How the Supreme Court Shaped the Class of 2028 at Harvard
The demographic composition of the Class of 2028 is remarkably similar to last year’s group of freshman students who were admitted when the College still considered race in its admissions — an indication that the Supreme Court ruling, at least initially, only had a modest impact on Harvard.
Over the course of the year since the Court declared Harvard’s race-conscious admissions practices unconstitutional, the University has undertaken a series of changes to the admissions process in an effort to maintain the diversity of admitted classes while avoiding another legal challenge.
The College rolled out new application questions, designed in the trial’s wake; it fast-tracked a return to standardized testing, reversing previous commitments to stay test-optional for longer; and it reworked interviewer guidelines in a bid to steer clear of any mention of race, if only to avoid a rerun of the nearly decade-long stint in court that thrust Harvard’s tightly-kept admissions secrets into the national spotlight.
But Harvard’s highly anticipated announcement on Wednesday of the Class of 2028’s demographic data showed that the makeup of the student body remained somewhat consistent with that of previous years. The share of Asian American students stayed the same at 37 percent. The proportion of Hispanic or Latino students rose to 16 percent from 14 percent, while the share of Black students fell to 14 percent from 18 percent, according to the College.
As the College delayed its standard releases of demographic data for its admitted class, questions began to mount about what the effect of Harvard’s new admissions practices — the first in decades to not consider race — would have on a College that prides itself on its diversity.
In order to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, Harvard was unable to consider an applicant’s race throughout the admissions process and could not look at demographic data until it finalized enrollment for its freshman class. As a result, the data was released months later than usual, after students choose to accept or deny their admissions offers — and its rollout prompted confusion amidst a little-explained change in the way Harvard calculated its numbers.
But interviews with experts, students, and people close to Harvard’s admissions process revealed that the data released by the College did little to close the discussion on Harvard’s admissions process in the case’s wake.
Instead, as questions circulate on the College’s methodology and reactions range on the demographic changes, the data only stated one thing definitively: the fight over Harvard’s admissions is far from over.
‘An Impossible Position’
Though the College’s admissions officers had to wait for months to learn the Class of 2028’s demographic composition, there was always one certainty: Harvard was going to get criticized.
If the racial and ethnic composition of the class did not change as dramatically as the University predicted it would during the trial, Harvard would’ve faced accusations that it had not complied with the law. But if the share of minority groups decreased, Harvard would’ve been slammed for not doing more to foster a diverse student body.
In the end, both happened.
Tyler M. Ransom, an economics professor at the University of Oklahoma who has authored several papers on Harvard admissions using applicant data released in the trial, said that “every one of these schools is in an impossible position.”
“They’re trying to placate their alumni and their students and faculty, who, as a whole, appear to be pro-racial preferences,” Ransom added. “Then they’re also trying to balance that against abiding by the Supreme Court ruling, which is anti-racial preferences.”
Edward J. Blum, founder of Students for Fair Admission — the anti-affirmative action group that sued Harvard — called Harvard’s data “bewildering.”
“Throughout the SFFA litigation, the college passionately argued that maintaining the racial composition of their incoming class would not be possible without implementing the type of racial discrimination that was barred by the Supreme Court,” Blum wrote in a statement. “It appears that was not true.”
Richard D. Kahlenberg ’85, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, said he was pleased by the results that Harvard shared.
“To see today’s release that 14 percent of the students are Black, precisely the level Harvard was at during the litigation, is, I think, very good news,” Kahlenberg said.
Both Brown and MIT saw larger decreases in Black enrollment than Harvard, and overall more changes across the board. At Brown, while the percentage of Asian students rose, the share of Latino or Hispanic students fell 4 percent.
The opposite was seen at both Yale and Princeton, who saw very slight changes in Black enrollment paired with a drop in the percentage of Asian students.
Harvard witnessed some of the most moderate changes when compared with other institutions, according to the College’s data.
Julie J. Park, a consulting expert for Harvard in the lawsuit and professor of higher education at the University of Maryland, conceded that the University and other experts had been bracing for a greater decline in the share of Black students in Harvard’s freshman class.
“The drop is still worrisome,” Park wrote in a statement.
‘An Element of Confusion’
For a University reeling from a year of high-profile scrutiny, Wednesday’s release could easily have been a blow off the chin: a change in demographic data that, while potentially upsetting, easily fit in with trends across higher education in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision.
But an abrupt and unexplained change in the College’s methods of calculating and comparing the racial composition of the Class of 2028 drew sudden scrutiny and confusion to the results.
Instead of calculating each group as a percentage of the whole class, Harvard displayed each group as a percentage of the number of students who reported their race, the College’s statement claimed.
