Declining Diversity at Top Colleges: What’s Going On?

First it was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) dropping the news anyone paying attention to higher education was expecting: Diversity representation among its entering class had declined, and rather dramatically.

Then, one by one, additional colleges came out with similar statistics. Brown University. Amherst College. The University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Middlebury College. All reported drops, albeit in varying amounts, in racial diversity among their new students.

Yale University is one exception.

Many of these institutions blamed the results, either explicitly or implicitly, on last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ban on race-conscious admissions. But is it that simple, or are there more factors at play?

As the new academic year was getting underway, MIT let the world know that its incoming class of 2028, the first to be admitted under the new restrictions on affirmative action set by the Supreme Court in 2023, was decidedly less diverse than in previous years.

Among its entering class, 5% are Black, 11% are Latino/a, 37% are white, and 47% are Asian American. Last year, 15% were Black, 16% were Latino/a, 38% were white, and 40% were Asian American.

Over the past three years, about 29% of MIT’s students have identified as Black, Latino/a, or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. For the class of 2028, that figure fell to 16%.

MIT is hardly alone in this regard. At Brown, 18% of first-year students come from underrepresented groups, down from 27% in 2023. Fellow Ivy Penn reported a more modest decline, dropping from 25% last year to 23% this year.

At Harvard, Black enrollment fell to 14% from 18%, though Latino/a enrollment increased from 14% to 16%. Figures for Asian American students remained the same.

Among liberal arts colleges, Middlebury reported that 26% of new students are people of color, down from 35% last year, while Amherst’s share of Black and Latino/a students dwindled from 11% and 12%, respectively, to 3% and 8%.

Swarthmore College reported a drop from 56% to 52%, though it’s rather astounding that people of color constitute more than half of the first-year class.

And among selective public universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) — one of the two defendants, along with Harvard, in the landmark Supreme Court case — announced that the number of Black students in the entering class declined by 2.7 percentage points, while the representation of Latino/a students dropped by .7 percentage point.

The University of Virginia experienced a more modest 1.4-percentage-point drop among Black students and, in fact, noted an increase in its Latino/a population.

Is it fair to levy all the blame for the diversity declines on the Supreme Court, or does that constitute a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy (“after this, therefore because of this”)?

Are other factors contributing to the diversity losses on campus? Maybe, says Jayson Weingarten, a college admissions consultant with Ivy Coach and a former admissions officer at Penn. But the court should shoulder at least 90% of the blame, he told BestColleges.

The drop in diversity is “attributable to the ways schools do affirmative action in 2024,” he said, “so if you’re assigning blame, the vast majority has to be with SCOTUS. That’s inarguable.”

Weingarten also points to test-optional policies as a culprit. Absent standardized test scores, he says, colleges have a more difficult time finding that “diamond in the rough” — students whose relatively high scores demonstrate achievement despite their circumstances.

That’s the reasoning behind Brown’s decision to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement, a rationale shared by Yale and Dartmouth, among other schools.

But just what are those circumstances? If the context for determining what constitutes a challenging situation involves race, then doesn’t that violate the mandate issued by the court? Put another way, can admissions officers give special consideration to applicants from schools where the vast majority of students are underrepresented minorities?

It’s actually more comprehensive than that, Weingarten explained.

“They’re looking at school information such as how many students are on free and reduced lunch, what educational opportunities students have, how many upper-level math classes and AP (Advanced Placement) courses are offered, and what the average SAT scores are to determine who is that diamond in the rough,” he said.

Still, standardized tests present a double-edged sword for both students and colleges.

“Anytime a school puts another barrier in the way, applications go down,” Weingarten said. “Colleges have to be mindful that creating too many hoops to jump through might prevent students from applying in the first place.”

He noted Yale’s acceptance of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate scores in lieu of SAT and ACT results as an example of an institution “trying to get the information they need to make good decisions” but being flexible in their requirements.

Time will tell if the resumption of standardized testing indeed provides a boost for underrepresented students, as many universities suggest it will.

It apparently didn’t manifest that way at MIT, where diversity numbers dropped despite the reinstated SAT/ACT requirement. Yet MIT is something of an outlier given its strong reliance on math SAT scores to determine fit, so it’s difficult to draw broader conclusions.

Weingarten does not, however, put much stock in the notion that delays in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) rollout contributed to the drop in diversity, as some observers claim.

“Top schools have all the resources needed to process FAFSA forms quickly and efficiently,” he said. “I imagine it’s the less-wealthy and -prestigious schools that can’t staff up that are more impacted by the delays. “It’s worth noting that at least one study has detailed how the botched rollout has disproportionately affected Black and Latino/a students, though that research spanned all of higher education.

What’s certainly not a factor, Weingarten contends, is the nature of the applicant pools. Did the abolition of affirmation action dissuade people of color from applying to selective colleges? If so, then it would make sense for corresponding enrollment numbers to suffer.

“I would be shocked to find any sort of change in the number of applications from underrepresented students at any of these schools,” he said.

“They bend over backward to maintain diversity and inclusion. If there were any sense that the SCOTUS decision resulted in a change in the applicant pools, they would have said something about it.”

Indeed, institutional announcements detailing fall enrollment figures failed to mention applicant pools, save for Middlebury College’s, which noted that it “received applications from students of color in similar numbers to previous applicant pools, which is a helpful foundation.”

We’ll never know the full story because colleges don’t report application breakdowns by race to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and Common Data Set as they do for incoming classes.

Colleges prefer it that way, Weingarten suggested, because otherwise it would be “too easy for anyone to do the math on the varying rates of admission,” potentially opening institutions to lawsuits.

Speaking of which, might watchdog organizations such as Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the plaintiff in the SCOTUS case against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, pursue legal action against universities that don’t demonstrate a notable decline in underrepresented minority enrollments?

The organization said it would carefully monitor how universities implement the court’s decision.As mentioned, the diversity represented in Yale’s incoming class differs from those at most peer institutions. The percentage of Asian American students actually declined, from 30% to 24%, while Black and Latino/a enrollments remained stable.

Similarly, at Princeton, while Asian American enrollments dropped from about 26% to 24%, figures for Black and Latino/a students mirrored those from the previous year.

And at Duke University, Black enrollments ticked up from 12% for the class of 2023 to 13% for this fall’s class. The university also reported an increase from 12% to 14% among Latino/a students.

Are Yale, Princeton, and Duke doing something different to ensure steady enrollments among underrepresented minority students? Might their outreach efforts simply be more effective?

“When you see that these schools have no change in their Black enrollment and their Asian enrollment goes down, that is not indicative of taking race out of the equation, in my view,” Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University, told The New York Times.

It would surprise exactly no one if SFFA or a similar group sought more information, though gaining access to relevant data would prove easier at public universities.

“Are these groups looking for ways to go after schools to advance their agendas? Of course,” Weingarten said, “and Yale could become that next hot potato. If you’re an admissions officer and you’re seeing everyone else experiencing some sort of decline and you’re not, then it becomes incumbent on you to have general counsel come up with a good defense for why.”

Pursuing such a tack at this stage might appear arbitrary. One year does not make a trend.

Universities are still feeling their way in this new legal environment and adjusting practices that have been in place for decades. They’re also experimenting with new outreach tactics and leveraging financial aid to reduce barriers for underrepresented and low-income students.

Despite their best efforts, selective universities might discover that diversity numbers rebound slowly, if at all, as was the case at public institutions in states such as California and Texas, where affirmative action was banned long before the SCOTUS ruling.

We’ll see at this time next year if anything has changed.