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24% of the class of 2028 is Asian American. This is a 6% decrease from the previous year. -
23.6% of the class of 2028 is Asian American. This is a small change from the previous year. -
39% of the class of 2028 is Asian American or Pacific Islander. This is an increase of nine percentage points from the previous year. -
37% of Harvard's freshman class is Asian American. Some experts project that the actual proportion of Asian American students in the class of 2028 is likely larger than this.Admissions after Affirmative Action
The composition of colleges’ incoming class after the Supreme Court ruling
A changing landscape for college admissions | PHOTOGRAPH BY ADOBE STOCK
Nationwide, members of the class of 2028 are now engaged in their coursework, like so many preceding cohorts. But unlike their past half-century of predecessors at colleges and universities with selective admissions, they gained their places at their new schools without explicit consideration of race or ethnicity—the result of the Supreme Court rulings in June 2023 outlawing affirmative action in undergraduate admissions (see “The Supreme Court Rules,” September-October 2023, page 14). Although only a few schools have reported data on the racial and ethnic composition of their newly admitted students, and it is too soon to discern what longer-term strategies they may adopt to sustain diversity among their undergraduates, the varying results disclosed do suggest the possibility of real, and large, changes as a result of the law now in effect.
The racial and ethnic diversity of selective institutions will surely remain contested terrain. Critics of affirmative action, including the litigants who brought the cases the Court decided last year, have long claimed it is discriminatory and admits lesser qualified (or even unqualified) candidates. The schools that have most vigorously defended consideration of race within holistic admissions, such as Harvard and Princeton, have insisted that increased diversity is integral to educating today’s students to live in and lead an increasingly diverse, complex world—and has been accompanied by rising academic standards (see MIT’s commentary below). Now that the law has changed, proponents of diversity are being tested to achieve it through new means.
Duke and Virginia
Among the reporting institutions summarized in an Inside Higher Education roundup, Duke and the University of Virginia reported that the share of black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students enrolled in the class of 2028 increased from the prior year—a result hardly anyone would have expected. Both are national universities, but both have a strong local and regional presence—and both put in place 2023 initiatives to increase recruitment of students from lower-income and under-resourced high schools in their immediate environs (backed up at Duke with substantial new financial aid for students from the Carolinas). Those measures appear to have buffered the effects of the court rulings—and may point a way for selective state universities to do something similar. It is difficult to imagine truly national and international universities—the Ivies, Chicago, Stanford—from being able to do something similar, at least on the same scale.
MIT
In fact, one such near-peer had reported results that it found especially disappointing. Overall, about 17 percent of MIT’s new class is made up of black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students—down 14 percentage points from the class of 2027. Black students made up 5 percent of the new class (down from 15 percent the year before); Asian Americans made up 47 percent of the class, up from 40 percent the prior year.
In an extraordinary post on the results and an accompanying interview, admissions dean Stu Schmill (MIT ’86) explained that the “significant change in class composition comes with no change to the quantifiable academic characteristics of the class that we use to predict success at MIT”—a direct refutation of claims that affirmative action had diluted merit and the quality of the admitted class. He explained how MIT had historically admitted fully qualified applicants and then diversified the class once their qualifications were established—a step it can no longer take—and lamented that “when there are now fewer African-American first-years enrolling at MIT than when I was a freshman more than 40 years ago, that cannot possibly be the right outcome for our community; not in a country as large and increasingly diverse as ours, and not at an institution with our history and our values.” He also pointed to the troubling state of American public education, given that in high schools where 75 percent or more students are black and/or Hispanic, two-thirds don’t offer calculus, more than half don’t offer computer science, and nearly half don’t teach physics—all essential preparation for the MIT curriculum. He observed:
In my time as dean, we have considered only applicants who meet our extremely high threshold of academic readiness. Recognizing the substantial educational benefits of diversity, we then worked to assemble from that highly qualified group a class that reflected both breadth and excellence in its collective interests, aptitudes, and experiences.
