2 Years After Affirmative Action Ruling, Harvard Admits Class of 2029 Without Releasing Data

Harvard College released its regular decision offers of admission to the Class of 2029 on Thursday evening, but for the first time in almost seven decades, the school did not report its regular decision acceptance rate.

Students applying in the Regular Decision round received their admissions decisions at 7 p.m.

Following precedent set in the Restrictive Early Action round last December, Harvard did not publicly release information about the number of applicants or admits on Thursday. In the past five years, the College has accepted between 1,085 and 1,245 regular decision applicants.

The Admissions Office first announced in October that it would not release any information on the Class of 2029 — including acceptance rate, geographic data, yield rate, and more — until this fall, when it must report it to the Department of Education.

That meanst Harvard students, and the public, will not know the profile of the incoming class until its students are well into their first semester on campus.

According to Harvard College’s admissions statistics website, the new policy to not release data was implemented to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to overturn affirmative action.

“Due to the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision, we are unable to access all information about Harvard’s applicants, admitted students, and enrolling students, while the application review process is still underway,” the website reads.

Admissions experts said withholding the data for several months could delay speculation about how Harvard’s admissions practices have changed since the Supreme Court decision — and delay accusations that Harvard’s data implies an unofficial consideration of race in admissions.

Jon Boeckenstedt, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management at Oregon State University, wrote in an emailed statement that he suspects the decision was “due to the enormous and disproportionate amount of attention Harvard gets on something as fundamentally unimportant as admissions statistics.”

Dan Lee, co-founder of Solomon Admissions Counseling, added that in light of the Trump administration’s decision to cut $400 million in federal grants from Columbia University, there is even more reason to share less about admissions practices.

“The Trump administration has been making a lot of demands on top colleges around the country,” he said.

“If you have an admissions process hypothetically that’s still admitting based on racial preferences, that would probably draw attention to you,” Lee added.

In previous years, the College announced an acceptance rate for both the Restrictive Early Action and Regular Decision rounds.

Harvard released acceptance rates for the Class of 2028 — the first to be impacted by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — when students were admitted, but published demographic data several months later. The announcement appeared to show a four percent drop in the number of enrolled Black students.

But because the College changed its scale for reporting racial demographics, it’s difficult to draw apples-to-apples comparisons between the data for the Class of 2028 and prior years. The College later clarified that international students had not been included after The Crimson and other outlets reported the discrepancies.

The Department of Education circulated a threatening Dear Colleague letter last month, where Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor delivered an expansive interpretation of the SFFA decision — which has been challenged by some legal experts — and warned federally funded colleges and universities that any consideration of race could be punished.

“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” Trainor wrote.

“And race-based decision-making, no matter the form, remains impermissible,” he wrote.

—Staff writer Cassidy M. Cheng can be reached at cassidy.cheng@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cassidy_cheng28.

—Staff writer Claire T. Grumbacher can be reached at claire.grumbacher@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @clairegrumbachr.