When the Supreme Court banned the use of race in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, elite universities variously condemned and pledged to subvert the verdict. Now that multiple top schools have announced the racial composition of their 2028 classes, we’re learning what that looks like in practice.
Ending race-based affirmative action was expected to change elite universities’ demographics substantially. Indeed, in SFFA, many of these schools signed an amicus brief arguing that it was imperative that they be allowed to continue discriminating, because race-neutral methods would keep them from admitting classes with—in their view—enough black and Hispanic students.
Yet, in their first admitted undergraduate classes following the Supreme Court’s ruling, several top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Duke, have seen little to none of the expected shift in the racial composition. On average, the cumulative black and Hispanic shares of these schools’ incoming classes has declined by just 0.6 percentage points (from 26.8 percent to 26.2 percent), while the Asian share has fallen 2.4 percentage points (from 32 percent to 29.6 percent). Though schools record their demographic data differently—some exclude international students from their calculations, for example—the general pattern indicated by these results is troubling.
We know that elite universities previously discriminated against white and Asian applicants to benefit black and Hispanic students. So, universities like Yale that signed the amicus brief and have seen little change in their demographics after SFFA are either breaking the law now, or they were misleading the Supreme Court when they declared race-neutral methods insufficient to achieve their diversity goals. Which is it? The answer is probably both.
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Author: Ruth King
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