Courtesy of Collin Lloyd
The matriculation of the Class of 2028 marks the first round of college admissions after the US Supreme Court struck down their 2003 decision Grutter v. Bolinger, a landmark case that upheld affirmative action. As the 2024-2025 academic year began, waves of outrage struck many social media and news platforms as demographics for incoming first-year students at many top universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and Amherst College saw various degrees of decreased enrollment, particularly of Black and Native American students.
The term affirmative action in college admissions refers to the practice of promoting equity where some students of color experience discrimination and generational inequity in access to education. The history of affirmative action in Supreme Court cases dates back to 1978, when they ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that race, particularly affirmative action, could be a factor in college admissions, but that racial quotas were discriminatory.
On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court overruled Grutter v. Bolinger in the case Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard and its companion case against UNC, declaring that race could no longer be considered in any student admissions process. In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative-leaning legal organization that advocates against affirmative action, sued Harvard University and UNC for alleged discrimination against Asian American students. The Supreme Court ruled 6-2 against Harvard, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissenting, and Ketanji Jackson, despite not taking part in the decision itself, joining their dissent. The decision alleged that Harvard and UNC, in a consolidated case, both failed to avoid racially stereotyping students, and never specified at what point in time they would end race-based admissions, two requirements of Grutter v. Bollinger.
Though race can no longer be an official factor in admissions, the decision specified that universities are still able to consider race; for example, a student may mention their struggles in regard to their race in part of their personal essay, or those struggles may be mentioned in a letter of recommendation for the students.
New waves of conversation surrounding the merits and pitfalls of affirmative action struck the internet after MIT released the demographics of their incoming first-year class earlier this fall. Strikingly, their percentage of enrolled students that self-identify as Black dropped from 15% in the class of 2027 to 5% in the class of 2028. J. Brian Charles at the Chronicle of Higher Education says that “less than one in six incoming MIT freshmen, or 16 percent, identify as Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander, which represents a drop of nine percentage points, or 36 percent, from previous classes.”
At Tufts University, the overall percentage of students of color in the Class of 2028 dropped to 44% from the previous year’s 50%. Black student enrollment dropped from 7.3% last year to 4.7% this year, and Asian and Indigenous students experienced similar declines.
Amherst College, different from MIT and Tufts, published the racial demographics of their class years in three categories: federal reporting guidelines, self reported identities (domestic), and self reported identities (international). Self-reported identities allow students to indicate that they identify with more than one race or ethnicity, and therefore numbers differ from the standardized category, though all college students self-report their ethnicities. In the Amherst College Class of 2027, 11% of students were Black, 15% self-reported, but in the Class of 2028, 3% of students were Black, 6% self-reported. Overall, the percentage of students who self-identify as people of color fell from 47% to 38% this year.
One of the largest arguments for affirmative action to remain was to combat legacy admissions, a common phenomenon in admissions processes that favors candidates with immediate family members who previously attended the institution. Amherst College and MIT both previously ended legacy admissions, though they still see discrepancies between numbers of white students and students of color. Having affirmative action in place at those institutions sometimes indirectly counteracted legacy preference by assisting first-generation students and students of color, but the process also attempted to generally bridge the gaps made by cycles of generational poverty, discrimination, and lack of access to education. However, Harvard, whose case ended affirmative action, still practices legacy admissions.
Some college administrators and admission experts cautioned against reading into the numbers in the first year after the case, especially as admissions processes change. Between colleges shedding legacy admissions, changing how they consider standardized test scores, handling a post-COVID-19 world, and any other reasons, college admissions processes change daily. Therefore, numbers and demographics can seem varied and change trends, though many pointed out that the severe drops in enrollment of Black students, uncharacteristic of typical single-year changes.
In addition, many online respondents pointed to the 1996 affirmative action ban in California’s Proposition 209. According to a 2020 study by Zachary Bleemer, as the ban took place for the Class of 1998, Black and Latino enrollment at UCLA and UC Berkeley fell by 40%. After 1998, the total enrollment of Black and Latino students at the University of California “declined by about 800 students per year after 1998.” For many, this study provides a clear parallel to the beginnings of trends we see after the federal ban.
Connecticut College upholds that it does not practice legacy admissions, and that the institution very steadfastly stands with affirmative action. The College was part of an amicus curiae brief during SFFA v. Harvard with 33 other liberal arts institutions, including the aforementioned Amherst College, citing the “substantial harm” that a decision in favor of SFFA would cause to all colleges, especially liberal arts colleges, and of “the extent to which Grutter remains workable and scrupulously applied by small colleges.” In an article on the Conn website published after the SFFA v. Harvard decision, Dean of the College and interim Dean of Equity and Inclusion Erika Smith stated, “together we will continue to look for other ways to bring the full spectrum of the best and the brightest through our institutions and into leadership roles in the future.
