The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming class of 2028 saw a steep decline in the proportion of black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students, the university announced Wednesday. It is MIT’s first undergraduate class to be admitted since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to ban affirmative action, and MIT is the first major university to release statistics on the makeup of its freshman class since the Supreme Court’s ruling.
About 16 percent of the class of 2028 students will be black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander, compared to a baseline of about 25 percent among undergraduate students in recent years, the announcement said.
The comparison with the class of 2027 was also dramatic. The percentage of black students enrolled fell from 15% to 5%, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students fell from 16% to 11%. White students made up 37% of the incoming class, compared to 38% last year.
On the other hand, the percentage of Asian American students in the class rose from 40% to 47%. (According to MIT, the percentages do not add up to 100 because students could indicate more than one race.)
“The course is, as always, outstanding in many ways,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in the announcement, adding, “What it does not offer, as a result of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same level of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the MIT community has worked to achieve over the past decades.”
Edward Blum, founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that successfully sued against race-conscious admissions, welcomed the decision as evidence that the Supreme Court ruling is having a positive impact.
“Every student admitted to MIT in the class of 2028 will know that they were admitted based solely on their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the color of their skin,” Blum said in an email.
The contrast between the decline in black and Hispanic student enrollment and the increase in Asian American enrollment is consistent with the evidence in the two lawsuits brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
The lawsuits argued that black students, who on average performed lower on standardized tests such as the SAT, were significantly boosted while Asian students were disadvantaged. Eliminating race-based admissions could reduce the number of black students and increase the number of Asian-American students.
Because MIT is a science-based school, it requires a very specific type of education. Still, its admissions scores could put pressure on other schools, particularly Harvard and the University of North Carolina, to produce scores that match MIT’s or face critics who might claim they found a way to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ban.
“As it stands, MIT has basically taken race out of the equation,” said Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and an expert for Students for Fair Admissions.
Arcidiacono said the numbers were consistent with what he predicted at trial if race was taken out of the equation. He was surprised, he said, that MIT had not taken steps to soften the blow, such as changing the weighting of test scores.
Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, said the decline in black enrollment was “as depressing as it was predictable” and had far-reaching consequences.
“A lack of black students at the country’s leading universities will ultimately have an impact on the country itself,” he said, adding: “What begins on university campuses will ultimately impact the entire country, every sector of the country, from the top of government to academic leadership to corporate leadership.”
MIT’s admission rate is about 5%, which is in line with admission rates at other universities with very high selectivity. MIT officials stressed that the decline in enrollment of historically underrepresented minority students does not mean that the university has a history of admitting underqualified students.
Officials said the class’s change in composition was also unrelated to the reinstatement of the SAT as an admissions requirement two years ago. Last year’s class, for example, had the highest percentage of students from underrepresented minorities ever, despite the test’s reinstatement, said Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions.
“The general tests enabled us to objectively identify well-qualified students who lacked other opportunities to demonstrate their preparation,” he said in a newsletter about the new figures.
Test opponent Bob Schaeffer, education director of Fair Test, expressed skepticism.
Schmill’s statement, he wrote in an email, “raises the question of why the number of black and Latino students in the class of 2028 has declined.”
Requiring students to take tests while most other colleges made the ACT and SAT optional starting in fall 2024 could have “sent the signal that MIT was less ‘minority-friendly,'” Schaeffer said.
The rapid decline in the number of black students enrolling at MIT was comparable to that at the University of Michigan after that state imposed a racially discriminatory admissions ban in 2006.
In 2006, Michigan’s student population was 7% black. By 2021, it had dropped to just under 4%, according to a brief filed by Michigan authorities in connection with the Supreme Court case. The drop came even as the number of college-age black residents in the state increased from 16% to 19%.
In their brief, Michigan officials argued that the state’s aggressive efforts to increase the number of minority students through so-called race-neutral strategies, including connecting underserved areas, have only partially closed that gap.
Similar declines occurred at California’s most prestigious public universities after the state banned minority funding in 1996. At the University of California, Los Angeles, the proportion of black students fell from 7% in 1995 to just over 3% in 1998. The proportion of Latino students fell from around 22% to around 10% during the same period.
Efforts to increase student diversity through outreach have been expensive and ineffective, officials said in a brief to the Supreme Court.
Schmill, MIT’s admissions officer, blamed a lack of training in science and technology.
“Black and Hispanic students are less likely to attend high schools that teach calculus, physics or computer science,” he said.
Schmill said the university, which has made great efforts in the past to reach students in these communities, must now redouble its efforts.
Schmill said MIT officials did not know whether fewer black and Latino students applied this year because they did not ask applicants about their race.
But the Supreme Court said applicants are allowed to write about their race if it is essential to a life experience, such as overcoming discrimination. Some experts predicted that admissions officers would circumvent the ban on considering race by sifting through students’ essays and extracurricular activities for clues about their racial and ethnic background. But whether MIT used that tactic was not clear from the results.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
