by Sharelle Burt
September 5, 2024
The decision worried a number of Black students
A number of predominantly white institutions (PWI) are seeing massive drops in Black enrollment following the Supreme Court’s historic affirmative action ruling, NBC News reported.
After the ruling, which said that considering race in admission in public colleges and universities was unconstitutional, schools like Amherst College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Washington University in St. Louis are on the growing list of schools that have seen a dip in Black student enrollment for the 2024 academic year.
President of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Danielle Holley, highlighted her experience since the high court’s ruling. She said leadership was forced to rely on outreach programs, personal statements, and other application materials in efforts to reach their diversity goals. Holley called the process “catastrophic.” “The feeling was pretty catastrophic. It fundamentally changed,” Holley said.
“That demographic information that used to be readily available for a student’s file is now masked.”
In 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions systems at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina (UNC), marking the end of affirmative action admission policies at colleges and universities. Chief Justice John Roberts sent the majority opinion with the help of options of all five of fellow conservative justices, including Black Justice, Clarence Thomas.
Months later, Roberts wrote that the school’s selective admissions process “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints.” The decision indicated that these policies “cannot be reconciled by the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause” in the 14th Amendment.
Data released in August 2024 showed that close to 5% of MIT’s incoming class of 2028 was Black, in comparison to its average of 13%. The neighboring school of Amherst College saw a significant drop from Black students making up 11 % of the class of 2027 to only 3% for the class of 2028. Smith College, also in Massachusetts, only saw 4% of Black enrollment for the incoming freshman class, compared to 4.6% in 2023.
The decision worried a number of Black students, including Flematu Fofana, a freshman at Yale University. She said she cried when the Supreme Court made the ruling, concerned with how it will affect extracurricular activities and awards received by other applicants to top colleges. “Without affirmative action I felt so uncertain about how my college decision was going to go. It made me decide to change my strategy a little bit when I was applying to colleges too,” Fofana said.
“Initially I had based my school list around how much I aligned with the academics, the extracurriculars there. But after the decision, and when I started visiting schools, I started realizing how much I value diversity.”
While schools like Washington University in St. Louis and Tufts University saw both a 4% and 2.6% drop in first-year Black students, HBCUs have seen an increase in enrollment. According to Newsweek, Jackson State University in Mississippi welcomed close to 1,250 incoming freshmen and transfer students for the Fall 2024 semester.
Leaders at Hampton University in Virginia accredited the end of affirmative action in college admissions for the uprise in enrollment. “I think that many students recognize that this ruling impacted them personally,” Hampton University assistant vice president of enrollment and dean of admission, Angela Nixon Boyd, said.
“And so they, again, want to be in an environment where they feel welcomed, feel safe and that they feel that they will have an opportunity for success.”
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