This year, 8 percent of students opted not to report their race, compared to 4 percent last year.
In order to report percentage changes this year, Harvard stated that it recalculated last year’s demographic percentages using the same methodology as this year — by calculating out of the percentage of students that chose to report their race. College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo later confirmed that Harvard’s data did not account for international students.
But a Crimson analysis, corroborated by three experts, found that the numbers Harvard found did not necessarily match the numbers they had previously reported for the Class of 2028, calling into question the way in which Harvard calculated its data.
The Crimson’s calculations were made using the Common Data Set — the most updated public demographic information that the College shares for each class. Palumbo declined to provide the raw data that the College used to calculate their findings.
Palumbo also declined to clarify the reasoning behind the change in Harvard’s reporting practices or answer questions about where the data they used came from.
Kahlenberg said he struggled at first to understand the change Harvard made in reporting demographic data. He added that the change introduced “an element of confusion” to those reading the data.
“When I saw the numbers, it was hard to know what to make of this change,” he said, adding that the College had long been reporting its data “in a consistent fashion.”
Park, the education professor who consulted for the University during the trial, wrote that the way Harvard changed its data made it challenging to make comparisons to previous years’ demographic data.
She wrote that she believed the drop in the number of Black students in the Class of 2028 may have been affected by the change in data reporting.
“I think some of the negative impact is masked because of how Harvard decided to report the numbers, and also because Harvard had a higher percentage of Black students to begin with,” she wrote.
‘It Really Does Benefit Everyone’
Though some experts said that Harvard likely avoided a worst-case scenario, many leaders of affinity groups and other proponents of affirmative action said the University needs to do more to recruit a diverse student body.
Jeannie Park ’83, the co-founder of Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, a pro-affirmative action organization, slammed Harvard for the drop.
“Any drop in an already small number can dramatically impact the campus environment for students of color, and students are already reporting negative effects,” Park said. “Harvard must address why it fell short, especially compared to other colleges.”
Monica M. Clark ’06, president of the Harvard Black Alumni Society, criticized the drop in Black enrollment at the College as “disappointing,” but praised Harvard’s efforts to promote racial diversity in its admitted class in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“People talk about these diversity efforts like it’s only opening doors for people of color,” Clark said. “But it really does benefit everyone.”
David E. Lewis ’24-25, student lead of the Affirmative Action Coalition at Harvard, said he was concerned with the drop in diversity.
Regardless of how the College reported the data, Lewis said a drop “will have negative impacts on the overall diversity and education that we all experience here on campus.”
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 emphasized the importance of diversity at Harvard in an interview with the Harvard Gazette, a University-run publication.
“We have worked very hard for many decades to ensure that students from every background come to Harvard,” Fitzsimmons said. “We will continue to fulfill our mission, even as we continue to follow the law with great care.”
‘The Million Dollar Question’
The ambiguity in Harvard’s announcement — common practice since the trial’s start, as a University wary of ending up back in court continues to close ranks — may have exposed it to more scrutiny and potential criticism than before.
In the wake of its first admissions cycle without affirmative action, Harvard has been left with questions from experts and litigators looking to examine the College’s results to judge whether they complied with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Much of the scrutiny around Harvard’s ability to admit a class so demographically similar to those taken under race-conscious admissions relates back to the trial, during which the University and SFFA both speculated what Harvard’s admissions would look like without the consideration of race.
Economists hired by Harvard and SFFA simulated what the composition of past classes would be if they were not admitted under race-conscious policies. Both sides speculated that the Class of 2019 — which was 14 percent Black — would have seen its Black population roughly halved were the class not admitted with the consideration of race.
In a brief filed with the Supreme Court in 2022, three months before oral arguments between the University and SFFA, Harvard wrote that it had established a committee in 2017 “to evaluate race-neutral alternatives” to its race-conscious policies.
Though the committee evaluated 13 potential race-neutral scenarios, it “concluded that none would currently allow Harvard to achieve the educational benefits of diversity while maintaining its standard of excellence,” according to the brief.
“The million dollar question is, ‘how did they do it?’” Kahlenberg said of Harvard’s results.
Blum — the activist who sued Harvard — wrote that “the admissions results from Harvard and other institutions are mostly indecipherable without detailed racial data about standardized test scores, recruitment policies, advanced placement tests, legacy preferences, and other factors.”
Kahlenberg also called on Harvard to share more information about their admitted class and admissions practices in order to avoid scrutiny.
“The suspicion will be that Harvard cheated,” Kahlenberg said. “Moving forward, Harvard needs to do everything it can to show clearly that it is engaging in authentic, race neutral strategies that are perfectly legal.”
—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.