Effects of the Supreme Court decision banning race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
Did elite universities follow the law this year?
On June 29, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision addressing the legality of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions programs (Students for Fair Admissions, or SFFA v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina). The Court held that Harvard and UNC’s admissions programs, which account for race at various stages in the process, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Following the decision, there were widespread predictions (often including the word “dire”) that, absent race-based affirmative action, the percentage of Black students in matriculating classes at elite universities would decline precipitously while the percentage of Asian students would increase dramatically. During the past few weeks, a number of universities have released some details of the racial/ethnic composition of their 2024 entering classes. The data are ... interesting, and are well summarized in a recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (copied below in italics):
The proportion of first-year students from underrepresented minority groups — especially Black students — declined at most of the big-name colleges that previously considered race, just as many experts had expected. But the declines were greater at some institutions than others. Oh, and hold the phone, folks: Some subgroups of underrepresented students decreased in size at many big-name colleges, while other institutions saw increases.
Let’s look at some data, starting with the two institutions whose race-conscious admissions practices Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) successfully challenged in court. At Harvard College, 14 percent of freshmen identify as Black, down from 18 percent last year, and 16 percent identify as Latino, up from 14 percbent.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 7.8 percent of freshmen are Black, down from 10.5 percent, while 10.1 percent are Latino, down just slightly from 10.8 percent. And 25.8 percent of incoming students are Asian American, up from 24.8 percent.
Some highly selective colleges reported striking demographic shifts. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 16 percent of freshmen identify as Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander, a drop of nine percentage points — or 36 percent — from the previous year. Forty-seven percent are Asian American students, an increase of six percentage points. And white enrollment stayed about the same as last year.
At Amherst College, 3 percent of freshmen are Black, down from 11 percent last year, and 8 percent are Latino, down from 12 percent. Columbia University welcomed a first-year class in which 12 percent of students are Black; last fall, 20 percent were. Brown University saw the proportion of Black students decline to 9 percent, from 15 percent last fall; the share of Latino students fell to 10 percent, from 14 percent.
But wait a second. At Duke University this fall, the proportion of Black and Latino freshmen held steady. The same was true at Yale University, where, as it turned out, the proportion of Asian American freshmen declined. The University of Virginia also saw a small decline in Asian American students, a slight drop in Black students, and an increase in Latino students.
And at Harvard, Asian American students account for 37 percent of the incoming class, the same as last year, a result that perhaps surprised SFFA and its supporters, who surely expected that number to rise. Though the proportion of Asian American students increased at some institutions, including M.I.T., Brown, and UNC-Chapel Hill, it declined at others, such as Duke, Princeton, and Yale.
Comments
Honestly, I’m surprised that any of these schools reported significant declines in the percentage of Black students in their new freshman classes. Based on my over 40 years of experience as a faculty member, I had predicted that universities would find a way to either ignore or work-around the new law. In my experience, most faculty are not concerned with the niceties of constitutional limits on their decisions, and in the interests of furthering what they consider to be a social-justice-based morally “correct’ goal, following the law is far from their highest priority. I assume that the fact that many universities apparently did change their admissions practices to make them more color-blind is a reflection of the fact that undergrad admissions is conducted by administrators rather than faculty – and higher-level admins have reason to be fearful of lawsuits if they fail to make their admissions procedures (more) color-blind.
The biggest puzzle raised by these data concerns those schools who did NOT see a dramatic change in the racial make-up of their new freshman classes. The whole point of race-based affirmative action was to admit students from underrepresented minority groups who would not have been admitted if race and ethnicity were not taken into account. Accordingly, one would naturally expect that if a university actually did follow the law now and admit students without taking race or ethnicity into account, there would be a significant decline in the number of students admitted from those minority groups.
As a result (as noted in an article in Inside Higher Education):
Students for Fair Admissions, whose lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina led the Supreme Court to strike down race-conscious admissions last June, wrote letters on Tuesday to the general counsels of Yale, Princeton and Duke Universities asking for details about their admissions processes, accusing them of noncompliance with the ruling. In the letters, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, SFFA president Ed Blum said he was “deeply concerned” that the institutions had violated the affirmative action ban.
After some selective colleges reported stark drops in Black and Hispanic enrollment this fall, Yale and Princeton reported that their numbers had remained relatively stable; Duke reported a slight increase. All three also reported declines in the proportion of Asian Americans in their classes: The share fell by two percentage points at Princeton and six points at Yale and Duke.
