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In arguments before the Supreme Court, proponents of affirmative action claimed that the number of Black students admitted to selective colleges and universities would plummet absent affirmative action. Opponents of affirmative action claimed that the number of Asian Americans would increase substantially.
As colleges and universities release data on their incoming classes, the actual picture is much more muddled. Some schools have reported the kind of major declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment that advocates of affirmative action had feared. At Amherst College, the percentage of Black students in the entering class dropped from 11 percent to 3 percent. At MIT, the number of Black students dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent. At Columbia, the percent of Asian students increased from 30 percent to 39 percent, while the percentage of Black entering students dropped from 20 percent to 12 percent.
But other schools reported smaller drops in Black and Hispanic enrollment, and little or no increase in Asian enrollment. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady in their percentages of minority admissions. Asian American enrollment dropped from 35 percent to 29 percent at Duke; from 30 percent to 24 percent at Yale; and from 26 percent to 23.8 percent at Princeton.
What’s happening?
The president of Amherst College, in an email to the college community, asked, “Why did our demographics change so significantly while other institutions saw different outcomes?”
Part of the answer — at least to the question of why Asian Americans didn’t show higher numbers — is that the percentage of students declining to identify their race has increased. Experts speculate that the non-responders are overwhelmingly Asian Americans, who fear they will be disfavored because of race. At Tufts, non-responders rose from 3.3 percent to 6.7 percent.
There are also discrepancies in the way different schools count, particularly when it comes to the growing number of biracial students. At some schools, when you check two boxes, you’re counted twice; at others, you’re counted once.
No one is particularly satisfied with the numbers. Advocates of affirmative action point to the lower numbers of Black and Hispanic students as costing all students the benefits of diversity in the college experience, and point to the need for increasing efforts to recruit students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
At Harvard, where the number of Blacks in the incoming freshman class dropped from 18 percent to 14 percent, the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard described that drop as “huge.”
Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a critic of affirmative action, takes heart in the fact that the numbers aren’t as low as some had feared.
“There were predictions that the Black population could fall to 2 percent at some universities and 6 percent at Harvard, and that did not happen,” Kahlenberg said. “I want there to be racial diversity on campus. I think it showed it was possible to achieve that without racial preferences.”
Others have argued that the number of Black and Hispanic students is still too high, and the number of Asian Americans still too low, to reflect a true merit system.
But the most troubling number of all, it seems to me, comes from Richard Sander, a critic of affirmative action who is a law professor at UCLA.
According to Sander, Black students make up about 3 percent of the top one-tenth of high school students nationally. Three percent — for a group that makes up, according to data from Pew, some 14 percent of the U.S. population.
That is, ultimately, why affirmative action at the college level is at best a Band-Aid for a larger problem of educational inequality that must be addressed if there is to be true equality and diversity at the college level.
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