Black freshman enrollment plummets at top Massachusetts universities after affirmative action

The percentage of black freshmen fell this year from 11 percent to 3 percent at Amherst College; from 14 percent to 5 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; from 8.5 percent to 3 percent at Boston University; and from 14.5 percent to 10.4 percent at Harvard University.

Harvard reported earlier this month that black students make up 14 percent of its current freshmen, down from 18 percent last year, but those figures do not include international students or students who concealed their racial identity. The Globe recalculated Harvard’s figures to include both groups.

The end of affirmative action has not yet led to the significant increases in white freshman enrollment that some had expected. The 30 schools in Globe’s national analysis reported modest declines — less than 1 percentage point on average — in the share of white students enrolling in their freshman class. At the top 11 schools in Massachusetts, the share of white students barely budged.

Asian American students appear to have benefited the most from the affirmative action ruling. Data show that the share of Asian American freshmen increased by an average of 1.4 percentage points at 30 schools nationwide. Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the Supreme Court, alleged that the schools discriminated against Asian Americans in the admissions process.

The share of Spanish-speaking first-year students fell by about 1 percentage point across the 30 schools.

Research has found that private, highly selective colleges — which have historically been among the least diverse and have been trying to change that in recent decades — were the most likely to consider race as a factor in their admissions process before the court ruling last summer. Less competitive colleges, particularly those that accept more than 50 percent of applicants, can’t afford to be so picky and are therefore less affected by the ruling, the Pew Research Center found last year.

Several higher-education observers cautioned that the data are preliminary and that it may be too early to identify trends with just one year of information. More students this year also declined to disclose their race. Still, some scholars and advocates say they are concerned about this year’s drop in black enrollment.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Anthony Abraham Jack, a Boston University professor who studies first-generation college students and a graduate of Amherst College. “It’s going to lead to segregation in higher education. You’re going to see the top schools become whiter and wealthier.”

Jack says he worries about the long-term effects of fewer black students attending top universities.

“This will fundamentally limit the ability to make the people who lead our most powerful institutions look like America, and not just the wealthier, whiter 1 percent,” Jack said.

The MIT Black Students’ Union and the Black Graduate Students’ Association said in a statement they “are deeply concerned about the recently released demographic data for MIT’s class of 2028.”

“While not perfect, affirmative action was established as a tool to combat centuries of structural racism — slavery, Jim Crow segregation, redlining, mass incarceration — that systematically keep Black and other minority groups out of higher education,” the student groups wrote.

MIT blamed the decline in the number of freshmen of color on “persistent and profound racial inequality in American K-12 education,” Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions and student financial services, wrote in a blog post last month.

Leaders at Amherst College, which reported a significant decline in both black and Hispanic freshmen enrollment, said in a letter to the community last month that they were committed to “continuing and deepening” efforts to recruit diverse students “in accordance with the law.”

“This process will take time, but we are confident that we will continue to build a community that reflects the diversity of the world around us,” Amherst leaders wrote.

Natasha Warikoo, a sociology professor at Tufts University who has written extensively about affirmative action in college admissions, said that in states that previously banned affirmative action, the share of students of color dropped dramatically in the first few years after their bans and then started to rise again. She added that it’s “not a surprise” to see inconsistent enrollment numbers at colleges that take many factors into account in the admissions process.

The Supreme Court ruling did not end the holistic admissions policy, in which top universities consider a range of factors beyond academia, including applicants’ life experiences, challenges overcome and family or work commitments. Many universities added essay prompts in response to the ruling, allowing prospective students to share context about their lives. Schools also said they had increased outreach efforts to more high schools and partnered with more community groups and nonprofits to reach first-generation, low-income and rural students.

The Supreme Court warned that schools should not rely too heavily on temporary solutions to “establish, through application essays or other means, the regime we today consider illegitimate.”

It is unclear at this point why black freshman enrollments declined at most schools while remaining steady at a handful of others, including Princeton University, where black freshman enrollment remained roughly stable, and Yale University, where black freshman enrollment grew by half a percentage point. A Yale spokesperson said the pool of applicants for the incoming class was “the largest in Yale’s history and included the most applications ever from students identifying as members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.”

Students for Fair Admissions said earlier this week that it would investigate whether Yale in New Haven, Princeton in New Jersey and Duke University in North Carolina are complying with the Supreme Court ruling. SFFA argues that “it is not possible for these schools to obtain the racial outcomes for the class of 2028 that they have reported without using racial proxies that the Supreme Court prohibits.”

“SFFA hopes that these colleges will provide us and the public with specific, detailed information about their new admissions policies,” SFFA President Edward Blum said in a statement.

A Princeton spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

A Duke spokesman said the university is “committed to compliance with the law.” A Yale spokesman said its “admissions practices are fully consistent with the law and the 2023 Supreme Court ruling.”

Warikoo said Students for Fair Admissions’ concerns about Duke, Yale and Princeton are “nonsense.”

“I don’t think these things will go anywhere, but it is disturbing how much they are investing in their crusade against racial justice,” Warikoo said.

Universities don’t use consistent methods to report their data, complicating early analysis of admissions numbers. Five schools — Harvard, Boston College, Carleton, Middlebury and Haverford — didn’t report the share of white students in the class of 2028. Eleven schools, including MIT, counted multiracial students across multiple demographic groups, potentially increasing the number of students of color. Other schools, such as Tufts, calculated percentages without including international students. The Globe recalculated Tuft’s percentages to include international students.

Some higher education experts hope the decline in the number of black freshmen will spark a conversation about how to improve access to top universities.

James Murphy, director of postsecondary policy at Education Reform Now, a nonprofit think tank, said the decline in students of color at schools like Amherst and MIT was particularly “painful” because those institutions have invested significantly in diversifying their student populations in recent years, and neither school uses legacy preferences, which give priority to children of alumni.

Murphy, who created an online tool to track enrollment results after the Supreme Court ruling, said the MIT and Amherst results are a reminder that doing away with traditional preferences isn’t a “magic bullet,” but he still hopes top schools will reconsider old practices, such as recruiting large numbers of students from prestigious private high schools and giving big boosts to athletes.

“I hope this is another incentive to get rid of those practices,” Murphy said.

Hilary Burns can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @HilarysburnsNeena Hagen can be reached at [email protected].