Opinion | Post-Affirmative Action, Is Sustained Campus Diversity Suspicious?
As universities have released demographic information about their new freshman classes — the first cohort affected by last year’s Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action — advocates for colorblindness are crying foul.Though some schools have reported substantial demographic changes — including reduced Black and Hispanic representation and increased Asian American representation — not all schools have seen much change in these directions, if any.Yale, Princeton and Duke, for example, reported declines in Asian American enrollment; all three also reportedly kept Black and Hispanic enrollment near the same levels as the prior admissions cycle.Affirmative action’s defenders long framed the policy as a crucial diversity tool, while its critics argued that it often harmed Asian American students.
If it turns out that not much has changed at certain schools, critics are wondering, are those schools failing to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling?Last month, Students for Fair Admissions, a legal group founded in 2014 to challenge affirmative action in schools (and the plaintiff organization in the key Supreme Court cases), raised the stakes: It sent letters to Yale, Princeton and Duke, accusing them of circumventing the court’s decision and threatening litigation.The letters were surely a warning shot to other schools, too.But these patterns in admissions data are not the smoking gun that critics suggest.
They do not necessarily imply failure to comply with the court’s decision.Indeed, it is difficult to draw any conclusion from them at all.
There are at least three perfectly legal and very plausible explanations for why schools’ racial composition might not change the way critics of affirmative action expected — and, apparently, wanted.The first possible reason is that schools do not admit students in a vacuum.They compete for them.
Why did fewer Asian American students enroll this year at Yale, Duke and Princeton? Perhaps they went to...