A little over a year after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action unconstitutional, colleges around the country are seeing the impact.
Harvard, Tufts and University of North Carolina all saw drops in Black students among their incoming freshman class, while schools like Amherst College and MIT saw their Black enrollment for the incoming freshman class drop by more than half.
Tyrone Howard, a UCLA professor who studies race and education, says if these trends persist, schools will need to be more intentional about recruitment.
“One year, blips happen all the time with admissions, but if the same trends exist one, two, five years then that suggests that we have a real structural problem. We want to be present in those communities. We want to reach out to churches. We want to talk to parents. We want to let these adults know that it is still possible to be at our institution,” Howard said.