Supreme Court has Changed the Racial Mix in College Enrollment

Supreme Court has Changed the Racial Mix in College Enrollment

As this article points out, racial minorities have not been excluded. Their enrollment has gone up in some places.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

How a Supreme Court Decision Changed the Racial Mix at Colleges

In 2024, one year after the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could no longer consider an applicant’s racial or ethnic identity, the number of underrepresented minority students enrolling at highly selective colleges fell significantly, according to a new report from the nonprofit group Class Action. At the same time, many other institutions saw an increase in Black and Hispanic students.

The analysis, based on recently released federal data from more than 3,000 colleges, provides a detailed rendering of the immediate impact of the court’s decision by comparing enrollment outcomes in fall 2024 — the first admissions cycle after the ruling took effect — to those in 2022 and 2023. (Class Action’s report compares the 2024 data with averaged data for 2022 and 2023.)

The findings confirm that the still-unfolding story of what happened after the court’s decision in SFFA v. Harvard is as big and complex as higher education itself. Among the 50 most selective colleges, enrollment of Black freshmen declined by 27 percent and enrollment of Hispanic freshmen declined by 10 percent. Those drops were steepest at so-called Ivy Plus institutions (the eight Ivy League colleges, along with Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago).

But the picture looked different at public flagship universities, where enrollment of incoming underrepresented minority students increased by 8 percent. The number of Black freshmen was up nearly 20 percent at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and up 50 percent at the University of Mississippi. Meanwhile, Hispanic enrollment increased 35 percent at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and 50 percent at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.

Other sectors also saw overall increases in underrepresented minority students, including public four-year universities (5.9 percent), land-grant institutions (5.6 percent), and private colleges accepting at least a quarter of their applicants (7 percent).

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