The First Post-Affirmative Action Class Enters College
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From The New York Times, I'm Katrin Benhold, and this is The Daily. The Supreme Court's decision to ban affirmative action last summer was expected to drastically change the demographics of college campuses around the country. Now, we're starting to understand the extent of that change. Today, my colleague David Leonard explains. It's Friday, September 6th. David, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Katrin.

So in the past few weeks, elite colleges around the U.S. have started to release their enrollment numbers for this academic year, which is the first academic year since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action. It's a moment you and a lot of other people have been eagerly awaiting because we're all curious what the effects of this decision will actually be. So what have you seen so far?

It's been fascinating. So as you said, this is the first year of students who are coming after the Supreme Court decision in 2023 that said colleges cannot continue to use the kind of race-based affirmative action that they used before. And really what that meant is that students were checking a box about their race. And in order to make up for underrepresentation in the past,

colleges were basically giving what they call a tip to Black applicants, Hispanic applicants, and Native applicants. And the Supreme Court said you can't do that anymore. You can take into account students' life experiences, including race, on an individual level, but you can't give these broad advantages to different groups in the process. And people care about this, even though it's at a relatively small number of schools, because

because these schools confer big economic advantages on the people who go there, according to recent economic research. And they disproportionately create the American elite. Senators and Supreme Court justices and CEOs disproportionately come from these several dozen schools. And so...

The first of these schools to report the demographics for the new freshman class, these are the classes that have just arrived on college campuses in the last few weeks, was MIT. And they reported this really big decline in the number of Black students. It had been 15% last year. It's 5% this year in the first year class. And a decline in the number of Hispanic students from 16% down to 11%.

The number of Asian students went up significantly, and the number of white students remained roughly constant. So this is basically a scenario that a lot of different people predicted, right? Defenders of affirmative action said...

after the decision came down that the share of Black and Latino students would likely plummet, and critics of affirmative action predicted that the share of Asian students would likely rise because affirmative action had suppressed their numbers. That's exactly right. And so it looked like, oh my goodness, we're going to have this result that fits this neat story that we're going to see Black and Hispanic enrollment plummeting at all of these elite schools and potentially Asian enrollment surging.

Because that was the picture at the first school to report. And there was at least one other school that had results that resembled MIT's. Amherst College, which is a highly selective college in Massachusetts, also reported meaningful declines. The share of Black students went from 15% last year to 6% this year. The percentage of Hispanic students went from 12% last year to 8% this year.

But it turns out, as we've gotten more schools reporting numbers, and even as we've dug a little bit into MIT's and Amherst's numbers, the picture's gotten a lot more complicated. Complicated how? Well, there are several schools where the share of Black students remained almost exactly the same. So at Duke, the share of Black students this year held steady at 13%, same as last year. At Yale, it held steady at 14%. At Princeton, it also held steady in the same range.

And even at some of the schools that have reported big declines in the number of Black and Hispanic students, like MIT, the numbers may exaggerate how big the decline actually was. And that's because at several of these schools at MIT,

A student who is multiracial counts in more than one category. So when you see the share of both Black and Hispanic students falling, there might be a single student who counts in both of those declines. And look, at several of these schools, including MIT, the Black and Hispanic share definitely did fall. It just may not have fallen as much in real human terms as some of those numbers suggested that it did. Right. And...

I want to emphasize that we're still really early in this reporting cycle. And I'm confident from talking to people that schools are going to be all over the map. They're not all going to be like MIT, or they're not all going to be like Duke. But I don't think we yet know the mix of how many schools are going to remain roughly similar and how many are going to have big declines. And we're just going to need more time to find that out.

Okay, so clearly there is quite a lot of variation in this data, but just from what you're telling me, it seems like the share of Black students at least overall is down. It sounds like at best it's kind of stable for now, but in some places it actually dropped. So is that a pattern you're seeing here? I think that is a pattern. And once more schools report, I think that's what we're going to end up seeing.

The trends with Hispanic students, though, are a little different. Hispanic students are even more all over the map in terms of the trends. So there are schools like MIT where the share of Hispanic students fell. There are schools like Princeton and Yale where the share held roughly steady. But we even have an example so far among just a very few schools that have reported of a school where the percentage of Hispanic students rose, which is UVA. It's gone from 8%

to 10% in one year. That's a meaningful increase. And so one of the things I will be watching going forward as more schools report is, is the Hispanic share overall kind of holding steady, which seems plausible, or is it declining, which also seems plausible. But there's another point to think about here. So far, Katrin, we've been talking about race. But if you look at economic data,

it looks like the number of lower income students at many of these colleges is actually going up. So I'll give you two interesting examples, Duke and UVA. Duke is private, UVA is public. These are historically two of the least economically diverse colleges in America.

