Harvard’s Black Student Enrollment Dips After Affirmative Action Ends

The predictions were dire. In the course of a bitterly contested trial six years ago, Harvard University said that if it were forced to stop considering race in admissions, the diversity of its undergraduate classes would be badly compromised.

Now, a year after the Supreme Court struck down the school’s admissions system, effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions everywhere, the numbers are in for the first class to be admitted, and the picture is more nuanced and complex than predicted.

The proportion of Black first-year students enrolled at Harvard this fall has declined to 14 percent from 18 percent last year, according to data released by the institution on Wednesday — a dip smaller than the school had predicted, but still significant.

Asian American representation in the class of 1,647 students remained the same as last year, at 37 percent. Hispanic enrollment has gone up, to 16 percent from 14 percent. Harvard did not report the share of white students in the class, consistent with past practice, and it is hard to make inferences because the percentage of students not disclosing race or ethnicity on their applications doubled to 8 percent this year from 4 percent last year.

The post-affirmative-action demographic breakdowns have been trickling out over the last three weeks, and overall Black students appear to have been most affected. The percentages of Black students declined sharply at some elite schools, although surprisingly, they held steady at others. The suit against Harvard had accused it of discriminating against Asian Americans to depress their numbers, while giving preferences to members of other minority groups.

Admissions experts suggested even before the new numbers came out that the most coveted schools, like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, would be best positioned to maintain their Black enrollment because the students who were admitted to them were very likely to accept. So in that view, they are unicorns, part of a highly selective ring of schools that scooped up the top students and remained relatively unaffected by the ban on race-conscious admissions.

Schools that were slightly less selective — like Amherst, Tufts and Brown — saw bigger changes to their demographics.

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The trajectory for Black students at Harvard roughly resembles that of their counterparts at its peer institutions, including at Yale, where the percentage of Black students remained about the same at 14 percent, and at Princeton, where it was stable at about 9 percent. At Duke, the share of Black students increased slightly. It stayed the same at Caltech, at 5 percent.

But at Brown University, the share of Black students dropped to 9 percent from 15 percent. Brown also had a fairly sharp decline in Hispanic first-year students, to 10 percent from 14 percent.

At Columbia University, the share of Asian students increased compared with the share admitted last year, to 39 percent from 30 percent, while the share of Black students dropped to 12 percent from 20 percent, admissions data released on Wednesday showed.

The portion of Hispanic students also dipped slightly to 19 percent from 22 percent, and the portion of white students declined to 49 percent from 51 percent.

The Asian American share of the first-year class grew at Caltech, Brown, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and M.I.T.

But it dropped to 24 percent from 30 percent at Yale, to 23.8 percent from 26 percent at Princeton and to 29 percent from 35 percent at Duke.

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