RUTHFULLY YOURS

Renu Mukherjee Are Universities Following the Supreme Court’s Affirmative-Action Ban? Data suggest that some of America’s top schools may be practicing racial preferences by other means.

Posted By Ruth King on March 11th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-supreme-court-affirmative-action-racial-preferences

When the Supreme Court, in 2023, banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions, observers expected the number of black and Hispanic freshmen on elite campuses to fall and the number of Asian freshmen to rise. At many schools, however, that didn’t happen.

Admissions data reveal that Yale, Princeton, Duke, and several other highly selective schools enrolled fewer Asian students in their Classes of 2028—the first group admitted since the Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—than they did in their Classes of 2027. Black enrollment at these schools, by contrast, remained virtually unchanged.

In the run up to SFFA, these elite colleges repeatedly asserted that they could not maintain racial diversity on campuses without affirmative action. Sixteen prestigious colleges filed a joint amicus brief arguing that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.” Several had advanced the same argument in amicus briefs filed in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, earlier cases examining the use of racial preferences.

For more than two decades, universities claimed that socioeconomic preferences, geographic sorting, and other race-neutral alternatives could not achieve the same level of racial diversity on campus as could affirmative action. Yet the demographics of many schools’ Class of 2028 suggest otherwise. It raises an awkward question: Did America’s top universities mislead the Supreme Court then, or are they breaking the law now?

Consider data from an Inside Higher Ed database that tracks the demographics of the Classes of 2027 and 2028 at 31 highly selective universities. The database includes the first-year demographics for 13 of the 15 highly selective universities that alleged, in the SFFA amicus brief, that their campuses would lose racial diversity absent racial preferences. I’ve listed the demographics for 12 of those universities below. (The University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania were not included in the database. I chose to omit the California Institute of Technology because its data appeared unclear.)

Contrary to their claims, seven of these universities saw either minimal demographic change between the Classes of 2027 and 2028 or a declining share of Asian students and a corresponding increase in the share of Hispanic students, with the share of black students remaining roughly the same.

The Class of 2028 at Princeton, Emory, Yale, Duke, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, and the University of Washington in St. Louis each had fewer Asian students than did the Class of 2027. What’s more, Yale, Duke, and Dartmouth saw virtually no change in their share of incoming black freshmen, while their share of incoming Hispanic freshmen increased. These institutions argued, in their amicus brief for Harvard, that racial diversity on their campuses would suffer without affirmative action, but they seem to be managing just fine.

So, are race-neutral alternatives just as effective as race-based preferences in achieving racial diversity in higher education? Or are the “race-neutral alternatives” these universities now use merely affirmative action by another name? In other words, are elite universities currently practicing illegal discrimination?

Several highly selective universities have seen a post-SFFA surge in Asian enrollment. The share of Asian freshmen at both Brown and Carnegie Mellon increased by 4 percentage points, for example, while the share at Columbia increased by 9 percentage points. The largest spike in Asian enrollment came at Johns Hopkins, where the share of Asian students rose by 15 percentage points. While each of these institutions should be commended for following the law, they should also be scrutinized for having apparently penalized a racial group for years before 2023.

On February 14, Craig Trainor, the Department of Education’s acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, shared guidance with universities on how to comply with the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action. The Trump administration would interpret the ban, he warned, as prohibiting the use of overt racial preferences, as well as “non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information.” As the Justice and Education Departments begin assessing compliance with this guidance, they should take a close look at several of the universities mentioned here.

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