Asian Representation at MIT Increases after Supreme Court Ruling Ending Affirmative Action By David Zimmermann
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has seen a significant increase in Asian-American representation in its first freshman class to be admitted since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in the admissions process at U.S. colleges and universities last summer.
Asian-American students make up 47 percent of the incoming freshman class, according to the new admissions data that MIT announced on Wednesday. This is up from 40 percent the prior year.
The data is consistent with the evidence that Students for Fair Admissions brought in its two lawsuits against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina: that subjective admissions criteria were used to disadvantage Asian students who performed disproportionately well on standardized tests such as the SAT, while black and Hispanic students, who scored lower on such tests on average, were given an admissions boost. As a result of the landmark ruling, it’s expected black enrollment will decrease while Asian enrollment will increase. MIT came to the same conclusion.
“We expected that this would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT,” Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill told campus publication MIT News. “That’s what has happened.”
The percentage of black students enrolled at the university dropped from 15 percent last year to 5 percent, and the percentage of Hispanic students dropped from 16 percent to 11 percent. White students stayed roughly the same — 37 percent compared to 38 percent last year.
The university notes these figures do not include international citizens, nor does the total add up to 100 percent as students may identify as more than one race or ethnicity.
MIT is the first major university to publish data on the composition of its first-year class since the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023.
“The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions,” MIT president Sally Kornbluth said in a statement. “What it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the MIT community has worked together to achieve over the past several decades.”
Before the ruling, the highly selective MIT used race-based admissions to find applicants from underrepresented minorities in order to build a diverse student body. After the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard and UNC’s admissions practices violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, MIT was one of many schools to pivot.
“Following the SFFA decision, we are unable to use race in the same way, and that change is reflected in the outcome for the Class of 2028,” Schmill said. “Indeed, we did not solicit race or ethnicity information from applicants this year, so we don’t have data on the applicant pool.”
“But I have 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,” he added.
In past years, about 25 percent of undergraduate students enrolling at MIT identified as black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander. That baseline is now down to 16 percent, according to Schmill.
Meanwhile, Students for Fair Admissions president Edward Blum, who won the Supreme Court case last year, indicated that the ruling is having a positive effect on MIT’s enrollment.
“Every student admitted to the class of 2028 at MIT will know that they were accepted only based upon their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the color of their skin,” Blum told the New York Times.
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