Harvard University is the latest elite university to report a decline in enrollment for Black first-year students this fall, a year after it lost a pivotal Supreme Court case that resulted in a nationwide ban on race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.
Black students make up 14 percent of first-year students, Harvard said Wednesday, down from 18 percent last year. The share of Asian American students held steady, however, while Hispanic enrollment grew slightly.
Around New England, Amherst College, MIT, Tufts University, and Brown University have also reported enrolling a smaller percentage of Black first-year students this year compared to last year.
It may be early, however, to draw conclusions about the extent to which the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions policies is affecting diversity at top higher education institutions. Black student enrollment held mostly steady at Princeton University and Yale University , perplexing both advocates and critics of affirmative action. Many schools have not yet released demographic data of their incoming classes.
“It’s all over the place right now,” said Natasha Warikoo, a professor of sociology at Tufts University, who has written books about affirmative action in college admissions. Warikoo said she is most concerned so far about the percentage of Black students dropping at several schools.
“The origin of affirmative action back in the early 1960s was really about making space and opportunity for African Americans, in particular, because they were excluded from elite higher education in the past,” Warikoo said. “That is the origin, and that’s who is being affected the most right now, so that, to me, is very troubling.”
Princeton and Yale spokespeople did not immediately respond to interview requests.
Harvard said 37 percent of incoming students are Asian American, the same as last year. The share of Hispanic or Latino first-year students grew 2 percentage points, to 16 percent, while the share of Native American students fell from 2 percent a year ago to 1 percent. Fewer than 1 percent of incoming Harvard students identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, reflecting no change from last year.
Harvard said 8 percent of students in the graduating class of 2028 did not disclose race or ethnicity this year, compared to 4 percent last year.
Zachary Bleemer, a Princeton University economist who studies higher education, said schools in California experienced a similar trend after the state’s 1996 ban on affirmative action. Bleemer found it was “almost exclusively” white and Asian American students who opted to withhold information about their race and ethnicity.
A Harvard spokesperson would not disclose the percentage of white students or legacy students in the class of 2028 and declined to make an official available for an interview.
“Our community is strongest when we bring together students from different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs,” William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, said in a statement.
Nuriel Vera-DeGraff, a junior at Harvard, said Wednesday that he was disappointed but not surprised to see a decline in Black first-year students.
“It’s just sad and a reminder that even before the Supreme Court ruling, there were many, many flaws with the college admissions system,” Vera-DeGraff said, noting the practice of giving preferential treatment to the children of donors and alumni specifically. “This just adds insult to injury.”
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose race-conscious admissions policy the Supreme Court also rejected last year, recently reported the share of Black students in its first-year cohort also declined, to 7.8 percent, from 10.5 percent a year ago. The percentage of Asian or Asian American students at UNC grew slightly while Hispanic enrollment fell slightly. White enrollment stayed about the same.
“It’s too soon to see trends, with just one year of data,” Rachelle Feldman, vice provost for enrollment, said in a press release.
The court last June, in a case against Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, ruled that schools were barred from taking into account a prospective student’s race when evaluating their application for admission, effectively ending race-based affirmative action. Experts had raised fears that the move could be detrimental to diversity on elite college campuses across the country, based on what happened at highly selective schools after statewide bans took effect.
Students for Fair Admissions leader Edward Blum, who brought the case against Harvard and Chapel Hill, wrote in an email that he found it “bewildering” that some schools mostly maintained diversity “since these colleges in their 2022 joint amicus brief to the Supreme Court wrote that maintaining the racial composition of their incoming class would not be possible without implementing the type of racial discrimination that was barred by the Supreme Court.”
Students for Fair Admissions alleged the universities discriminated against Asian Americans in the admissions process, but at Harvard, removing race-conscious admissions did not seem to affect the share of Asian American students enrolled. First-year Asian American enrollment, however, did grow at MIT and Brown.
To mitigate the anticipated effects of an affirmative action ban, competitive schools around the country increased outreach efforts to low-income high schools; partnered with nonprofits working with low-income, rural, and first-generation students; and added essay questions to allow prospective students to share context about their lives.
Harvard said 20 percent of its first-year students are the first in their family to attend college, in line with recent years.
Some higher education watchers question whether schools that have reinstituted standardized exams since the COVID-19 pandemic ended are more likely to see fewer students of color enroll. Earlier this year, several top schools, including Dartmouth College and Yale, reinstated testing requirements that were suspended during the pandemic after new research found exams like the SAT are a good predictor of academic success, and can help identify low-income students with much potential. Some students and advocates of racial equity remain skeptical.
“I’m concerned about that, and I hope it’s a wakeup call to higher education,” said Angel Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “Do we really want to add another layer of complexity for marginalized students?”
Officials at MIT, which last month said the share of students of color in its first-year cohort declined 9 percentage points, rejected the notion that testing undermines diversity.
“[T]he class we admitted last year under the testing requirement had the highest proportion of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in MIT history, because universal testing helped us identify objectively well-qualified students who lacked other avenues to demonstrate their preparation,” said Stu Schmill, the university’s dean of admissions and student financial services, in an interview posted on the university’s website. “As I explained at the time, standardized tests are certainly imperfect, but they are, in important respects, less unequal than other things we can consider.”
Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles who has been critical of affirmative action, said in an interview that the declines of Black students at several top schools underscores “a really serious academic gap problem.”
“What we ought to be doing is saying drops in Black enrollment highlight failures of the K-12 system,” Sander said. “This moment ought to refocus our attention on how to improve minority treatment.”
Higher education watchers said there is likely to be a “cascading effect” of Black students who were not accepted to the country’s most selective schools enrolling at other institutions. UC San Diego, for example, gained Black and Hispanic students who were not accepted to more competitive schools like UCLA without affirmative action, Bleemer said. The most selective schools typically see the largest declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment after bans on affirmative action, Bleemer said.
“When one college loses, someone else has to gain those students,” Bleemer said.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.