That last step is no longer permissible, and despite taking several steps to respond to the new law, MIT was clearly unable to recruit as diverse a class as it sought.
(It is worth noting that these data, and those reported by other schools, may be somewhat imprecise. According to Inside Higher Education, the number of students who declined to specify their race nearly doubled at many institutions, and information on the composition of applicant pools is nonexistent. The New York Times’s David Leonhardt suggests that changes in how applicants did and students now do report their race, or mixed-race characteristics, may overstate the decline in diversity reported at MIT and elsewhere.)
Ivy and Near Peers
At Yale, according to admissions office data, 14 percent of class of 2028 students are African American, 19 percent Hispanic/Latino, 24 percent Asian American, 46 percent white, and 3 percent Native American. The Yale Daily News reported comparable class of 2027 figures as unchanged for African Americans and Native Americans; up 1 percentage point for Hispanic/Latino students and 4 percentage points for white students; and down 6 percentage points for Asian Americans.
These results, like those at Duke and Virginia, may run counter to earlier expectations that without affirmative action considerations in holistic admissions reviews, white and Asian American enrollments would rise as a share of the student body. But Yale has been extremely aggressive about alternative means of recruiting in recent years, participating in the QuestBridge admissions program for high-achieving, low-income students; joining a new venture to recruit applicants from rural areas; and employing the (Harvard-developed) Opportunity Atlas to identify students from under-resourced communities and neighborhoods—among other measures.
Princeton has also developed considerable momentum in attracting lower-income and first-generation students; significantly increasing transfer admissions; and—last year—boosting financial aid to a new level. (Attendance is now free for students from families with incomes of $100,000 or less, compared to Harvard’s $85,000; Princeton said 71.5 percent of students qualify for aid, sharply higher than the 55 percent at Harvard College). The Tigers reported that black or African American and Hispanic or Latino students each make up roughly 9 percent of the new class—down in aggregate less than 2 percentage points, according to the Princetonian, with Asian American enrollment down about 2.2 percentage points.
On the other hand, Brown reported that among “new first-year students, 18 percent come from groups historically underrepresented in higher education, a decline from 27 percent in 2023,” with the share of self-reported domestic black or African American undergraduates declining to 9 percent from 15 percent, and of Hispanic or Latinx students to 10 percent from 14 percent. The Asian American cohort increased from 29 percent to 33 percent of the entering class, and the share of students self-reporting as white decreased 3 percentage points.
Amherst, one of the nation’s top-ranked liberal arts colleges, long known for attracting a diverse student body, suffered one of the steepest declines in new black matriculants—a reported 3 percent of the entering class, down 8 percentage points from the prior year—and the share of Latinx students dropped 4 percentage points (to 8 percent). Matthew L. McGann, the director of admissions and financial aid, told the New York Times point-blank, “As a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision, the incoming class is not as racially diverse as recent classes have been.”
And the Litigants…
The University of North Carolina, the public institution in the litigation that yielded the 2023 Supreme Court rulings, reported that among entering first-year and transfer students, 7.8 percent were black or African American this year, down from 10.5 percent in the prior year, and that Hispanic, Latino, and Latina matriculants were 10.1 percent of the new class, down from 10.8 percent. American Indian or Alaska Native admittees were 1.1 percent of the new class, down a half-point, and the shares of the class accounted for by white and Asian or Asian American students, respectively, were 63.8 percent (up 0.1 percentage point) and 25.8 percent (up 1 percentage point).
With that, attention turns to Harvard College, which has yet to report. As the most prominent defendant in the affirmative action litigation, the College has a large target on its back. Complicating the local admissions picture, of course, is the turmoil that swept over the campus last fall, from the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel: in the aftermath, the University was the subject of relentless criticism and news coverage, during the height of the applications season. And on this past January 2—one day after the deadline for regular applications—the short, tumultuous tenure of Claudine Gay, the first black president, came to an end with her resignation. Sorting out what effects those developments may have had on prospective applicants would seem an impossible counterfactual—but it is the case that the number of applications declined some 5 percent from the prior cycle.
