The Results Are In: Harvard Doesn't Need Racial Preferences to be Diverse

Harvard’s long-awaited release of the racial demographics of the Class of 2028 — the first admitted after the Supreme Court prohibited colleges from employing racial preferences — defied all the gloomy predictions.

During the nearly nine-year court battle over Harvard’s admissions policies, officials swore that there was no possible way to preserve racial diversity without employing racial preferences in admissions. The data released yesterday makes plain that they were wrong.

As an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, I testified that Harvard could take steps — such as increasing preferences for socioeconomic disadvantage — to create healthy levels of racial diversity.

Harvard said the alternatives I proposed were not workable. Its expert witness, economics professor David E. Card, predicted that the share of Black students would decline precipitously in the absence of racial preferences, from 14 percent to six percent.

The gloomy predictions were widespread. Yale Law School professor Justin Driver, writing in the New York Times, said “a decision banning affirmative action would be catastrophic for the presence of marginalized racial groups on the nation’s leading campuses.”

In an amicus brief, several liberal arts colleges said that without racial preferences, Black student admissions would drop to 2.1 percent on their campuses — a return to early 1960s levels. And when six U.S. Supreme Court justices found that the use of racial preferences at Harvard — and a similar program at the University of North Carolina — violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the U.S. Constitution, the three dissenters claimed the decisions would have a “devastating impact.”

But when Harvard released its data today, the share of Black students was not 6 percent or 2 percent. It was 14 percent. Hispanic enrollment was 16 percent. And Asian representation remained roughly steady at 37 percent.

Racial diversity survived.

The numbers are not precisely analogous to the way Harvard reported racial data in the past, for reasons having to do with how it factors in students who decline to report their race. But even accounting for that difference, it seems clear that Harvard avoided the disaster that College officials and the higher education establishment had claimed would befall them.

How Harvard did it is the million-dollar question.

The University said it increased its recruitment efforts following the Court’s decision, including sending its staff to 150 cities. And over the longer term, they have also worked to dramatically increase socioeconomic diversity: The share of first-generation college students was 7 percent in the class of 2019; it now stands at 20.5 percent in the class of 2028. These are very positive developments.

At other prestigious universities, like Yale and Duke, a similar pattern emerged.

Yale’s Black and Hispanic representation stayed even at 14 and 19 percent, respectively, and its socioeconomic diversity also increased. Yale’s admissions dean said “the class of 2028 includes the greatest representation of first-generation and low-income students on record.”

At Duke, where the share of Black students increased slightly, the institution doubled its share of students who qualify for Pell grants — a federal program for low-income college students — over just a two-year period. The economic diversity, Duke’s admissions dean said, “was clearly helpful for us this year in terms of racial diversity in enrollment.”

Still, some suspect that in addition to using socioeconomic factors, which are perfectly legal, Harvard may have stretched the ability the Supreme Court granted colleges to consider the discussion of race in a student essay beyond what the ruling intended. The justices in the majority warned that the essay provision could not be used as a covert racial preference, while Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor called it “an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.”

Harvard has two tasks moving forward: continue to solidify legal and effective strategies for maintaining diversity on campus and dispel suspicion that they are cheating.

Simulations that Duke professor Peter S. Arcidiacono and I created for SFFA suggested that Harvard would have to substantially increase the share of students from the bottom two-thirds of the economic distribution, from 18 percent to 49 percent, to preserve racial diversity.

The benefits of socioeconomic diversity are clear, but to attain such numbers Harvard’s practices cannot remain stagnant — they must remain open to new race-neutral strategies. For example, I recommended that the University discontinue legacy preferences, a policy that disproportionately benefits white and wealthy students.

And to settle speculation that it is cheating, Harvard should disclose more granular socioeconomic data than it has thus far. For example, what share of the student body comes from various income quintiles of the American population?

Professor Raj Chetty ’00 found that Harvard had 15 times as many rich students than low income students in the Class of 2013. The University should report this data on an annual basis.

Embracing socioeconomic affirmative action was always the right thing to do from a moral perspective, because it rewards talented students who overcome odds — many of them Black and Hispanic. In a new legal environment, this approach also provides the best shield against litigation suggesting that Harvard is breaking the law.

Richard D. Kahlenberg ’85 is the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. He was an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions in its lawsuit against Harvard.

This piece is the third installment in a series that has provided analysis and commentary on the culmination of Harvard College’s first admissions cycle following the United States Supreme Court’s curtailment of race-conscious admissions. Read Kahlenberg’s first installment here, and read his second installment here.