A handful of highly selective institutions have released demographic data on their incoming Class of 2028 cohorts, the first class admitted since the Summer 2023 Supreme Court ruling barring the use of race-conscious practices in college admissions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for instance, announced that, among the 1,102 students in the new cohort, less than 1 in 6 incoming first-year students, or about 16%, identified as Black, Latine, and Native American and Pacific Islander, compared to a baseline of 25% of undergraduate students in previous years, The New York Times reports. Black student enrollment showed the steepest decline, falling to 5% for the Class of 2028, compared to 15% for the Class of 2027.
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“The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions,” Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, said in an announcement. “[W]hat 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.”
Racial disparities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) K-12 education may also have led to a less diverse class, says Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions. MIT does not require applicants to take certain classes, but it considers “an ideal preparation to include calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, and four years of English.” However, among public high schools where 75% or more of the students are Black and/or Latine, nearly two-thirds do not offer calculus, over half do not offer any form of computer science, and over half do not offer any form of physics. Kornbluth says MIT is committed to reaching out to “talented students whose potential has been limited or masked by a lack of opportunity” in order to reduce those inequities.
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A closer look at the Class of 2028
Accounts from other colleges, meanwhile, have varied. At Amherst College and Tufts University, students of color make up a smaller share of the first-year class as well, Inside Higher Ed reports. Around 44% of students in the incoming class at Tufts are students of color, down from 50% the previous year, says The Boston Globe. Amherst saw a steeper drop: the share of students of color fell from 47% of last year’s incoming class to 38% this year.
However, changes at Emory University, Yale University and the University of Virginia (UVA) were less pronounced. At Emory, representation of Black and Latine first-year students fell slightly by 1.5 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively. Emory credits several initiatives for reaching a broad range of students, such as its partnership with QuestBridge National College Match program, which matches the university with high-achieving students from low-income households, and its expansion of the Emory Advantage program, which meets 100% of undergraduate students’ demonstrated need and eliminates need-based loans by replacing them with institutional grants and scholarships.
Yale’s Black, Latine, and Native American first-year enrollment remained steady year over year, according to the university’s admissions office. Latine first-year student enrollment grew by 1%, reaching the largest share of Latine students in the university’s history. Yale said it not only received a record number of applications but also the largest number of applications from students who identify as members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Last September, Yale adopted new initiatives to expand its outreach to a broader range of prospective students, such as incorporating new place-based data from Opportunity Atlas, a mapping project that measures economic mobility across the country.
At UVA, the number of Latine first-year students rose 2.2% from last year, while Black student enrollment fell slightly by 1.4%. Pell-Grant recipients, meanwhile, make up nearly a quarter (24%) of the new class, up from 14% from five years ago. “This class is perhaps the most socioeconomically diverse class in our history,” says Stephen Farmer, UVA’s vice provost for enrollment. UVA officials say need-based scholarships offered through its Access UVA program and the expansion of financial aid last year have helped bring diversity to its campus. UVA’s partnership with public schools in low-income districts also may have supported their diversity efforts, experts tell the Times.
Demographic data for Harvard University and the University of North Carolina—the two universities that were at the center of the Supreme Court cases that ended race-conscious admissions—have yet to be released, the Times reports. “The racial makeup of their freshman classes may offer the most significant indicator of the impact of the affirmative action ban,” says the Times.
With the end of race-conscious admissions, experts predicted admissions offices at highly selective institutions would struggle to find race-neutral alternatives to building diverse student populations. Unless institutions develop new strategies, “we stand on the cusp of what I fear will become a lost generation of Black students at many leading colleges,” Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on the Supreme Court’s rulings on education, tells the Times.