The Atlantic

The Race-Blind College-Admissions Era Is Off to a Weird Start

Rose Horowitch
Mon, February 3, 2025 at 7:00 AM EST9 min read

When colleges began announcing the makeup of their incoming freshman classes last year - the first admissions cycle since the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action - there seemed to have been some kind of mistake. The Court's ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had been almost universally expected to produce big changes. Elite universities warned of a return to diversity levels not seen since the early 1960s, when their college classes had only a handful of Black students.

And yet, when the numbers came in, several of the most selective colleges in the country reported the opposite results. Yale, Dartmouth, Northwestern, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan, Williams, and Bowdoin all ended up enrolling more Black or Latino students, or both. Princeton and Duke appear to have kept their demographics basically stable.

These surprising results raise two competing possibilities. One is that top universities can preserve racial diversity without taking race directly into account in admissions. The other, favored by the coalition that successfully challenged affirmative action in court, is that at least some of the schools are simply ignoring the Supreme Court's ruling - that they are, in other words, cheating. Finding out the truth will likely require litigation that could drag on for years. Although affirmative action was outlawed in 2023, the war over the use of race in college admissions is far from over.

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