I wrote a whole story for our magazine about how dominated Duke was by upper-income students. And UVA, the University of Virginia, has long been arguably the least diverse public college in America.

And yet, we've really seen increases in economic diversity. So UVA reported that the percentage of students who received the Pell Grant, which is the largest financial aid program in the country, basically goes to people in the bottom half of the income distribution. The Pell share at UVA rose from 16 to 24 over the last year. At Duke, it rose from 17 to 22.

And we're going to need more information to figure out exactly what's going on here because the federal government did expand eligibility for the Pell Grant, which might explain a couple ticks of that increase. But it really seems like in a lot of these places, economic diversity has risen over the past year.

I mean, it's really fascinating. What you're basically saying is that one year after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action, broadly speaking, we're seeing racial diversity decreasing, but economic diversity actually seems to have gone up. That's exactly right. And that's not a pattern that many people would necessarily have expected. And it's a fascinating pattern. And that, of course, raises the question of why is that happening? We'll be right back.

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So David, I want to dig a little deeper into this frankly surprising finding that we discussed in the first half. Why is it that post-affirmative action economic diversity has gone up at these schools?

Well, one thing that seems to be happening is that the number of upper income Black and Hispanic and multiracial students at some of these schools, like MIT, has declined. And to some extent at some of these schools, they have been replaced by lower income students of many races, potentially including lower income Black students and lower income Asian and white students.

And the reason that would be is that the Supreme Court said you can no longer take into account simply a student's race. But the Supreme Court also said that colleges can very much continue to take into account students' life experiences. And so the main way that they would hear about students' experiences would be the essays. So if a student wrote about how they grew up in a neighborhood that was lower income, maybe an overwhelmingly Black or overwhelmingly Hispanic neighborhood,

and they faced racial discrimination. Or maybe they grew up in a lower-income, overwhelmingly Asian neighborhood and faced racial discrimination. The colleges can take all those into account. And so in this more subjective process in which students have to talk about themselves as individuals rather than checking a box, you

You can imagine why these highly selective colleges who can choose among incredibly large numbers of fantastically talented students, why some of them might be admitting more low-income kids who can talk about their experiences with disadvantage and discrimination and admitting fewer kids who benefited from the old version of affirmative action,

but who also come from higher income neighborhoods and more advantaged high schools. And if that is what colleges are doing, you could understand why the number of low income students may be going up, even as the number of black and Hispanic students might be either holding steady or going down.

So in other words, this sort of stronger focus on these application essays, which surface these stories of overcoming, have kind of helped to lead to more socioeconomic diversity in these classes. Because overcoming adversity isn't necessarily a racial issue. Overcoming adversity absolutely can include race in the United States, given our racial inequities and given racial discrimination. But it's not only race.

David, I just want to gut check here. Now that affirmative action is no longer on the table, can we just assume that colleges are still trying to maintain the same degree of racial diversity? In other words, are students still encouraged to share their stories of growing up as a minority in these essays? Well, that's a fascinating question.

If you ask colleges, they would have to say by the letter of the law that racial diversity for its own sake is not something that we are emphasizing or considering in our application process.

But we know that these colleges, and they've said this, they believe deeply in the value of racial diversity. They think it produces better education for their students. They think it means that the students who are on campus who are not from one of the largest groups don't feel alone. So they care a lot about it. But your question is also scraping at something interesting here, which is there are certainly conservatives and opponents of affirmative action.

who are worried that schools are going to cheat, who are worried that schools are going to say we are taking into account the student's individual experience. But actually, the schools often have ways of knowing a student's race, whether it's from the essay or from other information in an application. And there are certainly conservatives who are worried that schools are basically going to try to hit their exact diversity targets as before for the sake of it. Schools, meanwhile, are very worried about being sued. And so I think

that we can expect conservative legal activists, the same folks who brought the lawsuits that led to the Supreme Court decision, to be scouring this data and potentially filing suit against schools that report very similar numbers as in the past and accusing them of still taking into account race while pretending not to. We are almost certainly going to see more legal fights over this issue.

But one of the interesting things here, David, is that in order to comply with the ban on race-based affirmative action, it seems that some of these colleges might actually be looking at class as a proxy for race, presumably in the hope that, you know, selecting for a more economically diverse class would also lead to more racial diversity. But that doesn't totally seem to be working out.

Yes, I think they are using class in part as a proxy for race, but you're absolutely right. There is no perfect proxy for race in the United States of America.

