Courtesy of chensiyuan, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Following the abolition of affirmative action by the Supreme Court on June 29, 2023, colleges and universities around Boston are seeing a significant decline in Black enrollment among first-year students, indicating how the new policy may transform the demographic makeup of higher education.
The newly-implemented Supreme Court decision on the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College now prevents colleges and universities from considering an applicant’s race as a part of their application, requiring these institutions to reevaluate their admissions process.
Harvard University saw a decline in Black students from 18% to 14% , Northeastern University experienced a cut from almost 8% to 5%, and Boston College (BC) saw their Black enrollment drop from 7% to 6%. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston University (BU) saw the sharpest decline in the area, with their enrollment dropping from 15% to 5% and from 9% to just 3% in their respective first-year classes.
Newly-inaugurated BU President Melissa Gilliam characterized the drop as “concerning and disappointing” in an interview with BU Today. In order to combat the decline in Black enrollment, she announced that BU would be establishing a task force to evaluate future steps that can be taken to ensure a diverse student body.
“Diversity is a core value of this institution, and we have to learn and improve,” said Gilliam in the interview with BU Today, emphasizing that the task force will examine a “full array of strategies to maintain the excellent and diverse classes we have attained in the past decade.” The initiative will reconsider recruitment methods, application evaluation procedures, and admissions marketing.
MIT Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill shared a similar sentiment, underlining that racial and ethnic diversity on campus is important both to the university and its student body.
“[Students] specifically tell us in surveys that attending a diverse institution is important to them and that they value this quality in their MIT experience,” said Schmill in an interview with MIT News. “When you bring together people with different ideas and experiences who share common interests, aptitudes, and match for MIT’s mission, they contribute their individual talents to collective excellence.”
While enrollment of Black students saw a significant decline, some minority groups saw an increase in numbers across Boston campuses. While the number Black and Asian students dropped at Tufts, the number of Hispanic/Latinx students grew; at Harvard, Asian student demographics remained fixed while Hispanic/Latinx students increased. Similarly, BU saw an increase in both groups’ numbers, as did Northeastern and BC.
Despite the Supreme Court’s decision on Students for Fair Admissions, research has shown that all students benefit from education in a more diverse learning environment. A 2016 study from The Century Foundation found that “students who attend colleges and universities with more racially and ethnically diverse student bodies are said to be exposed to a wider array of experiences, outlooks, and ideas that can potentially enhance the education of all students,” providing them with intercultural knowledge that prepares them for future engagement with a variety of people from different backgrounds.
This decrease in Black enrollment following the Court’s decision is likely caused by funding and resource gaps between schools with the most and least students of color. Data from The Education Trust found that, in 2022, high schools with the highest percentage of Black students received 16% less than those with the lowest percentage in state and local funding. The study also found that unequal allocation of resources leads to an unequal distribution of test scores, with students benefiting greatly academically from higher staffing, better resources, and more focused and individualized tutoring.
A study from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also found that schools with a vast majority of Black and Hispanic students are at least twice as likely to not have calculus or computer science programs than their majority-white counterparts.
These racial disparities in the allocation of educational resources lead to inevitable discrepancies between the college applications of white students and of students of color. When racial identity cannot be evaluated in the decision process, admissions teams are unable to holistically examine a student’s educational experience and the resources that are statistically less accessible to students of color, putting up further barriers to creating equity in education.
“I would love to see leading institutions start to have a dialogue that gets us a robust critique and reevaluation of merit,” said Libby Adler, a Northeastern professor of law and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, in a panel interview following the Supreme Court’s decision. “There is no neutral way to do university admissions. You choose what merit is — it’s a political choice and it has distributive consequences.”
If this pattern continues without being mitigated by universities’ response measures, we may continue to see lower rates of Black students admitted at elite colleges. If universities seek to retain diverse student bodies, they can be more proactive in their recruitment measures and more holistic in their application evaluation. As Adler emphasized, admissions processes are not neutral, and lamenting a lack of diversity without simultaneously adopting countermeasures will likely not result in any structural or demographic changes to a university’s student body.
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