Sept 11 (Askume) – The share of black students among first-year students at Harvard University fell by more than a fifth in the wake of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bars universities from using race as a factor in admissions, according to data released by the university on Wednesday.
Harvard said the class of 2028 will be made up of 14% black students, up from 18% last year, while the number of Hispanic students will increase from 14% to 16%.
Harvard University, one of the best universities in the world, is one of two defendants in the 2023 Supreme Court case, along with the University of North Carolina. The schools argue that promoting racial diversity improves the educational experience of all students on campus, but the court’s conservative majority ruled that taking race into account, often called affirmative action, is a form of discrimination.
Many colleges have warned that preventing them from considering race, as admissions offices have done for decades, will inevitably lead to a drop in minority enrollment. So far, enrollment figures for the first classes since many elite schools made the decision paint a mixed picture.
There was little change this decline for black and Hispanic students at some top schools, including Yale and Princeton.
Other institutions also saw steep declines. At MIT, the share of black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander students in first-year classes fell to 16%, compared with an average of 31% over the previous four years.
At Brown University, another elite school, the number of black students fell from 15% to 9%, and the number of Hispanic students dropped from 14% to 10%, according to the school newspaper. Amherst College, one of the country’s top liberal arts colleges, reports that only 3% of its freshmen are black, down from more than 11% last fall.
The lawsuit against Harvard accuses the school of favoring certain minorities at the expense of Asian American applicants. Harvard said the proportion of Asian-American students in Harvard’s first class has remained steady at 37%.
After the 2023 decision, many schools stepped up their enrollment programs , removing barriers to application and seeking other changes to increase diversity. Other advocates lobbied state legislatures to pass bills limiting admissions preferences to traditional applicants.
In releasing the data, Harvard said it has sent admissions staff to more than 150 cities to reach out to students and has joined a coalition of universities to raise awareness of its schools in rural communities.
“The change in the law does not alter our fundamental commitment,” Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said in a letter to colleagues announcing the data. “We will continue to work tirelessly to remove barriers to a Harvard education and comply with the law, while deepening our commitment to broad diversity.”
