Harvard Reports Drop in Black Enrollment

Updated September 11, 2024, at 12:32 p.m.

The number of Black students enrolled in Harvard’s Class of 2028 dropped by 4 percentage points compared with a year ago, offering the first indication of how the Supreme Court’s ruling against the College’s race-conscious admissions practices may transform the makeup of the student body.

The data released by the College on Wednesday revealed moderate, but notable changes in the demographic composition of the Class of 2028. The share of Black students declined to 14 percent from 18 percent. The proportion of Hispanic students in the Class of 2028 increased by 2 percentage points to 16 percent from 14 percent in the Class of 2027, while the proportion of students who identified as Asian American remained fixed at 37 percent.

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.

Though senior University administrators said the full effects of the Supreme Court decision will not be known for several more years, the data for the Class of 2028 fell short of the worst-case scenario that Harvard’s lawyers repeatedly warned of during the nine-year admissions trial.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said in the press release that Harvard benefits from having “students from different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs.”

“Our community excels when those with varied perspectives come together — inside and outside of the classroom — around a common challenge by seeing it through another’s perspective,” Fitzsimmons wrote.

Even as the data provided an initial sense of how the makeup of the College’s student body changed following the first admissions cycle without affirmative action, the numbers released by Harvard made it difficult to clearly compare the Class of 2028’s demographic data with previous years.

This year, the College changed its methodology for calculating demographic data as it saw a sharp rise in the number of students who opted to not disclose their race or ethnicity. In the Class of 2028, 8 percent of students chose to not disclose their race or ethnicity, whereas only 4 percent of students in the Class of 2027 chose to not report their demographic information.

Instead of displaying the proportion of students who self-identify as a certain race or ethnicity out of the entire freshman class – as the College has done in the past — the percentages released this year were calculated out of the total number of students who chose to disclose their demographic information.

The result of this change was a broader discrepancy between numbers released by the College in the past and those referenced in their comparisons today.

Harvard reported last year in May that 29.8 percent of the Class of 2027 identified as Asian American, while 11.1 identified as Hispanic or Latino. Black students made up 14.1 percent of the class and 2.3 percent identified as Native American or Hawaiian.

In an effort to accurately compare the data released on Wednesday, Harvard’s Admissions Office released new numbers for the Class of 2027 that were calculated percentages out of the total number of students who disclosed their demographic information, according to a College spokesperson.

William R. Fitzsimmons is the current Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Harvard College. By Jessica M. Wang

Edward J. Blum, the co-founder of the anti-affirmative action group that sued Harvard in 2014, wrote in a statement to The Crimson that the demographic results from Harvard and peer institutions are “mostly indecipherable without detailed racial data about standardized test scores, recruitment policies, advanced placement tests, legacy preferences, and other factors.”

“Yet, Harvard’s results are bewildering because 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 added. “It appears that was not true.”

Fitzsimmons declined a request for an interview through a Harvard spokesperson.

“This is the first undergraduate class whose admission was impacted by the Supreme Court decision striking down the ability of colleges and universities to consider race and ethnicity as one factor among many in the admissions process,” Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra wrote in an email on Wednesday.

“Because of that decision, the data on applicant race and ethnicity were unavailable to the Admissions Office until the admissions process had been completed for all students, including those on the waitlist,” she added.

Harvard’s release comes after multiple peer institutions — including Brown, MIT, Tufts, and Amherst College — saw decreases in Black undergraduate enrollment coupled with rises in the proportion of matriculated Asian Americans.

Reverse results were seen at universities such as Yale and Princeton, both of which witnessed marginal changes in the proportion of Black students enrolled alongside a decrease in the freshman Asian American population.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023 to effectively eliminate the College’s race-conscious admissions practices came after a nine-year legal battle with the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions.

Blum, a longtime anti-affirmative action activist, founded SFFA in 2014 as an offshoot of his earlier group, the Project on Fair Representation. Blum previously sued the University of Texas at Austin over its admissions policy, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that UT Austin’s race-conscious admissions practices were constitutional.

In the months since, Harvard made several changes to its admissions process: reworked application questions, new race-neutral guidelines for alumni interviewers, and increased the breadth of its recruitment in rural areas.

In a separate change made in April, Harvard returned to requiring applicants to submit standardized test scores, effective immediately — undoing a commitment to stay test-optional through the next two application cycles.

During the Supreme Court case, Harvard attorney Seth P. Waxman said that while the College continues to explore race-neutral alternatives, they had at the time found “nothing sufficient to take the place of race-conscious admissions.”

Hoesktra wrote in her email on Wednesday that Harvard remains committed to fostering a diverse student body even as it will continue to follow the law.

“We will continue to work tirelessly to pull down barriers to a Harvard education, and, in compliance with the law, to deepen even further our commitment to broad-based diversity,” Hoekstra added. “As we nurture students as both scholars and leaders for a complex world, one that requires their innovation and creativity, we owe them nothing less.”

—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.