When the Supreme Court banned the use of race in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, elite universities variously condemned and pledged to subvert the verdict. Now that multiple top schools have announced the racial composition of their 2028 classes, we’re learning what that looks like in practice.
Ending race-based affirmative action was expected to change elite universities’ demographics substantially. Indeed, in SFFA, many of these schools signed an amicus brief arguing that it was imperative that they be allowed to continue discriminating, because race-neutral methods would keep them from admitting classes with—in their view—enough black and Hispanic students.
Yet, in their first admitted undergraduate classes following the Supreme Court’s ruling, several top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Duke, have seen little to none of the expected shift in the racial composition. On average, the cumulative black and Hispanic shares of these schools’ incoming classes has declined by just 0.6 percentage points (from 26.8 percent to 26.2 percent), while the Asian share has fallen 2.4 percentage points (from 32 percent to 29.6 percent). Though schools record their demographic data differently—some exclude international students from their calculations, for example—the general pattern indicated by these results is troubling.
We know that elite universities previously discriminated against white and Asian applicants to benefit black and Hispanic students. So, universities like Yale that signed the amicus brief and have seen little change in their demographics after SFFA are either breaking the law now, or they were misleading the Supreme Court when they declared race-neutral methods insufficient to achieve their diversity goals. Which is it? The answer is probably both.
One possibility is that elite universities achieved their diversity targets, post-SFFA, by awarding applicants bonus points based on socioeconomic factors, such as having below-average parental income. While schools such as Harvard had previously enacted such policies to a limited extent, as Duke professor Peter Arcidiacono showed in his expert analysis of admission data in SFFA, maintaining their pre-2023 demographics without race-based affirmative action would have required universities to expand their socioeconomic preferences dramatically. This would have resulted in a large increase in the number of poor and otherwise disadvantaged students admitted to these schools.
But these same elite universities that have largely maintained their pre-SFFA racial makeup have seen no meaningful increase in poor students. On average, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Duke—each of which basically maintained their pre-SFFA share of black-or-Hispanic students—reported a meager 2.2 percentage point increase (to 22.4 percent) in the share of students eligible for Pell grants. And Princeton, Yale, and Penn, which also publish data on parent education, reported no increase at all in the share of students whose parents did not attend college. If these schools are using socioeconomic factors to preserve the size of their black and Hispanic cohorts, they have somehow done so without meaningfully increasing the proportion of poor students.
If these elite universities haven’t expanded their socioeconomic-preference policies, how have they maintained their racial breakdowns, even as peers like MIT, citing SFFA, report declines in black and Hispanic enrollment? One possibility is that their admissions officers are ignoring the ruling and are still considering race.
Another is that these schools have implemented ostensibly “race-neutral” admissions policies that are neutral in name only, by strategically altering the process to affect racial composition. For example, universities can deemphasize objective criteria, such as standardized test scores, that hurt minorities’ admissions prospects. Before SFFA, universities could simultaneously admit classes that were academically strong and met their racial targets by putting a large weight on SAT scores and awarding preferences to black and Hispanic applicants falling below the testing threshold. That is now illegal. But universities can still game the demographics of their admitted classes by choosing to deemphasize standardized tests or to abandon SAT requirements altogether.
This is precisely what happened following the passage of Proposition 209 in California in 1996, which banned the state’s public universities from considering race in admissions. The black and Hispanic shares of the admitted classes at UC Berkeley halved in fall 1998 when the ban took effect. According to a study in the Journal of Human Resources, the school avoided an even larger reduction in minority admissions by shifting weight away from performance on standardized tests—where minority applicants, on average, did comparatively poorly—toward high school grades, where racial gaps were smaller. For schools eager to discriminate, the principle on display here is almost boundless: find a series of variables that jointly predict race, and reward or penalize applicants accordingly.
This, of course, is nothing more than racial bias beneath a facade of race-neutrality. And in other contexts, it is illegal. If an employer penalized job applicants who were able to speak Spanish (when the employer had no plausible reason to care, let alone to disfavor an applicant’s having such an ability), we would recognize this as a thinly veiled attempt to discriminate against Hispanics. Similarly, an accounting firm that only hired applicants taller than six feet would also immediately be recognized as harboring anti-female animus. For a prohibition of racial discrimination to mean anything, it must also ban the transparent use of non-race characteristics as proxies for race. Chief Justice John Roberts warned against such attempts in his SFFA majority opinion, stating that “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today . . . the prohibition against racial discrimination is ‘levelled at the thing not the name’.”
Of course, without access to their admissions data, it is impossible to know exactly how Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and other top schools have managed to engineer their new classes’ composition. But given the willingness of elite colleges to cover their tracks—claiming that race was only ever a positive factor, that race was never determinative, and denying the use of racial quotas—they have long lost the benefit of the doubt. Such schools’ claims that they are complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling should be given a level of deference commensurate with the amount of evidence they have provided: zero.
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