Moving in are the new freshmen. From Cambridge to Chapel Hill, you can see them dragging milk crates and bedding past the same old gates on quads. However, the numbers also indicate that something has changed if you look at the faces. Just 5% of the Class of 2029 identify as Black or African American, according to a report published earlier this month in Princeton’s student newspaper. That is a significant decline. To find a figure that low, you have to go back to 1968. The silence surrounding the figure seems louder than the figure itself, especially for a school that spent decades printing brochures about diversity.
The Supreme Court rendered its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions two years ago, during the summer of 2023. Harvard and the University of North Carolina were the targets of the lawsuit, which was created by Ed Blum, a former stockbroker who has devoted much of his second act to suing organizations whenever he sees people of color in them. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that the Equal Protection Clause could not be reconciled with admissions practices based on race. In one afternoon, sixty years of precedent were rewritten.
Part of what makes the early data intriguing is that it is more disorganized than either side anticipated. The percentage of Black students in Harvard’s freshman class decreased from 18% in the fall of 2023 to 14% the following year before declining once more. UNC fell from 10.5 to 7.8 percent. The decline was even more severe at MIT, where it went from 16% to 6% in a single cycle, a swing so sharp that even supporters of the decision were taken aback. While everyone is watching the headline numbers at Harvard, it seems as though something is subtly being rearranged beneath the surface, school by school.
This is the part, though, that hardly anyone anticipated. The Southeastern Conference gained more than 2,200 Black and Hispanic freshmen while the Ivies were losing close to 600. At LSU, the number of black freshmen increased by roughly thirty percent. At the University of Mississippi—Ole Miss, of all places—it increased by fifty percent. In South Carolina and Tennessee, Hispanic enrollment increased by over one-third. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as the “cascade effect,” whereby highly skilled students of color who previously had an advantage at prestigious universities are now landing one rung down, then another, changing campuses that for years recruited from a much smaller pool.
It’s difficult to ignore how strange it is. The University of Mississippi now has a more diverse student body as a result of Blum’s years-long and multimillion-dollar efforts to end racial admissions. College admissions is not a one-player game, according to James S. Murphy, the Class Action senior fellow who conducted the statistics. If you alter one rule at the top, it will have long-lasting side effects.
However, there is actual loss in the cascade. Last year, 2,144 fewer Black and Hispanic freshmen were enrolled in the most selective 50 universities—those that send graduates to careers in law, medicine, finance, and the federal bench. A student who enrolls in a school with a lower graduation rate or a weaker post-graduate network is statistically less likely to end up in the rooms where decisions are made because those institutions are at the top of the nation’s professional pipelines. Ivy Plus schools saw a 7% increase in Asian American enrollment. Contrary to the SFFA case’s entire premise, white enrollment hardly changed.
It’s early yet. One data cycle, followed by two, does not constitute a verdict. Schools are experimenting with socioeconomic indicators, essays, and geographic targeting—anything that could protect a diverse class without provoking legal action. Some people are doing better than others. Roberts himself referred to diversity as a “commendable” objective while cutting off the best means of accomplishing it—the kind of paradox that ages oddly. The question that looms over the upcoming admissions cycle is whether the cascade settles into something long-lasting or whether the elite schools find a workaround that the courts will accept. As you watch this play out, you get the impression that the nation will gradually and unevenly discover what it truly purchased by ending affirmative action.
