Black Student Enrollment at MIT Plummets by Two-Thirds Following End of Affirmative Action

When the Supreme Court banned affirmative action, the number of black students admitted to a top US university dropped by two-thirds.

This year, only 5% of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students were black. This is a big drop from 2023 when 15% of MIT students were black.

At the same time, the number of Asian American students allowed into the university rose from 40% to 47% year over year.

In 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States said that race-based university admissions were against the Constitution. This meant that policies meant to increase diversity in college were overturned.

Since the decision was made in June 2023, MIT is the first school to share information about the people who will be in its first class.

According to Stu Schmill, who is in charge of applications at MIT, the number of students who say they are black, Hispanic, Native American, or Pacific Islander has gone down from about 25% to 16%.

“We thought this would make fewer students from racial and ethnic groups that have been underrepresented in the past apply to MIT.” “That’s what took place,” Mr. Schmill told MIT News.

This year, the number of Hispanic and Latino students dropped from 16% in 2023 to 11%. At the same time, the percentage of white students stayed the same at 37%, down from 38% in 2023.

The president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, said that the 2024 class “does not bring…” the same level of broad racial and ethnic variety that the MIT community has worked together to achieve over the past few decades. This is because of the Supreme Court’s decision last year.

Students for Fair Admissions (SFA) founder Edward Blum told the New York Times, “Every student admitted to the class of 2028 at MIT will know that they were accepted only because of their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the color of their skin.” SFA took legal action against Harvard and the University of North Carolina to overturn their affirmative action policies.

SFA said that Asian applications were being passed over in favor of black students during the admissions process, which was not fair.

He told the paper, “MIT just took race out of the equation.” Peter Arcidiacono is an economist at Duke University and an expert witness for SFA.