Minority Count Dips at Top Colleges After SCOTUS Ruling

Black and Latino enrollment at several major universities has dropped significantly since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last year that severely limited, if not ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions, The Hill reported Thursday.

Data released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander students make up only 16% of the class of 2028, compared with 25% of undergraduate students in recent years.

Black enrollment fell 8 percentage points at Amherst, 3 points at Tufts and nearly 1 point at the University of Virginia.

The University of North Carolina on Thursday also reported sharp declines in enrollment of new Black and Hispanic students compared with a year ago — the number of Black first-year and transfer students dropped more than 25% for this academic year and the number of new Hispanic students declined about 7%.

"This is about what people anticipated when the Supreme Court decision came down last summer, in part because affirmative action was a tool among many that was seeking to mitigate some of these systemic impediments to marginalized groups' ability to enter into competitive postsecondary institutions," Timothy Welbeck, director for the Center of Anti-Racism at Temple University, told The Hill. "And so removing one of those tools would then make it harder for members of those groups to gain admittance to some of these institutions,"

The Supreme Court in June 2023 ruled in a 6-3 decision that admissions programs used by the University of North Carolina and Harvard — the nation's oldest private and public colleges, respectively — violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars racial discrimination by government entities. It forced higher education institutions to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.

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