Harvard, UNC see drop in black student enrollment after end of affirmative action

CNN
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Samantha Greene, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said she immediately noticed a difference in the student population when she stepped on campus in August.

As chair of the Black Student Movement at the state’s flagship university, Greene said this year’s Black Student Convocation, an event that welcomes first-year students and connects them to campus resources, was much smaller than in the past.

“We’ve definitely seen a significant decline, not just in attendance, but in the presence of black students on campus,” Greene said. “We know each other, we talk to each other, and there’s just less of them.”

Last week, UNC Chapel Hill released a profile of incoming freshmen and transfers, showing that in the year since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in college admissions, the number of black students admitted to the university has fallen from 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent — a drop of about 25 percent.

Harvard University also experienced a similar decline in black enrollment, according to data released this week showing a 22 percent drop in black freshmen compared to the previous year. Both schools were named as plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that ended the long-held practice of considering race and ethnicity in college admissions.

“I chose this school because I saw the amount of diversity that was here and the results of that,” Greene said of UNC. “So, to see that kind of go down the drain, it definitely made me think about why I chose to be here.”

As admissions committees across the country release their latest racial demographics, a dim picture of the class of 2028 is beginning to emerge — one that has some experts warning about the long-term effects of a lack of diversity on campus.

The elimination of affirmative action has had an uneven impact on admissions to some of the most selective and competitive universities in the country.

At Yale University, the percentage of black students admitted this year remained steady at 14 percent compared to students who entered last fall. However, the number of Asian students dropped 20 percent compared to last year.

At UNC, despite the decline in the number of black students admitted, the percentage of Asian and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander students has increased slightly.

And at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the number of black students admitted to the class of 2028 dropped from 15% last fall to just 5% this year, while the number of Hispanic students fell by 31%.

In an interview with the university’s news organization last month, MIT dean of admissions Stu Schmill said the change in demographics reflects the impact of the Supreme Court ruling.

The class of 2027 had the “highest percentage of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in MIT’s history,” he said, and the university used race as a factor in identifying “well-prepared students emerging from the unequal K-12 educational environment.”

But after the ruling, Schmill said he has “no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-suited candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds who we would have admitted in the past — and who would have excelled.”

To further complicate the picture, many universities have indicated that since the end of affirmative action, students have been given the option to self-report their race on their application. Some universities have refused to do so, skewing the available demographic data.

The sharp decline in the number of black students admitted to UNC Chapel Hill quickly sparked outrage from students and alumni. In a press conference following the release of the data, Rachelle Feldman, the university’s vice provost for enrollment, said it was too early to know whether the changes in demographics were a pattern.

“At Chapel Hill, we are fully compliant in our admissions process, but we also take our service to the state very seriously and work to reach students and applicants in all 100 counties and ensure that everyone, regardless of background within North Carolina or beyond, who deserves a place here … feels welcome and supported and can thrive,” Feldman said.

William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard University’s dean of admissions and financial aid, made a similar pledge in an effort to convince the campus and the general public that the Ivy League university is committed to creating a diverse student body.

“Our community is strongest when we bring together students from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs,” he said in a statement. “And our community thrives when people with diverse perspectives come together — inside and outside the classroom — to solve a common challenge by seeing it through the eyes of another.”

But for Ed Blum, the legal activist whose lawsuit against Harvard and UNC ultimately ended the college’s affirmative action practices, the impact of the court’s ruling is mixed. Blum told CNN in an email that he believes the Supreme Court’s ruling “has been a tremendous benefit to all students.”

“The easiest part of my job is convincing my fellow Americans that a student’s race should not be used as a factor in college admissions,” Blum said. “In dozens of polls — Gallop, Pew Research, New York Times and others — substantial majorities of Americans of all races do not believe that a student’s race should be used in college admissions.”

History shows that ending affirmative action can have long-term economic consequences for students of color. The backlash against affirmative action policies reached a fever pitch in the 1990s, leading several states, including Texas, Washington, Florida, and California, to enact bans on race-conscious admissions policies.

Zachary Bleemer, a professor of economics at Princeton University who studies the impact of affirmative action bans, said that the bans passed in the 1990s — as now — had an immediate effect on the diversity of the student body.

When California ended affirmative action in 1998, “you saw an immediate 40 to 50 percent drop in black and Hispanic enrollment at Berkeley and UCLA, the two most selective schools in the state,” Bleemer said.

Bleemer also examined the lasting effects of the ban over the following decade, finding that more than 1,000 fewer students from underrepresented minority groups enrolled at the University of California each year.

For black and Hispanic students, losing access to California’s most selective colleges and universities also had long-term economic consequences.

“When affirmative action bans are implemented, black and Hispanic students flock to less selective universities and, as a result, are slightly less likely to earn a college degree, earn a degree in a lucrative STEM field, or earn a master’s degree,” he said.

“If you follow them into the labor market, you see a meaningful decline in wages, which decline by 5 or 6 percent, because they end up going to a less selective school.”

But in the years since the bans were put in place, Bleemer said schools have found ways to maintain diversity through racially neutral admissions policies. In states like Texas and Florida, top-tier admissions policies guarantee automatic acceptance to public schools for students who graduate high school in the top 10% and 20% of their classes, respectively.

Other schools, such as those in California, have adopted a holistic approach to admissions that places less emphasis on test scores and instead looks at an applicant’s qualifications as a whole. These programs tend to enroll black and Hispanic students, Bleemer said, but not to the same extent as race-conscious affirmative action policies.

Bleemer said he thinks the end of affirmative action offers American colleges and universities an opportunity to realign their admissions processes with their values.

“In many cases, universities themselves are realizing how big an impact the ban has had, and they are rethinking what they want the composition of their university to be, and they are putting in place policies — racially neutral policies — that better align with their admissions interests,” he said.

For Greene, the sudden change in her student population also presents an opportunity for student organizations like the Black Student Movement to make their voices heard and voice their concerns.

“I think it’s really important for people to know and see how collective we are,” she said. “I’m just worried that community is no longer the driving force behind UNC. It’s now a select few individuals in positions of power who are changing what UNC means to students, and I worry about the university — but it doesn’t change my opinion about coming here.”

Editor’s Note: Chelsea Bailey graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.