After Affirmative Action: Takeaways—and Puzzles—From College Admissions Data

Most people believed that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action in higher education admissions would cause a big drop in Black and Hispanic enrollment at the nation’s top colleges. What happened is more complicated.

Overall, more Black and Hispanic students enrolled in four-year universities in fall 2024 than in fall 2023. But in nearly all highly selective private and public colleges—the 85 that accept 25 percent or fewer applicants—Black enrollment declined or remained flat; the same was true of Hispanic enrollment at more than half of those institutions. 

Public flagships, typically the most selective public universities in their state, experienced a 6 percent increase in the enrollment of Black and Hispanic first-year students. Yet at 20 of the 50 flagships, Black student enrollment fell or flatlined, and Hispanic student enrollment fell or essentially stayed the same at 16. 

A new study found that high-scoring students from underrepresented minority groups were less likely to enroll in highly selective colleges in the fall of 2024 than in the previous year. Instead, those students “cascaded” into less selective colleges, which generally have lower graduation rates and postgraduate earnings. 

When President Donald Trump won re-election, he increased pressure on universities to disregard race and ethnicity in admissions. 

“Many institutions have over-corrected and over-complied in all sorts of ways in response to threats from the Trump administration,” said Shaun Harper, a provost professor of education, public policy, and business at the University of Southern California and a leading scholar of enrollment trends. 

Harper and other experts argue that emerging enrollment shifts may be a harbinger of things to come. Hechinger reporters analyzed the new federal data to look for changes in first-year student enrollment. Below are some notable takeaways.

1. Highly selective schools saw a large drop in Black first-year students and a smaller decrease for Hispanic students.

• The nation’s 85 highly selective universities, which include 71 private and 14 public institutions, reported an 18 percent drop in Black students, to roughly 8,200 from nearly 10,000 in 2023. 

• Among those colleges, 17 reported at least a 40 percent decline in Black enrollment (Hispanic students experienced similarly sized declines at five colleges). 

• Hispanic student enrollment decreased 4 percent, dipping to 19,000 from nearly 20,000.

• Meanwhile, Asian student enrollment increased by 2 percent, whereas white student enrollment increased by 1 percent.

2. While many thought white men might gain an advantage under new admissions rules, their numbers remained essentially flat at private, highly selective colleges, while Black and Hispanic women had especially large decreases.

• The number of Black women entering private, highly selective institutions plunged 27 percent, compared with a 23 percent drop for Black men. Enrollment of Hispanic women dipped 12 percent, while Hispanic men experienced an 8 percent drop. 

• Among 71 private, highly selective colleges, only 72 more white male students enrolled in 2024 than in the previous fall. (White women increased by 479 students at those colleges.) 

Highly selective colleges enrolled some 132,000 first-year students in 2024, a fraction of the 1.6 million incoming students nationwide. Experts see a reversal of gains in a decades-long battle to increase the number of Black students, particularly at these elite institutions—whosegraduates tend to move into higher-paying and more influential careers. They make up a disproportionate share of U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, Fortune 500 CEOs, and U.S. senators.

“Truly, it only takes about five to 10 years of an institution backsliding and changing its philosophy to really affect the next generation of who those leaders are,” said Eddie R. Cole, a history and education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

3. State flagships, selective and otherwise, have a mission to offer state residents a high-quality, affordable education. Their incoming student enrollment figures varied widely. 

• Black student enrollment nationwide increased by 6 percent in 2024, compared with 4 percent the previous year, but at 20 of the 50 flagships, the number of Black students declined or remained essentially flat.

• Hispanic student enrollment increased by 6.4 percent at all flagships, compared with an 8.6 percent increase the year before.

• Puzzling, perhaps: The six biggest drops in Hispanic students were scattered around the country, in Alabama, California, Iowa, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Many flagships post high graduation rates. State and local leaders more often hail from flagships than elite private colleges. 

Despite small gains in the overall number of Black students on some campuses, these students are still significantly underrepresented in many cases. 

At the University of Mississippi, for example, the percentage of Black students remains lower than it was five years prior. Ole Miss has long been one of the least representative flagships for Black students in the country. The percentage of first-year Black students there grew to about 8.5 percent from 7 percent in 2023, in a state where nearly half of high school graduates are Black. 

Hispanic enrollment at many flagship institutions has been climbing since 2019, reflecting increases in the number of Hispanic residents and high school graduates in many states. However, that trend was reversed at a dozen flagships, including Pennsylvania State University and the University of California, Berkeley. 

Penn State is one of several flagships that experienced drops in enrollment for both Black and Hispanic incoming students. After getting close to reflecting the Hispanic share of the state’s high school graduates in recent years, enrollment decreased by 255 Hispanic students. 

Berkeley’s decline was less significant: 138 fewer students. But it halts several years of increasing Hispanic enrollment. It is puzzling, given that California banned affirmative action in admissions decades ago, so the national change shouldn’t have had an impact. 

4. A huge number of students declined to report their race 

Students are not required to share their race with colleges, but historically almost all have done so. That may be changing: The number of admitted students declining to state their race at highly selective colleges shot up by 64 percent in a single year, an increase of about 2,300 students.

In fact, just 16 of the 85 highly selective private and public universities—most notably the University of Southern California—are responsible for three-fourths of that increased discretion. 

Harper, who is studying how and when students report their race and ethnicity, observed that students may be receiving mixed messages about this. 

“I think the answer is hiding in plain sight: that the Supreme Court decision signals to them that reporting their race would actually be a disadvantage, as opposed to any version of an advantage,” Harper said.

Looking ahead

Overall, experts expressed caution about drawing too many conclusions from a single year of data. Byeongdon Oh, a sociology professor at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, has studied widening racial inequality in higher education from the 1980s to the 2010s. He said he’s working on a more rigorous analysis that could consider additional factors behind the enrollment shifts, such as the pandemic’s impact on college-going.

This story about affirmative action was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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