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Black enrollment drops at some colleges amid Supreme Court ruling

A major concern by affirmative action advocates is not just admissions, but race-based scholarships as well.

A little over a year after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action unconstitutional, colleges around the country are seeing the impact. (Scripps News)

Rowers paddle down the Charles River near the campus of Harvard University.

By: Jamal Andress

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A little over a year after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action unconstitutional, colleges around the country are seeing the impact.

Harvard, Tufts and University of North Carolina all saw drops in Black students among their incoming freshman class, while schools like Amherst College and MIT saw their Black enrollment for the incoming freshman class drop by more than half.

Tyrone Howard, a UCLA professor who studies race and education, says if these trends persist, schools will need to be more intentional about recruitment.

"One year, blips happen all the time with admissions, but if the same trends exist one, two, five years then that suggests that we have a real structural problem. We want to be present in those communities. We want to reach out to churches. We want to talk to parents. We want to let these adults know that it is still possible to be at our institution," Howard said.

In an email to Scripps News, Edward Blum, the legal activist who has been pushing to end affirmative action for decades, called the latest numbers "mostly indecipherable" without more information, but also says the 2028 class shows the concern expressed by Harvard and others was overblown.

Some institutions saw their Black enrollment numbers remain steady. Notably, Yale's 2028 class features the same percentage of Black students, while its Asian numbers fell by 6%.

A major concern by affirmative action advocates is not just admissions but race-based scholarships as well.

According to the Washington Post, nearly 50 U.S. colleges and universities have eliminated, paused, or altered race-based scholarships worth at least $45 million.

Wil Del Pilar, the senior vice president at Ed Trust, calls this change "a national trend" and a clear "overreach."

"There was nothing about financial aid in the Supreme Court decision — institutions, if they wanted to keep race-focused, race-forward scholarships, they could absolutely do that," Pilar said.

Along with the Supreme Court's ruling, standardized test requirements and the federal government's botched rollout of a new financial aid form could play a role in the latest admissions numbers.