Harvard University’s incoming freshman class, the first admitted after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, has a smaller share of black students than the previous year, the university disclosed Wednesday.
Of the domestic freshmen who submitted demographic data, the percent of students who identified as black or African American dropped from 18 percent to 14 percent from the previous class.
“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, per the student-run publication the Crimson. “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.”
The class of 2028 is the first admitted after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the race-conscious admissions policies practiced by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The ruling was 6-3 against UNC and 6-2 against Harvard.
The statistics released by Harvard College are imprecise because the percentages apply to the 84 percent of the 1,647 enrolled undergraduate freshmen who are from the U.S. Of the domestic freshmen who were eligible to disclose their demographic data, 8 percent did not specify their race or identity, whereas only 4 percent declined to provide their demographic data last year.
Of the students who submitted demographic data, Asian-American students are 37 percent of freshman class, showing no change from the previous year. Students who identified as Hispanic or Latino increased from 14 percent last year to 16 percent. Students who identified as Native American dropped from 2 percent to 1 percent. Under 1 percent of students identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, showing no change from the previous year. Harvard College did not provide data on white enrollment.
Harvard changed its methodology from previous years by calculating the percentages out of the total number of freshmen who disclosed their demographic data, as opposed to its previous methodology of calculating percentages out of the entire freshman class, per the Crimson. The college released adjusted data for the Class of 2027 to show percentages out of those who did provide demographic data. (Harvard did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.)
“We have always been committed to finding exceptional talent across many communities and recruitment remains an important tool in building a robust and diverse applicant pool,” said Director of Admissions Joy St. John in a press release. According to Harvard’s admissions statistics website, it received 54,008 applications for the class of 2028 and admitted 1,970 students.
The decline in black/African American student enrollment was similarly observed at Harvard’s neighboring institutions.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the percentage of black/African-American students enrolled in the freshman class dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino enrolled freshman students dropped from 16 percent to 11 percent. At Wellesley College, the percentage black/African American students enrolled in the freshmen class dropped from 9 percent to 5 percent, and Hispanic/Latino students fell from 14 to 10 percent. At Boston University, the share of black/African American students in the freshman class dropped from 9 percent to 3 percent, a decline that the university president Melissa L. Gilliam called “concerning and disappointing.”
National Review previously reported that the Harvard University president, vice president, provost, and 15 deans signed an email reaffirming the institution’s commitment to diversity shortly after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. Although the letter affirmed that “we will certainly comply with the Court’s decision,” it added that “in the weeks and months ahead, drawing on the talent and expertise of our Harvard community, we will determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values.”
“Today is a hard day, and if you are feeling the gravity of that, I want you to know you’re not alone,” Claudine Gay, then a dean and president-elect, wrote in a separate email to the campus community after the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision.