Data shows drop in Black, Hispanic students at top colleges

Enrolment of Black and Hispanic freshmen in America’s most selective universities and colleges fell by 25.5% and almost 15% respectively in the first full cycle after the Supreme Court of the United States ended affirmative action in admissions in 2023, according to a new study.

At Harvard University, which, along with the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, UNC), was one of the two universities sued by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the percentage of incoming African Americans fell to 7% from 10% from the baseline average of the 2022 and 2023 academic years, while the percentage of Hispanics remained stable at 11% of the incoming class.

At UNC the number of Black students admitted fell from 526 in the baseline years to 356 in 2024 while Hispanics stayed stable at around 600.

The study, The Future of Fair Admissions: A First Look at College Enrollment Outcomes after the End of Affirmative Action (Future of Fair Admissions), was published last week by Class Action, an NGO founded by students in the wake of the SFFA decision.

By contrast, at the flagship universities in the state systems, which include, for example, the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, the percentage of Black students in the incoming class of 2024 allegedly rose by 8.4% and of Hispanics by 7.7%.

Following the SFFA decision, “the expectation was that we would see Black and Hispanic enrolment drop at the highly selective Ivy League schools and those institutions that admit fewer than 25% of applicants”, James S Murphy, a senior fellow with Class Action and author of Future of Fair Admissions, told University World News.

But there are not a lot of these in America, not even 100, and there are only 200 to 300 colleges that even considered race in their admissions processes prior to the SFFA decision, either because of state restrictions or because they didn’t care (having, essentially, open enrolment policies), Murphy explained.

“I was not expecting that 80% of state flagship universities would see growth in their student of colour enrolment. The University of Mississippi having a big increase in the number of Black students [338 to 506, or 40%] was not something I was expecting,” Murphy said.

However, he hastened to add that his study did not find a silver lining in the effect of the SFFA decision.

“It was a bad decision. I think it was argued simplistically. It ignores the real impact that being Black or Hispanic means to a student in America, the impact on your opportunities and how you are considered in the enrolment process,” he said.

The data for Future of Fair Admissions comes from the US government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). The cohort examined includes 3,198 colleges and universities that enrolled more than 3.5 million first-time students over three years. The 2024 enrolment figures were compared to an average of 2022 and 2023.

Murphy averaged these years to dampen the statistical noise caused by the “lingering effects of COVID-19 [on enrolment] and severe malfunctions with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) [that] may have affected application and enrolment patterns”, he writes in the report.

An additional caveat is the significant increase from about 1% in the baseline years to 5% in 2024 of students choosing not to indicate their race. “These are known unknowns” that will be examined in a subsequent study, Murphy said.

Ivy league data

Overall, America’s top 50 universities enrolled 2,727 fewer underrepresented minorities (1,444 of whom were Black and 1,223 Hispanic) in 2024 than in the baseline period.

Of large institutions, Johns Hopkins University enrolled almost 70% fewer Black students than it had previously and saw the largest percentage decline; the percentage decline for Boston University was 63%, while University of California, Berkley was near 70%.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology enrolled about 58% fewer Black students while New York University (NYU) enrolled 47% fewer. At each of these universities the decline in enrolment of Hispanic students was respectively about 53%, 8%, 5%, 38% and at NYU 41%.

Every Ivy League school enrolled fewer Black and Hispanic students than before the SFFA decision. The steepest decline was at Brown University, which enrolled 43% fewer Black students in 2024, followed by Cornell University, which enrolled around 37% fewer.

Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth each enrolled between 1% and 2% fewer Black students.

The figures for Hispanic students are quite different. The greatest drop, -38%, was at Cornell, followed by Brown, where the decline was 22%. But, Yale and Dartmouth both recorded double digit increases: +12 and +24, respectively.

American universities ranked between 151 and 200 (the least competitive as determined by admission rates of the five bands Murphy isolated) enrolled 10% more Black students (618) and 6% (1,902) more Hispanic students.

Increased diversity in state flagship universities

Across the country, the surprising increase in enrolment by Black and Hispanic students in state flagship universities following the SFFA decision was 8.4% and 7.7%.

The three universities that saw the largest increases in the number of Black students are in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina.

Mississippi and Louisiana are the states with the first and second highest percentage of Black students – 38% and 33% in their populations – while Black students comprise 26% of South Carolina’s.

The percentage of Black students at University of Mississippi grew by 50% or 168 students, while at Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College (LSU), the percentage of Black students grew by 30% or 490 students. The University of South Carolina-Columbia saw an increase in Black enrolment of 16% or 102 students.

According to Murphy, “on aggregate 80% of American universities saw an increase in diversity, ie, greater enrolments of Blacks and Hispanics. The University of Michigan is a good example. It enrolled more Black students in 2024 than it had since 2001 (and that was before Michigan banned affirmative action).