Our racial gaps are just too big. So even if colleges leaned heavily into economic affirmative action, they really might not be able to replicate the percentage, particularly of Black and Native students, that they had before affirmative action was outlawed by the Supreme Court. Now,

even if they can't absolutely replicate the shares that they had before, I do think the evidence suggests that colleges can be significantly more broad-minded about economic affirmative action in a way that has a very strong argument that it is fair and may also lift racial diversity. And what I mean by that is that when people think of economic diversity, sometimes they think of it just narrowly by income.

But colleges can take into account many factors besides income. They can take into account many of the factors that we know have huge racial gaps in this society. They can take into account wealth, and the wealth gap by race in our country is bigger than the income gap. They can take into account neighborhood poverty. They can take into account the kind of high schools that students go to.

And I think there's a very strong argument that they should be taking these factors into account. I mean, if a student is growing up in a high poverty high school with a family that has a very low network, those factors really do affect the student's ability to do schoolwork. That student is running with wind in her face. And so one of the things we hear from colleges is that they are trying to think about disadvantage in this broader way than they were before the affirmative action decisions.

So are there any concrete examples of schools doing what you're saying, you know, looking at socioeconomic factors in this broader way? Yeah, there are a few. So one thing that multiple schools are using is a tool from the college board. The college board is the organization that gives the SAT and gives the AP exams.

And the College Board gives colleges a dashboard so that the colleges can see not only what are a student's scores, but what is the context in which that student is coming from. So these AP tests, for example, the top score you can get is five. Now, if you get a four coming from a top high school, that means one thing. But if you come from a high school where you're the only student who managed to get a four on a given AP exam, that's really impressive.

And colleges are then able to take into account, look, it looks like this student can do the work at our college, and this student is one of the very, very best students in his or her community. That's one example. A second example is recruitment. A bunch of these colleges are doing more to go to neighborhoods and high schools that have historically not sent many kids to those colleges and try to do more to encourage students to apply.

UVA, the University of Virginia, is a specific example. They have launched this program called All Virginia. And it seems like it may have made a difference. I mean, the black share at UVA fell, but not much. It fell from 11% to 9%. And some of the other schools that have seen their black share hold steady are also doing these recruitment efforts.

And then a third thing is money. A whole bunch of schools are out there trying to raise money from their alumni and others specifically to pay for financial aid. And they're often being very upfront about this. They are saying, hey, give us money so we can afford to enroll more students who don't pay tuition or who don't pay much tuition. And that can also help with racial diversity.

So if schools are really committed, that's what I'm hearing you say, and they put in a lot of intentional effort and a lot of money, they can potentially achieve a level of both economic diversity and racial diversity without necessarily violating the affirmative action ban. Yes, absolutely.

And we do have some history here. In several states, race-based affirmative action has been illegal for a long time, more than 20 years. California, Texas, these are big states. And the state law said race-based affirmative action is not okay. And so if you look at what the selective colleges in those states did, one of the things you notice is this isn't a simple before and after.

Colleges need time to figure out what kind of programs they want to put in place that might make a difference. And so if you look at California, for example, it is absolutely the case that the number of Black students in particular at the most selective University of California campuses, which are Berkeley and UCLA, fell a lot right after California banned affirmative action. And it is

It is true that Berkeley has really struggled to recover the share of Black students that it had before the law changed. But UCLA, which is essentially as selective as Berkeley, has made much more progress. Twenty-five years ago, the share of Black students at UCLA was about 3%. Today, it's closer to 7%, which isn't that different from the share of Black residents of California.

And so what you see is we are going to have variation. There are some schools that are going to be able to maintain diversity better than others. And it isn't the case that these first year of numbers we see are necessarily going to be the new reality that lasts forever. There are going to be new versions of UCLA, schools where diversity initially falls, but then starts to rebound as they figure out ways to recruit a wide variety of students.

Okay, so there seems to be a model of what schools need to do in order to maintain or at least raise diversity from the kind of plummeting after a ban has happened. But what happens if schools won't or can't put in these resources?

I think it really depends on what group we're talking about. I think if you're talking about Hispanic students, there is real reason to be optimistic over the long term. So let's look at UCLA again. In 1999, the share of Hispanic students at UCLA was 13%. Today, the share of Hispanic students entering UCLA is 24%.

