Supreme Court's Ruling Against Affirmative Action Gets the Intended Result

University of North Carolina recently released a profile of incoming freshman and transfer students that shows in the year since the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in college admissions, the number of Black students admitted to the university dropped from 10.5% to 7.8% – an incredible drop of around 25%.

Harvard University also experienced a similar drop in Black enrollment, according to data released this week which shows a 22% decrease in Black freshmen when compared to the year before. Both schools were named as plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case in which activist conservative judges ruled against the long-held practice of considering race and ethnicity in college admissions.

“I chose this school because I saw the robust amount of diversity that was here and the results of it as well,” said Samantha Greene, president of the Black Student Movement at UNC. “So, to see that kind of go a little bit down the gutter definitely has me thinking about my choice to be here.”

As admissions offices across the country release their latest racial demographics, a murky portrait is beginning to emerge of the Class of 2028 – one that’s left some experts warning about the long-term effects of a lack of diversity on campus. 

At Yale University, the percentage of Black students admitted this year held steady at 14% when compared to those who started last fall, but the number of Asian students fell by 20% compared to last year.  

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the number of Black students admitted to the Class of 2028 utterly collapsed-- falling from 15% last fall to just 5% this year (a whopping 67% decrease), while Latino students saw a 31% decrease.  In an interview with the university’s news outlet last month, Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions, said the change in demographics reflects the negative impact of the Supreme Court’s widely discredited ruling.

Last year's freshman class had the “highest proportion of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in MIT history,” Schmill said, and the university used race as a factor in identifying “well-prepared students who emerged from the unequal K-12 educational environment.”  But after the shameful Supreme Court ruling, Schmill said he has “no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-matched applicants from historically under-represented backgrounds who in the past we would have admitted — and who would have excelled.” 

History shows ending affirmative action can have long-term economic repercussions for students of color. Backlash to 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, an economics professor at Princeton University who studies the impact of affirmative action bans, said the bans passed in the 1990s – similar to today – had an immediate negative effect on the diversity of the student body.  When California ended affirmative action in 1998, what “you saw was this immediate decline between 40 and 50% of Black and Hispanic enrollment at Berkeley and UCLA, the two most selective schools in the state,” Bleemer said.  For Black and Hispanic students, losing access to California’s most selective colleges and universities also had long-term economic consequences.  “If you follow [Black and Hispanic students] forward to the labor market, you see meaningful decline from the order of 5 or 6% of wages that disappear because they end up going to a less selective school instead.”