UPDATED: Is Yale defying the Supreme Court?

A survey of Yale's new freshman Class of 2028 raises affirmative action questions.

UPDATE: On Wednesday, Yale’s administration released its official numbers comparing 2027’s freshman class to 2028’s. The official results are very similar to my reporting on Tuesday comparing 2027 official results to an unofficial 2028 survey in the Yale Daily News.

From today’s Yale Daily News:

The class of 2028, Yale’s first group of students admitted since the Supreme Court ended race-conscious college admissions, saw changes in its share of Asian American and white students compared to last year’s class, while Black and Latine enrollment remained largely the same.

According to the first-year class profile released by the admissions office, 14 percent of the class of 2028 identifies as African American, 24 percent as Asian American, 19 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 3 percent as Native American and 46 percent as white.

Compared to the class of 2027, admitted in the last race-conscious admissions cycle, the class of 2028 saw a 4 percent increase in the share of white students and a 6 percent decrease in the share of Asian American students. The percentage of both Black or African American students and Native American students remained the same.

Back to my original post from Tuesday:

Slowly, more colleges are releasing data on their Class of 2028, the first one admitted after the Supreme Court’s ruling last year against affirmative action at Harvard.

As you’ll recall, MIT, which appears to be trying to knock Harvard off its traditional perch as the leader of American higher education by acting like the grown-up in the room post-Great Awokening (e.g., taking the lead on restoring mandatory admission testing) while Harvard has been shooting itself in the foot during its Claudine Gay DEI Era, went first and announced that its freshman class’s black share fell from 15% last year to 5%. Granted, MIT is probably still using affirmative action to get its black share even that high, but that sizable drop indicated that MIT wanted to get across that it is taking the Supreme Court’s ruling seriously.

Yale hasn’t yet made an official announcement, but the Yale Daily News conducted a detailed survey of 541 new Yale freshmen, 536 of whom answered the race/ethnicity question:

I put together the table below to compare last year’s Yale freshman class to this year’s post-Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard freshman class: