A Supreme Court ruling could cut the number of Black and Hispanic students in the Ivy League

With the US Supreme Court eliminating the use of race in college admissions, selective colleges are expected to face challenges in maintaining diversity in their student populations.

After state bans on affirmative action in admissions were passed in Michigan and California, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and UC Berkeley — some of the nation’s top universities — saw enrollment of underrepresented students of color drop sharply.

The nonprofit group Students for Fair Admissions went all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that affirmative action in admissions is unfair and leads to discrimination against more academically qualified applicants.

Lawyers for Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who defended the practice before the court, countered that affirmative action is still necessary today in a society where racism and segregation persist. Education reformers are concerned that less diverse student bodies will one day mean fewer professionals of color in industries from medicine to politics. Affirmative action proponents also argue that a diverse campus prepares all students better for life in a society where they’ll encounter of people of all backgrounds.

Black and Latino representation is expected to drop at elite colleges around the nation, while the share of white and Asian students rises.

“Affirmative action bans lead Black and Hispanic students to cascade into less-selective universities. Since more-selective universities in the United States tend to provide high-value educations to their students, this tends to lead Black and Hispanic youths to poorer educational outcomes and lower-paying jobs,” Zachary Bleemer, a Yale researcher who studied the impact of the California ban, said in an e-mail.

Colleges across New England prepared for the end of affirmative action by reviewing policies and programs that could be at risk, and studying what’s been learned from states like California, which spent years after the ban using race-neutral measures to try to build back diversity, consultants and higher education leaders have said.

“Our schools strongly believe that institutions need to have the flexibility to consider all factors in creating a diverse campus that’s able to reflect the lived experience of society,” Robert McCarron, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, told the Globe in April.

Here’s a look at the current demographics of the student bodies of the Ivy League schools.

What will the future numbers look like? The experiences of Michigan, UCLA, and Berkeley, three of the so-called public Ivies, offer a look at the possible future.

At the two California schools, Black and Hispanic enrollment dropped drastically after the ban passed in 1996. Most measures have recovered over the past three decades, but Black enrollment at UC Berkeley continues to be much lower than it was. University officials also pointed out in a friend of the court brief that, despite the rebound, Hispanic enrollment remains below the share of Hispanics among California high school graduates — more than 52 percent in 2019.

At Michigan, despite efforts to increase diversity, Black enrollment has still not recovered from what it was before the ban in 2006.

Material from Globe wire services and prior Globe stories was used in the report.