The US Supreme Court banned racial preference in college admissions in 2023, but universities that have released admissions data for 2024 so far indicate that they are taking sharply divergent approaches in their new policies.
Yale College, like its Ivy League peers, agreed to stop considering race in admissions and to prevent reviewers from knowing an applicant’s self-identified race in 2023. But Yale, through the Common App application process shared by all Ivy Leagues schools and most top universities, offers an essay prompt in which students reflect on their “membership in a community,” an opportunity applicants could use to disclose their race. The Supreme Court’s ruling had mentioned that applicants should still be allowed to discuss “how race affected his or her life” in applications but added that “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
In the Yale class of 2028, the first cohort admitted after the Supreme Court barred affirmative action, there were no changes in the proportion of black students compared to the year prior. This development is at odds with the school’s statement to the Supreme Court that it would see substantial declines in black representation without explicitly race conscious admissions. Yale claimed that race-neutral programmes aimed at increasing diversity would still “lead to a near 33% reduction in the number of African American students admitted.” Meanwhile, the Asian student population decreased slightly in the new incoming class, and the white student population increased slightly.