“If we asked Michigan why, they’d say because they were doing better outreach. And probably that did have something to do with it.”

But, Murphy explained, what we are seeing is the impact of what he calls the “cascade effect”: Black students with excellent academic records who, because affirmative action was outlawed, were not accepted in the country’s most elite schools, shifted to what Americans call their “safety”, which in many cases is a state flagship university.

“Did LSU really up its recruitment or University of Mississippi really up its recruitment of African American students? It's possible. Anything's possible. But the most logical explanation of the widespread effect is this kind of cascade effect,” said Murphy.

(The effect applies to Hispanics as well. The University of South Carolina, for example, saw an increase in Hispanic enrolment of 51% or 205 students; the University of Mississippi saw an increase of 44% or 127 students; the University of Illinois-Champaign saw an increase of 24% or 276 students; and the University of Florida saw an increase of 26%, or 369 students.)

Murphy’s huge cohort allows him to drill down to private universities, where he also found the cascade effect. Syracuse University in central New York State enrolled 22% or 161 more underrepresented minorities in 2024 than in the baseline years.

The 2024 freshman class at Fordham University in New York City had 23% or 123 more Hispanic students than did the baseline years and 18% more Black students.

An outlier is the University of Miami in Florida; it saw a 50% decline (-102) in the number of its Black freshmen but an increase of almost 200 Hispanic students, or 45%.

Lifetime earning reductions

While the cascade effect helps to explain why the incoming 2024 freshman class was, with the exception of the nation’s most highly competitive colleges and universities, on balance more diverse, Murphy explained that students who enrolled in the state flagships filled spaces that in other years would have gone to weaker students, so those students then enrolled in institutions lower in the league tables.

An important ramification of this, he writes, is that when all is said and done, “the proportion of Black freshmen and Hispanic freshmen at institutions with graduation rates of over 80% dropped by 1.6 and 1 percentage points, respectively. Those are not extremely large decreases but are meaningful, particularly for the students who are enrolled at institutions with weaker outcomes”.

Equally importantly, he explained, is a lifetime earning reduction as students shift downwards in the system.

“A kid who went from Harvard to Boston College, for instance, will likely earn less, going to work at Deloitte instead of McKinsey Financial. That kid is probably going to be fine no matter what because they're really smart.

“However, there is some research on this again back in California, looking at the cascade effect there. When you look at an aggregate, what ended up happening is that Black students, and I think Latino students, 10 years later … saw a decline in earning. It’s not like they went from making US$150,000 a year to US$40,000 a year.

“But there was an actual drop there, and so that's a serious finding that we need better data on, that we need to certainly keep track of.”

This is visually represented in Future of Fair Admissions in a chart that shows that four years after graduation, Black students in the 2024 freshman class who graduated from the top 10% of colleges and universities can expect to earn US$80,657 and Hispanics US$84,748 (when White students are included, earnings rise to US$88,730).

By contrast, when calculated with all American institutions, Hispanics’ earnings dropped to US$56,805 and Blacks’ US$54,906 (the figure for all students, Whites included, is US$59,222).

A complex space

SFFA’s court action ended decades of affirmative action efforts, going back to when Lyndon B Johnson was president of the United States in the mid-1960s, seeking to equalise the opportunities Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities had in getting into higher education.

The 2024 freshman class was the first full one to apply and be admitted under new and, in some cases, changing rules.

The 2026 freshman class will be the first to be admitted after President Donald J Trump’s administration forced an end to taking diversity, equity and inclusion into account in enrolment decisions, among other rules it has put in place in the name of “meritocracy”, including pushing hard for the return of standardised tests in enrolment decisions.

Murphy’s report is the first to look at the impact of SFFA on the ground.

“The impact of this Supreme Court decision was wider than many people thought it was going to be. That’s important, because it's a reminder that college admissions is a complex space where what happens at one place is affecting what's happening in other ones.

“That's why it's very wrong-headed to simply look at an enrolment number and say, I know what's going on there. And that’s why I make this point in the report: we know what happened at best, we do not know why it happened” (absent more quantitative and reliable qualitative data).

Murphy said the Trump administration has tried to freeze funding for a couple of universities saying, “You're in violation of the Supreme Court decision. You're breaking the law based on the fact you have more Black students than last year, so you must be breaking the law because there’s no other way to achieve that.”

“This is why, I point out, in places like Elon University, Fordham, Southern Methodist University and Dartmouth, and Texas Christian Right, which is not exactly a bastion of liberalism, to be honest … in these schools the number of students of colour went up – and not necessarily, in fact, quite likely, not at all, because of policy changes or anything those people were doing.”

Rather, we are looking at an epiphenomena of the cascade effect and the fact that university applications and acceptances occur, Murphy wrote, “within a complex ecosystem where the actions and decisions of admissions officers, financial aid officers, and students themselves shape and are shaped by each other”.