Colleges Are Releasing Their Admissions Race Data. Here’s Where Harvard Fits In.

As elite colleges nationwide began reporting racial demographic data for the first class admitted without racial considerations, two categories emerged: colleges with dramatic swings in the share of Black, Asian, and Hispanic/Latino students, and colleges with similar statistics to the previous year.

With its release on Wednesday, Harvard fell firmly into the second group.

Colleges and universities have been forced to grapple with a new admissions paradigm after the Supreme Court ruled against the use of race-conscious admissions practices in college admissions. In the aftermath, several schools saw major changes in their demographic data: at MIT, students identifying as Black, Hispanic, and Native American or Pacific Islander made up 16 percent of its freshman class, marking a nine percentage point drop from the Class of 2027. Asian American students increased from 40 to 47 percent.

But many schools — Harvard included — saw little to no change. While the College’s reported data remains vague, Harvard has said that the percentage of Asian students in the Class of 2028 is the same as the previous year, while the percentage of Black students fell by four points and the percentage of Hispanic/Latino students went up by two points.

Still, the College’s comparisons include recalculated data for the Class of 2027, making the numbers presented Wednesday different from those released last year. The change in methodology, which has largely remained unexplained by Harvard, has drawn scrutiny.

At many of its Ivy League peers, a similar story unfolded. While the percentage of Asian American students at Princeton dropped 2.2 percentage points, the share of both Black and Latinx students saw minimal fluctuation and was markedly in line with past years.

The share of Hispanic/Latino students and Black students at Yale stayed largely similar as well, though the share of white students increased by four percent. The proportion of Asian American students at Yale decreased from 30 percent in the Class of 2027 to 24 percent this year.

Other Ivy League schools saw more marked drops — at Brown, the number of Black students in the freshman class dropped by six percentage points, while the number of Latinx students dropped by four percentage points.

At the University of Pennsylvania, the percentage of students from races and ethnicities historically underrepresented in higher education dropped 2 percentage points from last year’s 25 percent to 23 percent for the Class of 2028. However, Penn declined to provide a detailed breakdown of their demographics.

According to Stuart Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions, the change is due to the Supreme Court’s decision.

In an interview with MIT’s official news publication, Schmill said that MIT “expected” that the Supreme Court’s decision overturning “would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.”

But while Harvard and its peer institutions had long warned that eliminating race-conscious admissions programs would severely damage their ability to maintain diverse classes — an amicus brief filed by more than a dozen universities, such as Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth, to the Supreme Court argued that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review” — those fears did not come to pass.

Edward J. Blum, an anti-affirmative action activist who led the lawsuit against Harvard, wrote in a statement that the “admissions results from Yale, Duke, Princeton and other institutions are indecipherable without detailed racial data about standardized test scores, recruitment policies, advanced placement tests, legacy preferences, and other factors.”

According to Julie J. Park, a consulting expert for Harvard in the lawsuit and professor of higher education at the University of Maryland, while Harvard’s four-percentage-point drop in Black student enrollment between classes was less than some schools, it was still meaningful.

“Yes, the percent changes at Amherst and Tufts (not to mention MIT) were even worse, but a drop of almost 30% is not great,” Park wrote. “You’re going to feel that on campus.”

—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves or on Threads @elyse.goncalves.

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.