In June 2023, the Supreme Court effectively banned the consideration of race in the admissions process. (It did not, however, prevent admissions offices from considering how race may have affected an applicant’s experience and character, as expressed in personal statements). The freshmen showing up on campus this year are the first post-SFFA class, which means the racial composition of the Class of 2028 is going to receive an unprecedented level of scrutiny. In order to help track the post-SFFA outcomes, Education Reform Now has created this tracker which will be updated as class profiles are released.
Before you skip to the tables, there’s some important things to keep in mind.
- The impact of SFFA was always going to be limited by the fact that most colleges and universities were already not considering race in their admissions decisions. That’s not just because nine states already banned race-conscious admissions at public universities. It’s because the majority of higher education institutions accept more people than they reject and have many seats on offer in their classes. These institutions are not in a position where they need to consider race as one of many factors to consider in a holistic process that makes very tough choices about who to admit from a too large pool of highly qualified applicants.
It is at those highly selective colleges that consider race in their admissions process where the SFFA decision is expected to have its most immediate impact. That is why we have limited our tracker to universities and liberal arts colleges in the US News rankings that previously considered race in their admissions process. We’re certainly not trying to endorse those rankings (we prefer these rankings). We want to keep the scope of this project manageable in order to provide the most up-to-date information. We expect that some highly-ranked colleges will not share any data this year. (We revised the tables on September 12, 2024, to show only those insitutions that have published data.) - It is too soon to say what the impact of SFFA was. So why share this tracker? We were concerned by the appearance of stories in the media that were focusing on a limited number of results–typically those trending in the direction that SFFA was hoping for–and ignoring what already appears to be some considerable variation. Many of these stories are also comparing institutions that took different approaches to describing the diversity of their class. We want to make sure people can easily see all the available data, free of whatever narrative frame some might want to put around it. Some people will be in a rush to create their own story about the impact of the SFFA decision. We recommend caution.
We think these tables, which compare the average enrollment percentages for the past two years with the percentage this year and calculate the percent change (not the percentage point change), are useful but there is a lot they do not show.
These charts do not show WHY changes occurred. Keep in mind that single digit percent change could very easily reflect the regular ebb and flow of college admissions. We have little data on who applied to these colleges and who was admitted.The tables do not show us anything about what policies and practices changed and what stayed the same at these institutions, whether it be recruiting, financial aid, yield-strategy, or evolving missions. It is entirely possible that an institution that saw significant changes did so in spite of their efforts not because of them, or that the changes would have been even more extreme if they had stayed with the status quo. The tables do not tell us anything about the impact of the FAFSA fiasco of last year. Even though many of these institutions also used CSS Profile to create financial aid packages, they might still have lost students who, for example, were afraid to enroll without having received confirmation of their Pell Grant. - We have only included colleges that have disaggregated their demographic data by the current racial/ethnic groups in the US census. Not all institutions share their demographic data in their freshman profiles in the same way, making it more challenging to compare outcomes at institutions. Some universities and colleges provide the same percentages that they supply to the Common Data Set and the Department of Education’s IPEDS data collection. Others, however, use students’ self-reported identification and leave out the category “Two or more races.” This decision has two effects: it increases the percentages of underrepresented students of color and it means the totals at these institutions will add up to more than 100 percent. Institutions that take this approach are marked with an asterisk in the tables. This institutional practice also led to the decision not to create a table for multiracial students. We are using the Common Data Set/IPEDS approach to categorization as our default category since that is the data that will be the subject of analysis in subsequent years.
We also left out enrollment for indigenous populations because the number of students enrolled from these categories are too small (often single digits or zero) to reflect changes in enrollment due to SFFA.
One element we decided not to share at this point is the percentage of students who did not indicate their racial or ethnic identity to colleges. At some institutions, that percentage increased significantly. We will likely share this data in a separate post next month.
Tracking this data is not easy, so if you see a new profile release please email it to me at James@EdReformNow.org.