Yale has said little about how they managed to square the circle of the racial composition of their new freshman class, but both Princeton and Duke have claimed that the admissions data reflect their new focus on admitting students from lower income families (described in another IHE article):
In June 2023, a few weeks before the ruling was handed down, Duke announced an ambitious new financial aid program and recruitment initiative for low-income students from the Carolinas.
Christoph Guttentag, Duke’s dean of admissions, told Inside Higher Ed that the initiative was unrelated to the then-looming court decision but that it clearly helped the university adapt to the new landscape. He credited the policy and its early implementation with Duke’s relative success among its peers in maintaining racial diversity and said he wouldn’t be surprised if other colleges that saw declines began to adopt similar programs.
“The actions we took were more focused on generating economic diversity in our applicant pool… but it was clearly helpful for us this year in terms of racial diversity in enrollment,” he said.
There is, in fact, evidence that these schools really have increased the socio-economic diversity of their freshman classes. As reported by Inside Higher Education:
The number of Pell-eligible freshmen at Duke has doubled in the past two years, from 11 percent of the incoming class in 2022 to 22 percent this fall; Yale’s increased from 22 percent in 2023 to 25 percent this fall, according to institutional data.
Princeton made greater socioeconomic diversity an explicit admissions target this past cycle. Last August, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, the university formed an ad hoc committee on undergraduate admissions to review how it could “act vigorously within the law to achieve the racial and other forms of diversity that are essential to Princeton’s excellence.” In March, committee members released their recommendations, which included admitting a class of which at least 70 percent of students qualify for need-based financial aid. The university hit that goal this fall, boosting the number of qualifying students to 71.5 percent, up from 66 percent in 2023.
The critical question, of course, is whether the effects of an increasing focus on socioeconomic diversity is likely to fully offset the effects (on the racial composition of the new freshman classes) of the elimination of race-based affirmative action. If so, then Duke and Princeton and Yale have indeed found the magic recipe for maintaining racial diversity at pre-SFFA levels while still admitting students in a legal (i.e., color-blind) manner. Christoph Guttentag claims that’s the case. Maybe — but I don’t believe it.
Can socioeconomic affirmative action fully compensate for the effects of the banning of race-based affirmative action?
To understand why I don’t believe that is likely to be the case, it is necessary to unpack Christoph Guttentag’s argument regarding the effects of increasing socioeconomic diversity on the racial composition of Duke’s newest freshman class.
We can, for starters, safely assume that some significant percentage of the Black students admitted to Duke (and other elite selective colleges) during the decade prior to the SFFA ruling would not have been admitted had race not been considered as a factor in admissions. That’s the essence of race-based affirmative action. Accordingly, if there had been no other change in the admissions process, the elimination of race-based affirmative action in college admissions would have resulted in a correspondingly significant decline in Black student admissions and an increase in the admission of Asian students.
However, as Guttentag noted, and as the Pell grant data indicate, these schools DID change their admission policies this past year to make the schools more affordable to students from non-wealthy families and to give preferences in admissions to students from non-wealthy families. Indeed, a particularly noteworthy change in Duke’s policies this year is that Duke is charging ZERO tuition for any admitted students who live in the Carolinas and whose families earn less than $150K per year.
Duke (and Yale and Princeton) claim that the changes they have made in admissions and tuition policies were more beneficial to Black students than to white or Asian students — to such a significant degree that they compensated for the decline in the numbers of black student admits that resulted from the ending of race-based affirmative action.
OK — if THAT is the case then it must also be true that, during the race-based affirmative action era, there must have been a pool of black high school seniors from families of modest means who would have been admitted under current (post SFFA) policies but who, in the past (1) chose not to apply to Duke for financial reasons or (2) applied and were admitted but chose not to attend for financial reasons. (Note that I did not include as a subcategory “Black students who applied but were rejected under the old race-based affirmative-action policies but who would have been admitted under the new socioeconomic-affirmative-action policies” — for the obvious reason that it is hard to imagine any such students could exist, unless the schools admitted Black students this year whose qualifications were much lower than those admitted under race-based affirmative action policies.)
Note, however, that the new focus by these schools on socioeconomic diversity, and Duke’s elimination of tuition for Carolinas students from non-wealthy families, would not solely benefit Black students; certainly SOME white and Asian students would fit into the category of students who would be admitted now but who would not have been admitted before or who could afford to attend now when they might not have been able to attend before.
