In a historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the admissions programs used by the University of North Carolina and Harvard College violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars racial discrimination by government entities.
The Harvard freshman class of 2028 will be admitted fully after the latest Supreme Court decision. Will Harvard declare that the class is <15% African American?
Resolves according to https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics, once available for the class of 2028.
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@Sketchy The 2028 stats are out—14%, so I think this resolves YES.
There's some weirdness with the reported data, discussed further here. IIUC, last year (& before), they just gave the % that report each race. This year, they give the % among those that report (in '28, 92% of students reported their race). [1] I don't think that changes the resolution, because if anything, this figure implies that they only actually have Black as the reported race for 14/100*92=~12.9% of the total class (but that is 14% of the 92% who reported). So whether you take the number they give (14%) or figure out the actual % class that have reported their race as Black, I think both are <15%.
[1]. The actual weirdness of the data discussed in the article is that Harvard re-reported their '27 results under the new methodology for comparison and it doesn't make any sense. They said last year 96% reported their race, and told the Crimson that for '27 the updated approach would give 18% Black. But at the time, they said it was 14.1%, and 14.1% -> 18% cannot be explained by just that rescaling? So I don't know how to make sense of those numbers, and neither can Harvard magazine lol. but IIUC, it's <15% no matter how it's measured.
MIT released their class of 2028 first year profile, and reports "5% Black/African American".
From the wayback machine, the same number for the class of 2027 was 15%.
that's a steep drop, so i would be shocked if harvard stayed >15% (when it was only at 15.3% last year). that being said, there's a lot of fuzzy choices in how this gets reported/classified/etc, the schools admission processes are different, so not a lock. (also seems possible that harvard could change the structure of how they report the first year class profile, complicating comparisons to previous years, assuming they do even release a profile soon)
@Ziddletwix I think I'll keep this open until the end of the year and N/A if there's nothing released.
If there is credible reporting on the demographic composition of the class that's not official from Harvard, I may consider counting that, though. Any issues with that?
- Harvard still has the same incentives for its racial diversity stats to look good
- Proxies for race are everywhere, some with plausible deniability as signifiers of other kinds of diversity (high school, hometown/neighborhood, income, urban/suburban/rural), some that can't be explicitly talked about but could easily be used anyway (names are the big one)
- Black applicants are now incentivized to signal their race somewhere else on the application (if there isn't currently a National Black Honor Society, there's about to be)
I think this comes down to whether Harvard wants to keep the number at 15, plus a bit of variance because they're not that far from 14.9 even with AA; or whether they care more about avoiding further lawsuits by having their racial representation numbers look more or less the same next year. But I think they can avoid that by doing a small token increase in Asian students.