At college campuses across America, new, returning and transfer students are already headlong into another academic year of concentrated learning mixed with new and renewed friendships.
For college and university officials, the dust won't settle for another few weeks, after many students declare or change majors, add minors and decide which classes they're taking. Only then will America's higher-education enrollment picture become clear — and the numbers become official.
As those numbers began to emerge in recent days, I and many others wanted to see the impact that the U.S. Supreme Court's affirmative action decision had on enrollment diversity at some of the nation's most elite institutions.
In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in the California Bakke case that universities could consider race as one of several factors when making admission decisions as a part of institutional goals, including having a diverse student body. The ruling did not mandate that universities had to do that, but it gave higher education leaders the option to include race as a part of providing their students with more diverse experiences.
This is the first academic year that colleges and universities have had to handle admissions without affirmative action. The impact of the Supreme Court's June 2023 decision to prohibit race-specific affirmative action admissions appears to be mixed, so far. Some campuses already are experiencing less enrollment diversity, while others have weathered the anticipated storm — at least this year.
According to Forbes, the number of Black students at Tufts, an elite private research university in the Boston area, dropped 35% — from 7.3% to 4.7%. Boston University also saw a drop in the number of Black students, from 9% to 3%.
CNN reported that the number of Black students admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology declined from 15% last fall to 5% this fall. Inside Higher Education reported that Amherst College welcomed fewer Black students this year by eight percentage points.
Meanwhile, Louisiana's only elite, or selective, higher education institution, Tulane University, saw mixed results. The number of Black students enrolled at the Uptown New Orleans school rose 1%, while Asian-American, Hispanic and multi-racial student numbers each fell 1% compared to last year.
"This year, Tulane admitted 14% of the 32,000 students who applied for a spot in the class of 2028," reporter Marie Fazio wrote earlier this week. "Of those incoming students, 6% are Black, 5% are Asian American, 12% are Hispanic, 5% are one or more races and fewer than 2% are Native American."
Tulane officials wouldn't discuss how the school's admission strategies have changed since the high court's decision. In a statement, a spokesperson said the St. Charles Avenue school was pleased that its students make up “one of the most ethnically, internationally and socio-economically representative first-year classes in Tulane’s history.”
We had a good run with higher education affirmative action. It helped colleges and universities provide students with campus communities that include people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different parts of the world. It worked well, even though it could've been better.
Some students and their families prefer community and technical colleges over four-year institutions. Some prefer large, state-supported institutions over small, private ones.
Some prefer institutions whose students all or mostly all share the same religious beliefs. Some prefer historically Black colleges and universities.
Even at those institutions, however, it's important to provide students with a diverse mix of classmates with different perspectives based on their lived experiences.
Many highly selective, expensive institutions such as Amherst, Harvard, MIT and Tulane have maintained their academic rigor while adding opportunities for students to expand their worldviews and become engaged citizens who appreciate, respect and value individuals' differences.
One year into higher education's post-affirmative action world is but a snapshot. It'll take five or more years to see the real impact that the U.S. Supreme Court has had on higher education enrollment.
In the meantime, colleges and universities can still find ways to remain welcoming to all applicants. The high court's decision need not return higher education to the days of largely White male student bodies that many institutions served for generations — or even centuries.
There's room for administrators, professors, staff, families and students to push these institutions to remain inclusive — even as courts reconsider the benefits that Americans enjoy these days because so many of them graduated from diverse colleges and universities in the last 50 years.
Hopefully, we can do even better in the next 50 years.
