‘Diversity slump’ is an odd way to describe what happened at MIT, where Asian-American enrollment increased by 7 percentage points this year.
Headline from the BBC: “Top US college’s diversity slumps after affirmative action ban.”
Interesting, let’s read on.
A prestigious US university has recorded a sharp fall in admissions from minorities following a Supreme Court decision to end affirmative action.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said 16% of its new intake identify as from a minority — down 10 percentage points in one year. Black enrolment fell from 15% to 5%.
Okay, that’s black enrollment. That’s only one minority race. What about others?
In recent years, around 25% of MIT’s enrolling undergraduate students have identified as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander, [MIT dean of admissions Stu] Schmill said.
Still missing one . . .
Its figures show that this year, the percentage of black students enrolled dropped to 5% from 15%, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped to 11% from 16%.
Still missing one . . .
White students make up 37% of the new class, compared with 38% last year, while the percentage of Asian American students rose to 47% from 40%.
Not until the tenth paragraph in a story purportedly about declining minority enrollment at MIT do we read anything about Asian Americans, the third-largest minority group in the United States, and when we do, we learn that their enrollment increased. And white enrollment is actually one percentage point lower than the year before.
More than 40% of the US population identifies as a race other than white, according to 2023 census data.
That means MIT is more diverse than the U.S. population, if “diverse” means the proportion that is non-white. MIT is less diverse only if “diverse” means non-white-or-Asian.
Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions, said he expected a fall and “that is what happened”. He said he had “no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-matched applicants . . . who would have excelled”.
MIT has an acceptance rate of 4.5 percent. It rejects well-qualified students who would have excelled every year. It’s just that now, because of the Supreme Court ruling, it isn’t allowed to do so to try to racially engineer its student body.
Edward Blum, whose Students for Fair Admissions group brought the Supreme Court case, told The New York Times that “every student admitted . . . will know that they were accepted only based upon their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the colour of their skin”.
Yep.