet to release numbers for the incoming class.

But the ruling has upended more than four decades of admissions practices, and supporters of affirmative action have warned it would have an immediate negative impact on diversity, with ripple effects throughout society. (The new numbers reflect enrollment rather than admissions because the Supreme Court prohibited admissions officers from looking at the race of applicants unless it came up organically, as part of a college essay, for instance.)

[…]

The percentage of Black students entering Amherst this fall dropped to 3 percent from 11 percent last year, and at Tufts, it dropped to 4.7 percent from 7.3 percent. Black students at the University of Virginia declined to 7 percent of the entering class compared to 7.9 percent last year.

White students entering Amherst rose to 39 percent of the class from 33 percent, and those entering Tufts went up to 49.3 percent from 46.8 percent. The percentage of Asian American students rose slightly to 20 percent from 18 percent at Amherst and slipped to 19.7 percent from 20.3 percent at Tufts.

The percentage of Hispanic students dropped to 8 percent from 12 percent at Amherst, and there was a similar decline at M.I.T. But confounding the picture, the share of Hispanic students actually rose slightly at Tufts and the University of Virginia. And at U.Va., the percentage of white and Asian students declined very slightly.

We still have a very small sample—a handful of schools—so parsing the differences between them is likely less useful than the overall trend. It may simply be that regional liberal arts colleges, elite engineering schools, and flagship public universities are drawing from different applicant pools. Still, it’s noteworthy that the ostensible basis for the lawsuit that ended affirmative action was that existing policies discriminated against Asian applicants. Thus far, MIT is the only case where changing the rules radically increased Asian admissions.

Critics of affirmative action have argued that the drop in racial diversity will be temporary, as universities look for ways to achieve diversity that correlate with race, such as socioeconomic status.

At U.Va., a public institution in Charlottesville, the state had created partnerships with public schools in low-income communities statewide as part of a recruitment effort.

Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on the Supreme Court’s rulings on education, called the Virginia program a potential model.

“It is a fine example of how universities can be creative, consistent with the Constitution, to avoid the plummeting enrollment of Black students that some universities have already witnessed,” he said.

Competitive admissions public universities have been using variations of this for decades now. The University of Texas at Austin’s policy of granting automatic admission to the top ten percent of graduates of every high school in the state, going back to 1997, is the most prominent example. Indeed, it was so popular that the school couldn’t handle all of them and the law was changed in 2009 so that “75 percent of the first-year in-state students must be automatically admitted,” effectively raising the bar to the top 6 percent.

Private schools would presumably have to be more creative. But a policy automatically granting admissions to a certain percentage of applicants who meet minimum academic thresholds and qualify for needs-based financial aid would likely increase the pool of Black and Hispanic enrollees and avoid running afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. Or, hell, they could simply have thresholds for GPAs, test scores, and whatever other qualifying criteria they use and cull applicants down to a “highly qualified” pile and then admit those based on a lottery.

Still, he noted that many college admissions offices are struggling with how to respond without running afoul of the court’s ruling. In the absence of innovation, Mr. Driver said, “We stand on the cusp of what I fear will become a lost generation of Black students at many leading colleges.”

The numbers from the handful of schools reporting are all over the place. MIT’s entering class dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent—a full two-thirds. The difference between 55 and 165 Black kids getting to go to MIT rather than another excellent but less prestigious school is significant. We’re not seeing results that drastic at any other schools but all of them are showing lower Black enrollments.

Another selective college, Emory University in Georgia, reported only slight changes in the racial makeup of this year’s freshman class. The percentage of Black and Hispanic students entering this fall dipped slightly, but so did the percentage of white students. The percentage of students who are Asian or whose race was not known increased.

Again, Asian students do seem to be the primary beneficiary of removing race from the admissions decision.

The new numbers were particularly striking at Amherst because it is known for its outreach to Black students. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 2022 that Amherst had topped its list of high-ranked liberal arts colleges enrolling the highest percentage of Black first-year students for 13 out of 28 years.

Amherst and fellow liberal arts colleges warned of dire consequences from the Supreme Court ruling in a court brief filed last year. In the brief, the school said a race-blind admissions policy would reduce the percentage of Black, Hispanic and Native American students by approximately half.

Amherst’s president, Michael A. Elliott, said the school remains committed to diversity and that it would look for new strategies to recruit a diverse student body. He also said that he is concerned about how the school’s current student body will adjust.

“On a small campus, the drop in demographic population can change the experience for those students,” he said in an interview Friday. “One of the unfortunate circumstances of the ruling is that it might diminish the sense of belonging that a student feels here. And we do not want that to occur.”

Indeed. Taking the extreme example of MIT, which admits roughly 1100 students each year, the difference between having 220 Black undergraduates and 660 out of 4400 is massive. In the former case, the Black student is likely to feel alien; in the latter, like one of many. Assuming an average class size of 20 students, odds are pretty good that they’ll be the only Black student in the room every single time. Not only will they stick out like a sore thumb but they’re forced into the awkward position of being The Voice of All Black People in every session. The dynamics would be very different with three Black students.

Here’s a bit of a curveball:

Tufts’s dean of admissions, Joseph Duck, who goes by JT, said the difference in the numbers year to year at Tufts was partly due to a doubling in the percentage of applicants who did not report their race or ethnicity [emphasis mine-jj]. He cautioned against parsing the data too closely. “There are different ways to present the data, as we are seeing as colleges and universities begin to report their results,” he said.

“As for why certain groups went up or down, we’re continuing to examine the data,” he said.

It’s certainly conceivable that, if there is no advantage to being identified as Black or Hispanic, those applicants would stop putting their race on their applications under the assumption that doing so could somehow hurt them. We may be comparing coding practices and not just admissions.

The numbers so far may present a skewed picture because they come from highly selective schools, according to Mr. Sander, who has studied the impact of affirmative action bans.

Mr. Sander predicted that the most elite institutions are likely to feel the impact of the affirmative action ban more than schools that are less selective. He predicted schools that provided a solid education but relied less or not at all on affirmative action would see an increase in Black enrollment.

“The students not admitted to the M.I.T.’s or Amherst’s of higher education are well-qualified to be admitted without a preference to other very solid schools,” Mr. Sander said.

Which is, of course, true. Assuming all of the kids admitted to selective schools go to one of them, it’s a zero-sum game. If a thousand Asian kids get into their first-choice schools at the expense of a thousand Black kids, that opens a thousand spots at the second-choice schools that the Black kids can backfill. It’s not like they’re missing out on Harvard and MIT and thus stuck going to trade school. They’re instead going to Cornell and Rice.

But, while Cornell is a fantastic school whose graduates go on to do great things, there’s still path dependence. For example, Harvard students are more competitive than Cornell students for the top law schools, which are the pathways for Supreme Court clerkships. Which is increasingly the pathway to becoming a Supreme Court Justice.