Did Colleges Obey the Supreme Court?

Kind of, sort of, a little bit.

From the New York Times, a study of 59 of the more prestigious colleges’ reactions to announcing that affirmative action violates the Constitution:

The first thing to note is that due to the rapid growth of Hispanics and Asians, the share of the population that is black, and not Hispanic, not multiracial, and not foreign, has been falling. Yet, instead, we see the black share grow during the Great Awokening from about 5.5% in pre-woke 2012 to about 7.4% in 2022 during the Racial Reckoning, an increase of 35%.

In 2024, after the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action, the black share is down to about 6.2%, still higher than in 2014.

Here’s my paywall:

Hispanics went down from 14% to 13%, but still up from around 8.5% in 2010.

The white share fell from 62% in 2010 barely over 50% in 2024, up only slightly after the Supreme Court’s decision.

Asians went barely up from 18% to (eyeballing) maybe 18.2%.

The main change was a big increase in the small number of students who didn’t report a race from 2% to a little over 4%:

Of course, this Decline to State percentage is still smaller than in the early 2010s. It was pretty popular around the turn of the century to not admit to a race, IIRC, then it fell from favor.

Who are these kids? Are they Asians and whites who discovered from the Supreme Court’s decision that admissions departments don’t like them, so they hid their race? Maybe they were blacks and Hispanics who discovered that affirmative action is supposed to be over? Beats me.

The bottom line is that elite colleges just barely responded to the Supreme Court laying down the law against affirmative action:

MIT, which has taken the lead of American academia away from Harvard in the post-Woke era, came closest to obeying the Supreme Court, by cutting its black share by ten points, from 16% last year to 6% this year.

But, keep in mind, that MIT had inflated its black share enormously in recent years: 16% of MIT’s freshman class in 2023 being black was absurd. This is MIT we’re talking about, a hard school, not Northeastern State Teacher’s College.

For MIT to still be 6% black this year obviously required a fair amount of illegal affirmative action. But, at least MIT made a gesture of compromise toward the judicial branch of the government.

Similarly, the third biggest decline was seen at Columbia, from 20% black to 12% black. But Columbia being 20% black in 2023 was insane.