Black enrollment falls at Columbia, top schools after affirmative action ruling. Now what?

Some of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities, including New York City's Columbia University, have released data in recent weeks on the racial makeup of their newest classes. The handiwork of the U.S. Supreme Court is written all over them.

The share of newly admitted Black students dropped off significantly at the most selective schools, according to the institutions. The enrollment figures are the first since the Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling in June 2023 , barred schools from using race as a factor in higher-education admissions decisions.

Some of the reported results:

At the same time, Asian American representation increased at Columbia (from 30% to 39%) and at Brown University (from 29% to 33%), but stayed flat at Harvard (37%) and marginally fell at Dartmouth and Princeton. At Yale, it declined from 30% to 24%.

To help make sense of the new admissions landscape, Gothamist spoke with OiYan Poon, the author of "Asian American is Not a Color: Conversations about Race, Affirmative Action, and Family." Poon, a proponent of race-conscious admissions, offers advice for students and parents who are at the very center of a college admissions landscape that's very much in flux.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

These results are confusing. But one of the results is that a number of higher-ed institutions have taken fewer Black students. What does this mean to you?

We saw this historically with the University of California, when they ended affirmative action in 1996. It's in some ways communicating to Black students, "We don't want you, as a college."

We're also seeing, simultaneously, increasing applications to historically Black colleges and universities, which are gems in the ecosystem — underfunded gems. But what we're seeing is really a loss, I think, of intellectual talent among Black students at these predominantly white institutions that are often deemed as pathways to upward mobility.

And I think this is a real challenge for a democracy that claims to be multiracial and diverse. So I just fear that this is going to have adverse effects on science, on economics, on a lot of sectors of life in our country.

By which you mean fewer African Americans getting those pathways?

Yes, absolutely.

We are seeing a decline in the number of Asian Americans at certain colleges and universities, while at others like Columbia and MIT, the Asian American enrollment has dramatically risen. What gives?

There was research that came out of Georgetown by Anthony Carnevale and his team several years ago, before the lawsuit's ruling [the one last year significantly limiting affirmative action in school admissions]. And his team found that without race-conscious admissions, there might be a 1% — give or take — increase in Asian Americans being admitted.

So when you take the ecosystem of all these institutions, it's been a mixed bag. It kind of washes out into what Dr. Carnevale and his team predicted, which was maybe a slight gain. But at the same time, I want to be clear that there are natural fluctuations year to year in admissions.

Depending on things that are happening in the world with each cohort of high school graduates — there might be a pandemic, or there's a debacle with the FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] form with the federal government, right? So things happen that then create these kind of so-called natural fluctuations in enrollment numbers.

The percentages going up and down in the shares of Asian American enrollment may have to do with, again, these institutions perhaps not recruiting in ways that they had before or building relationships with different communities. There's just a lot of things that could go into it. So I'm interested in seeing how this unfolds in the next few years, to see actual trends, because one year does not make a difference.

Is it clear how white students have been affected by the changes?

It's also been a little bit of an up and down, but mostly the picture is not fully clear yet. For now, you've only got a couple dozen institutions, and the actual public reporting data day is Oct. 15, barring any federal government shutdown.

So there's a very strong to-be-determined quality to all of this.

Yes.

What did you feel last year when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action?

I felt pretty devastated when the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions. I just knew it would have ... it was just a continuation of attacks on a multiracial democracy — and who is affirmed and included in spaces of higher education and spaces of learning and engagement in the life of our nation. As a mom of a young child and the daughter of immigrants, I felt really upset. I think there were a lot of tears actually.

Did the ruling fundamentally change how colleges and universities do their work?

I think there's been a lot of changes. People are still trying to figure out what they can do.

I think what we're finding, like my colleague Liliana Garces at the University of Texas — she's a professor there, and a trained lawyer — she has really put forward this idea of "oppressive legalism." In other words, lawyers are telling their colleges and universities to back off of things that are still very legal.

And so schools are moving away, and they're really driven and leading through fear, which I think is not a good way to lead principled and mission-driven organizations.

What does this mean for an institution that sees a very exciting application from, say, a Black student, but who is objectively less impressive because of some numerical score?

I think they're second-guessing. I think some of these colleges are so afraid of getting sued, they have really rolled back their target recruitment efforts to visit and build relationships with communities, with talented Black and brown students, low-income students.

If you're in the business of finding talented students, then you should be doing that. But I think because this lawsuit and the makeup of the court is what it is, that fear is really driving these institutions to say, "Well, I don't know if we can do this."

