In the arguments before the Supreme Court on affirmative action in college admissions, proponents of affirmative action claimed that the number of Blacks admitted to selective colleges and universities would plummet absent affirmative action. And opponents of affirmative action claimed that the number of Asian Americans would increase substantially.
As colleges and universities release data on their incoming classes, the actual picture is much more muddled. Some schools have reported the kind of major declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment that advocates of affirmative action feared.
At Amherst College, the percentage of Black students in the entering class dropped from 11% to 3%. At MIT, the number of Black students dropped from 15% to 5%. At Brown University, the percent of Black students dropped from 15% to 9%, and the number of Hispanic freshmen dropped from 14% to 10%.
At Columbia, the percent of Asian students increased from 30% to 39%, while the percentage of Black entering students dropped from 20% to 12%.
But other schools reported smaller drops in Black and Hispanic enrollment, and little or no increase in Asian enrollment. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady in their percentages of minority admissions. Asian American enrollment dropped from 35% to 29% at Duke; from 30% to 24% at Yale; and from 26% to 23.8% at Princeton.
As for Black enrollment, it increased from 12% to 13% at Duke; stayed at 14% at Yale; and dropped only from 9% to 8.9% at Princeton.
What's happening?
The president of Amherst College, in an email to the college community, asked, "Why did our demographics change so significantly while other institutions saw different outcomes?" and said that the question has "no easy answer."
Part of the answer — at least to the question of why Asian Americans didn't show higher numbers — is that the percentage of students declining to identify their race has increased, for example, from 5% to 11% at Duke and from 4% to 7% at Brown.
Experts speculate that the nonresponders are overwhelmingly Asian Americans, who fear they will be disfavored because of race. At Tufts, nonresponders rose from 3.3% to 6.7%. At Harvard, they rose from 4% to 8%.
There are also discrepancies in the way different schools count, particularly when it comes to the growing number of biracial students. At some schools, when you check two boxes, you're counted twice; at others, only once.
No one is particularly satisfied with the numbers. Advocates of affirmative action point to the lower numbers of Black and Hispanic students as costing all students the benefits of diversity in the classroom and college experience, and point to the need for increasing efforts to recruit students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
At Harvard, where the number of Blacks in the incoming freshman class dropped from 18% to 14%, the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard described that drop as "huge," and argued that "any drop in an already small number can dramatically impact the campus environment for students of color, and students are already reporting negative effects."
A precipitous drop to as low as 3% can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, making it all the more difficult to recruit talented Black students.
Others, like Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and a critic of affirmative action, take heart in the fact that the numbers aren't as low as some feared they would be.
"There were predictions that the Black population could fall to 2% at some universities and 6% at Harvard, and that did not happen. I want there to be racial diversity on campus. I think it showed it was possible to achieve that without racial preferences."
Still others have argued that the number of Black and Hispanic students is still too high, and the number of Asian Americans still too low, to reflect a true merits system.
"Your racial numbers are not possible under true neutrality," Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought suit against Harvard in the Supreme Court, said in letters this week to Princeton, Yale and Duke, adding: "You are now on notice. Preserve all potentially relevant documents and communications" — a sign that they are contemplating litigation.
But the most troubling number of all, it seems to me, comes from Richard Sander, a critic of affirmative action who is a law professor at UCLA.
According to Sander, who is cited by The New York Times for his work, Black students make up about 3% of the top tenth of high school students nationally. Three percent — for a group that makes up, according to data from Pew, some 14% of the U.S. population.
That is, ultimately, what is wrong, and why affirmative action at the college level is at best a Band-Aid for a larger problem of educational inequality that must be addressed if there is to be true equality and diversity at the college level.
Susan Estrich is a politician, professor, lawyer and writer. She has appeared on the pages of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Ms. Estrich has also appeared as a television commentator on CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Her focus is on legal matters, women's concerns, national politics, and social issues. Read Susan Estrich's Reports — More Here.