Therefore, in order for the percentage of Black students in the new freshman classes at these schools to have remained at pre-SFFA levels, it must also be the case that the size of this pool of Black students was much larger than the parallel pools of Asian and white students with those characteristics. In other words, to explain the Duke data (and the similar patterns at Yale and Princeton) it must be the case that Black students not only benefit from the new socioeconomic diversity focus at these schools, but they must do so to a much greater degree (that is — in much higher numbers) than is the case for Asian or white students.
Is that a reasonably likely possibility? It is certainly the case that the median family income of Black students is lower than that of white or Asian students. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that socioeconomic affirmative action COULD benefit Black students relatively more than white or Asian students. Certainly, that is the logic of the claim that Duke and Yale are making.
There is a reason, however, why I remain skeptical of the socioeconomic explanation for the Duke/Princeton/Yale admissions pattern. Focusing on Duke, I simply do not believe there are a lot of Black students in the Carolinas who were admitted this year but who, in the past, would have been (1) academically qualified to be admitted to Duke but who did not apply for financial reasons or who (2) were admitted but chose not to attend for financial reasons. I don’t think there is any question that Duke (1) would have admitted those kinds of Black students during the era of race-based affirmative action (2) would have LOVED to have had those students attend the school, and (3) would have been eager to have provided those students with sufficient financial aid to make attendance at Duke affordable to them.
In other words, I don’t understand who the Black students actually ARE who are now being admitted under socioeconomic affirmative action policies but who were not being admitted, or who chose not to attend for financial reasons, during the pre-SFFA race-based affirmative action era. A similar argument can be made, of course, regarding Yale and Princeton.
I might be able to make this point in a somewhat simpler way. The problem that universities face is that, even if they make attendance more affordable for students from families of modest means, and even if they engage in socioeconomic affirmative action, they are still faced with the situation that within every family income band (across the entire range from wealthy through poverty), Asian and white students are, on average, significantly more academically qualified for admission to an elite university than are Black students (based on mean SAT scores). Therefore, even if Black families are over-represented at lower income levels, it is not apparent how the color-blind admission of more students from those lower family income levels would compensate for the banning of race-based affirmative action. Moreover, it seems likely that those Black students from lower family income bands who ARE real academic stars were already being recruited by, and admitted to, elite universities, and with the provision of sufficient financial aid to make attendance financially possible.
To make the argument even more concrete, consider the case of students in the Carolinas from families with family incomes in the $50K - $75K range. In the past, those families could not possibly afford to send a child to Duke without their child receiving substantial financial aid. Now, however, with tuition for students from those families set at zero by Duke, attending Duke has become a viable option from a financial perspective. Accordingly, one would anticipate an increased number of those students to have applied to Duke this year, and especially with the benefits of socioeconomic affirmative action, to have been admitted to Duke this year. However, it is not clear how that would translate into significantly more academically qualified Black students being admitted to and then attending Duke – to partly compensate for the decline in Black admissions as a result of the ending of race-based affirmative action. Indeed, given the superior (on average) academic performance of white and Asian students compared with Black students within this family income group, one would anticipate that with color-blind admissions, most of those students from families with incomes at this level who would have the sterling academic credentials required to be admitted to Duke would be students from white or Asian families.
I should note that I am certainly not opposed to the new Duke policies. Indeed, one of my children went to Duke, and we paid hundreds of thousands in tuition – money we would not have had to pay under the new Duke “free tuition for Carolinas students from families making less than $150K” policy (and yes, we do occasionally reflect on what we might be doing with that money now if we had not given it to Duke). I think this is a wonderful new policy, and I’m also supportive of Duke’s (and Yale’s and Princeton’s) socioeconomics-based affirmative action initiatives. And if I’m wrong, such that the application of those policies in a fully color-blind manner results in the maintenance of the same levels of racial diversity that occurred under race-based affirmative action, then I would consider that to be a win win situation.
However, in the absence of more complete data demonstrating how socioeconomics-based affirmative action fully compensated for the opposing effects of the ban on race-based affirmative action, I’m not convinced that these schools fully complied with the law. The schools certainly have the data that could prove me (and, way more importantly obviously, SFFA) wrong, and I hope they put this issue to rest by generating and releasing the information. My guess, though, is that the schools will do all that they can to stonewall SFFA and to keep SFFA from learning exactly how the admissions sausage was made this year. It will certainly be interesting to see what SFFA learns when it asks for more specific data from these institutions.