EDUCATION
Why Black Student Enrollment is Dropping After Supreme Court Decision
Without policies designed to foster equity, some Black students are feeling the sting of rejection
Colleges and universities once used race-based affirmative action policies to alleviate the racism Black applicants faced in the admissions process. It wasn’t a perfect tool nor universally embraced, but it did make a difference. Nothing illustrates that point more than the drop in Black student enrollment following the Supreme Court’s decision to ban their use. While conservative Supreme Court justices argued a colorblind process was the only fair path forward, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion that “race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better,” arguing “if the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race makes it matter more.” The results following the ban have proven her point.
While Harvard University has not yet reported its demographic profile, several schools have reported a drop in the share of Black and other racially marginalized students following…