Do you think that Ed Blum the legal activist who founded a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which won the Supreme Court victory against Harvard and the University of North Carolina and this movement is ultimately about increasing white student representation in institutions of higher education?

Yes. [laughs] I mean, the simple answer is yes. I think at the end of the day, what Ed Blum's movement is about is really shutting down and decreasing who's at the table in this country in various sectors. He started out in voting rights . It's about power and who gets to have it in this country.

There are students across the country, high school juniors and seniors who are just trying to make sense of this. What advice would you give them?

Be yourself. Really, just be yourself and know that you've worked hard. And lean into your interests and curiosities and know that there are over 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. And we forget that sometimes, right? We think that there's only like 50.

So how to reconcile that with what you said earlier, which is that Black students are being denied spots in some of these more prominent institutions?

There's still a lot of opportunity in higher education, but we can't pretend like there's also not material consequences and inequalities, right?

There's an economist, Zach Bleemer, who studied the University of California and what happened there in relation to who went to the University of California campuses, versus the California State University campuses and community colleges. After the ban on affirmative action, there was kind of this cascading effect where fewer Black and Latino and Indigenous students were going to the UC's but were going more to the Cal States and the community colleges. And, as a result [for] white and Asian students, he said , there was no economic gain.

But there was an economic decrease, there was harm done to these other students of color who were cascading downward.

So it sounds like what you're saying is that there are material gains for the most disadvantaged communities...

When you go to the most prestigious institutions.

Less so for white and Asian students.

Right.

Do you have specific advice for the parents of students whose anxieties are probably supercharged right now?

I am very sympathetic to those concerns as a mom. My daughter's in Chicago Public Schools. We have magnet high schools. This is not about college, but it's still a selective process.

And I have told my daughter since she was entering kindergarten just very casually, "Hey, isn't this a beautiful neighborhood high school? Someday you can go here, right?"

And last year in third grade, she came home and said, "Mom, if I don't go to Lane Tech High School" — which is, I guess, like a Stuyvesant here in New York, we have about 10 or 12 of those kind of magnet high schools — she said, "If I don't go to Lane Tech High School, my life is over." And I was just like, "Té Té, you're in third grade!" What is happening here?

It just was confounding. I guess in some ways, I'm the anti-stereotypical Asian parent. There's lots of possibilities, but I recognize that this is actually a privilege that she has.

My daughter has a privilege as a daughter of two highly educated professionals. So when I think about middle-class and educated parents, I really want to tell them, "Let's calm down here." But I think about my daughter's classmates and their parents, and a lot of their children, if they go to college, this will be their first person in their families to go to college.

And so that anxiety I recognize and respect.

How about institutions themselves? Do you think they need to be changing course in some manner or are they at the mercy of larger political and legal forces?

I mentioned there's over 4,000 colleges and universities, right? The great majority of them are at the whims of their financial situations.

Historically, if you look at how colleges and universities developed, they've been financially precarious institutions. The majority of colleges and universities are driven by financial considerations. So admissions decisions have so much to do with the calculus [around] what percentage of my incoming students can pay full or close-to-full tuition? So that I can also then cover those who need financial aid, because I only have X amount of dollars in next year's fiscal budget in the university to cover financial aid. Here's my limited financial aid budget. And how do I leverage Pell Grants or state aid, right? And so there's this prediction there, but it does create a privilege for wealthier students.

Disproportionately white.

Yes. Disproportionately white.

As an Asian American, how do you explain the centrality of Asian Americans to this particular issue? Is it simply about equity?

Asian Americans are so complicated. We are an extremely diverse community — socioeconomically, ethnically, culturally, linguistically, you name it. There's all kinds of Asian American experiences. There's folks who are incredibly wealthy and folks who are incredibly poor and everyone in between.

But at the end of the day, there are these flattened racial stereotypes about Asian Americans — as crazy, rich Asians, as extremely intelligent but only at math and science, really docile, quiet, hardworking, not complainers, overcoming adversity and so on — unlike these undeserving minorities, posing against the stereotypes of undeserving Black, undeserving Latino communities.

This is all flattening all of us, and it's a divide-and-conquer tactic that Ed Blum has played into very well, unfortunately. And so you use these stereotypes to say we don't need policies or practices to recognize these inequalities in our education system. And so then you can keep these inequalities in place and those who are most privileged continue to benefit.

And so Asian Americans get used, and that's what I talk about in this book and how different Asian Americans are making sense of all of that.