It has risen really quickly, even without affirmative action in California. And that's because of much broader trends. There's been a whole lot of research tracking the outcomes of immigrants. It's been part of this recent big data revolution in economics in which researchers can study millions of tax records and census records and get a sense for families' trajectories over time. And what it shows is that not only Asian families, but also Hispanic families,

Immigrant families are doing extremely well. When you look at measures like education and income, the recent immigrants, both Asian and Hispanic, are very much following the trajectory of earlier generations of immigrants, the Italian families and Irish families and Jewish families from a century ago. Immigrants themselves often remain poor for their lives, but their children do so much better.

They become more educated, they make more money, and their grandchildren do even better yet. And that's the trajectory that so many Asian and Hispanic families are on in this country. And so when you think about that larger reality, it means that perhaps colleges need to worry a little bit less

about what their enrollment of Hispanic students are going forward, even with this decision. I think the story starts to become very different when you're talking about groups that have experienced centuries of discrimination and oppression in this country. And that is specifically Black Americans and Native Americans.

And of course, the whole point of affirmative action from the outset was to correct for racial injustice in America, basically to help right those historic wrongs like slavery. So how should we be thinking about that original goal now?

That's a vital point, Katrin. When affirmative action started, basically in the Kennedy and then LBJ administrations in the 1960s, it was not a broad program to help all racial minorities so much as it was a program specifically to help Black Americans. The population at the time was less diverse. The American population was overwhelmingly either white or Black.

And the idea of affirmative action was to deal not only with the legacy of slavery, but also the legacy of the racially discriminatory laws that we had well into the 20th century, into the second half of the 20th century, that helped white people buy homes but wouldn't help Black people buy homes. These are legacies we still live with today. One of the reasons that Black families are less wealthy than white families is because we have had government policies that have specifically tried to lift

the net worth of white families and excluded black families. And so given this incredible legacy of discrimination, and given the fact that immigrants of all groups traditionally have all kinds of advantages for a complicated mix of reasons, the thing that I particularly will be looking at is what happens to the share of black students and native students at many of these schools. I think those are the areas that

given the legacies of racial discrimination in this country, particularly for Native and Black people, that are much more worrisome than what happens over the long term to the share of Hispanic or Asian or white students at these schools. And is there room, in the light of this sort of ruling that came down a year ago, to design a more targeted remedy specifically addressing this particular historic injustice? I don't know.

And I think it's a great question. There was a fascinating discussion during the Supreme Court arguments over this case about whether, for example, a college could consider whether an applicant came from a family that had been enslaved. And Justice Kavanaugh, who of course is a Republican appointee, suggested that he might be open to such a policy. Now, it was a brief conversation, and I don't know whether you could, but that's a really tricky question, right? Because the notion of did you have an ancestor who was enslaved

is not a question about race. But of course, in the United States, we know that that is referring to only one race. And so you can imagine, particularly if the numbers of Black students look really worrisome in coming years, that colleges might try to get more aggressive about those kinds of questions. But it is certainly something that would have to be the subject of future legal cases.

So David, as we're coming to the end of this episode, it just strikes me that race-based affirmative action, which was supposed to address racial injustice, actually kind of failed on the economic piece of that inequity. And now in this post-affirmative action world, we're seeing some progress on the economic injustice front, but on the racial component, these colleges may actually be going backwards.

Yes, that is right. And it's a sign of how complicated this entire subject is. And I think one thing to keep in mind is it's not as if the system before the Supreme Court's decision was working particularly well from anyone's perspective. So conservatives, of course, were unhappy with a system with racial categories. That's how we got the case. And it's how we got a conservative Supreme Court saying you can't use these racial boxes.

But the old system was also not that easy to defend on progressive values. I mean, several years ago, multiple elite colleges had more students coming from the top 1% of families based on income than the entire bottom 60%. So kind of affirmative action for the rich, actually. Yes. And the idea that these colleges that are supposed to be meritocracies had more students from the top 1%

than from the entire bottom 60%, it is very hard to defend with any set of progressive values. And now we have a new system. And it seems as if this new system may increase economic diversity, just as you were saying. It also has the potential to decrease racial diversity and aggravate racial inequality in a country where racial inequality is a deep and abiding problem.

And so as we think about this going forward, I think we're likely to end up with a set of changes that aren't simply good or simply bad from the perspective of any political ideology. I think we're instead likely to end up with a mix.

in which whatever your views are, you're probably going to look at this system a few years from now and say, hmm, it changed in some ways that are problematic, and it changed in some ways that are positive. And over time, the colleges are going to try to increase the positives and decrease the problematic aspects of it. Well, David, thank you very much. Thank you, Katrin. We'll be right back.

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Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan and Alex Stern with help from Asta Chaturvedi. It was edited by Liz O'Balin and Michael Benoit with help from Chris Haxel and research help by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Katrin Benholt. See you Monday.

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