Students' ethnicity going undeclared
Fewer disclose their race on college applications
By: Zachary Schermele
USA today
..... Fewer students in this fall's [2024] calls of college entrants chose to disclose their race or ethnicity in their applications to some top schools, data shows.
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The pattern is nuanced and affects only a silver of the nation's universities. However, it is among several early indications of the potential fallout of the Supreme Court's decision last year [2023] that effectively prohibited colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions.
..... Higher ed watchers have anxiously waited to see how or if the racial and ethnic makeup of freshman classes would change.
..... The results are preliminary, and it's tricky to compare the disparate data. But they present some troubling through-lines that many or may or may not be related to the Supreme Court decree - including a downturn in enrollment of Black and Hispanic first-year students at several high-profile institutions. Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Standford University are among the schools that saw enrollments of those demographic groups drop.
..... Other colleges, including Northwestern University and Yale University, showed gains, not losses, in the dame types of students.
..... Highly selective universities, which do not enroll the majority of U.S. college students, were most likely to consider race in admissions prior to the decision. Administrations at most colleges were unaffected by the June 2023 supreme Court ruling, however, the fraction of institutions impacted by it includes some of the wealthiest and most well-resourced schools.
..... A USA Today review and new data analysis published by the advocacy group Education Reform Now show another apparent trend: At many selective colleges, a greater share of students chose not to identify their race or ethnicity on there applications.
...... For example, at Pomona Collage, a small private school outside Los Angeles, an average of 3.7% of incoming freshman did not indicate their race in 2022 and 2023, according to Education Reform Now's analysis. Among the school's 2024 applicants, 6.9% did not disclose their race. Similar jumps were recored at Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and other schools.
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Education Reform Now's tracker has many disclaimers. Schools often calculate data about their student demographies differently, so juxtaposing them can be a daunting task, said James Murphy, the group's director of career pathways and postsecondary policy: "In many cases, the tracker is comparing apples and pears."
..... Even so, the data says something about how some students may be changing their approach to college admissions, said Carson Byrd, a University of Michigan researcher who studies race in higher education. "It shows how much people are still unsure exactly what the SCOTIUS decision means for them and how it might impact them," he said.
..... Many colleges have continued to ask students of self-report their race or ethnicity on their applications for other reasons apart from admission. Typically, college announce the demographics of their incoming classes to signal their eagerness to cerate diverse student bodies. They want to demonstrate they're welcoming places, Murphy said."It matters a lot for people of color and students of color who are looking at these institutions and saying, 'do I belong here?' " he said.
..... This fall, [2024] rather than trumpeting their campus diversity, many colleges swiftly identified shortcomings before blaming them squarely on the Supreme Court.
..... While it's difficult to track outcomes, some students say they already feel a difference at their campuses.
..... According to Murphy's tracker, Black student enrollment at Amherst College, a small private school in Massachusetts, dropped nearly 75% from its average the previous two years. A scathing open letter from Amherst;s Black Student Union called on alumni to cease donations until administrators provide a more aggressive approach to shoring up the number of Black students on campus.
..... "We were paraded as symbols of diversity, yet when it mattered most, we were abandoned," the organization wrote.
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Avery Cook, a junior and a member of the BSU, said she chose to go to the library arts college in part because the competitive high school she attended in New York City didn't enroll enough students who looked like her. but this fall, [2024] she said, the change in the campus atmosphere is underivable.
..... "Amherst is such a small school that a decline in diversity this steep - you can see it and feel it," she said.
..... Michael Elliott, Amherst's president said the school is committed to regaining ground.
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"Other institutions have seen a similar impact, and all colleges and universities are evaluating the outcomes of this first admission cycle under the new legal standard," Elliotee and other administrators wrote in a joint message to students and staff in late August. [2024] "At Amherst, we will continue and deepen our ongoing efforts - in accordance with the law - to reach and recruit stunts from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences."
..... Amherst, like other schools, saw a slight rise in new student who declined to disclose their race, Zacary Bleemer, an economics professor at Princeton who studies California's controversial ban on race-conscious admissions at public universities in the 1990s, said a
similar trend emerged then, too.
..... Nearly all the California students who didn't report their race ended up being white or Asian, Bleemer found. ultimately, his research showed that the state law cased freshman stunts from underrepresented minority groups to "cascade into lower quality colleges."
..... According to Bleemer, the impacts of affirmative action bans are often most dramatic in the first year they go into effect.
..... At a dinner with reporters in Washington this fall, [2024] several college presidents spoke frankly about how the Supreme Court;s ruling on race-conscious admissions have weighed on them. John Bravman, president of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, called it a "statistical fact" that the decision is "changing our populations." Yet he caution against drawing larger conclusions. "We're in the early days," Bravman said. "Let see where the numbers go."