At MIT, Black and Latino enrollment drops sharply after affirmative action ban
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming class of 2028 saw a precipitous drop-off in the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students, the university announced Wednesday. It is MIT’s first undergraduate class to be admitted since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year banning affirmative action, and MIT is the first major university to release statistics on the composition of its freshman class since the high court’s ruling.
For the incoming class of 2028, about 16% of students are Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander, compared with a baseline of about 25% of undergraduate students in recent years, the announcement said.
The comparison to the class of 2027 was also dramatic. The percentage of Black students enrolled dropped to 5% from 15%, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped to 11% from 16%. White students made up 37% of the new class, compared with 38% last year.
On the other hand, the percentage of Asian American students in the class jumped to 47% from 40%. (The percentages do not add up to 100, according to MIT, because students could declare more than one race.)
“The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions,” Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, said in the announcement, adding, “What 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.”
Edward Blum, founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that successfully sued to end race-conscious admissions, welcomed the decision as proof that the Supreme Court ruling was having a positive effect.
“Every student admitted to the class of 2028 at MIT will know that they were accepted only based upon their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the color of their skin,” Blum said in an email.
The contrast between the enrollment decline in Black and Hispanic students and the rise in Asian American students is consistent with the evidence in the two lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, brought by Students for Fair Admissions.
The lawsuits argued that Black students, who on average scored lower on standardized tests, like the SAT, were being given a significant boost, while Asian students were being penalized. With the elimination of race-conscious admissions, Black enrollment could be expected to go down, and Asian American student numbers could be expected to go up.
Because it is a science heavy school, MIT requires a very specific kind of educational preparation. Still, its admissions results could put pressure on other schools, particularly Harvard and the University of North Carolina, to demonstrate results consistent with those of MIT. Otherwise, they could open themselves up to critics who might say they found a way to defy the Supreme Court’s ban.
“From the looks of it, MIT basically just took race out of the equation,” said Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University, and expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions.
Arcidiacono said the numbers were consistent with what he at trial had predicted would happen if race were taken out of the equation. He was surprised, he said, that MIT had not taken steps to soften the blow, like changing the weight it gave to test scores.
Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, said the decline in Black enrollment was “as depressing as it is predictable,” with far-reaching consequences.
“A paucity of Black students at the nation’s foremost colleges will ultimately have effects on the nation itself,” he said, adding, “What begins on college campuses will ultimately affect the nation as a whole, in every sector of the nation, from governmental leaders to academic leaders to business leaders.”
The admission rate at MIT is about 5%, in line with other highly selective universities. MIT officials took pains to make the point that the enrollment decline in historically underrepresented minority students did not mean that the university had admitted underqualified students in the past.
Officials said the change in the composition of the class also had nothing to do with the reinstatement, two years ago, of the SAT as an entrance requirement. Last year’s class, for instance, had the highest proportion ever of students from underrepresented minorities, despite the reinstatement of the test, said Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions.
“Universal testing helped us identify objectively well-qualified students who lacked other avenues to demonstrate their preparation,” he said in a newsletter discussing the new numbers.
An anti-test activist, Bob Schaeffer, public education director for Fair Test, was skeptical.
Schmill’s statement, he said in an email, “begs the question of why the numbers of Black and Latino students in the class of 2028 declined.”
Requiring tests when most other schools made the ACT and SAT optional for the fall of 2024 could have “sent a message that MIT was less ‘minority friendly,’” Schaeffer said.
The precipitous decline in Black students entering MIT was similar to what happened at the University of Michigan after that state in 2006 imposed a ban on race-conscious admissions.
Black undergraduate enrollment at Michigan was 7% in 2006. By 2021, it had fallen to a little less than 4%, according to a brief filed by Michigan officials in connection with the Supreme Court case. The drop came even as the number of college-age Black residents in the state increased to 19% from 16%.
In the brief, Michigan officials argued that the state’s aggressive efforts to increase minority enrollment by using so-called race-neutral strategies, including outreach to underserved areas, had been only partly successful in erasing the gap.
There were similar declines at California’s top-rated state universities after the state adopted a ban on affirmative action in 1996. At University of California, Los Angeles, the percentage of students who were Black fell to just over 3% in 1998 from 7% in 1995. Latino student enrollment dropped to about 10% from about 22% during the same period.
Efforts to increase student diversity through outreach have been expensive and not very effective, officials said in a brief to the Supreme Court.
Schmill, the admissions dean of MIT, blamed a shortage of educational preparation in science and technology.
“Black and Hispanic students are less likely to attend high school where calculus is taught, where physics is taught, where computer science is taught,” he said.
Schmill said the university, which has emphasized efforts to reach out to students in those communities in the past, will have to redouble its efforts.
Schmill said the MIT officials did not know whether fewer Black and Latino students had applied this year because they didn’t ask applicants about their race.
But the Supreme Court said it was permissible for applicants to write about their race if it was integral to a life experience, like overcoming discrimination. Some experts predicted that admissions officers would subvert the prohibition against considering race by looking at students’ essays and extracurricular activities for clues as to their racial and ethnic background. But if MIT used this tactic, it was not evident from the results.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
