The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the first major universities to release demographic data for its incoming class after the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions, said Wednesday that its cohort of first-year students is less diverse than in previous years.
Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions and student financial services, said that 16 percent of enrolling undergraduates identify as Black, Hispanic, Native American, or Pacific Islander, down from 25 percent in recent years. MIT directly attributes the decline to the court’s ruling last June in two lawsuits challenging admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“We expected that this would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT,” Schmill said in a news story published by the university. “That’s what has happened.”
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It’s not immediately clear whether other selective universities are experiencing similar declines. Spokespeople for Harvard, Brown University, Tufts University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth College said demographic data for the class of 2028 are not yet available. Other selective schools did not immediately respond to inquiries from The Boston Globe.
The drop in diversity at MIT follows concerns across the higher education sector that ending affirmative action in admissions would reduce the number of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students admitted to the nation’s most prestigious schools. College leaders said that using race as one of many factors in the admissions process was the best tool available to enroll students disadvantaged by systemic inequities in K-12 education.
Even before the ruling, administrators at selective schools had been working to expand partnerships with nonprofits and community organizations that work with underrepresented and low-income students. They also added essay questions to allow applicants to expound on how culture, life experiences, and community have influenced their identities and ambitions.
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“There will be considerable concern about what this means for our community,” Schmill said in an interview. Diversity remains a top priority for MIT, he said, and he rejects arguments by some alumni that MIT should focus solely on academic excellence and not diversity.
Schmill, a 1986 MIT graduate, said every student admitted on his watch in recent years “has been exceptional.”
He wrote in a blog post Wednesday that “alumni and faculty from my generation sometimes grumble (because they grumble to me!) that the MIT education has been watered down; the data clearly shows the opposite is true in every way we can reasonably measure.” The school’s acceptance rate has declined from 33 percent in 1982 to 5 percent today, while graduation rates have risen, Schmill wrote.
“Over the last 10 years, as MIT has gotten more and more diverse, our graduation rates have gone up, retention has gone up, and academic performance has been increasing,” Schmill told the Globe. “I want to emphasize academic excellence and diversity coexist.”
MIT said it did not collect racial data from its entire applicant pool. Some higher education watchers were concerned the high court’s ruling would deter students of color from applying to top schools. The Common Application said in June that it did not observe “any meaningful deviations from historical trends with respect to students’ college application behaviors across racial/ethnic groups.”
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Several colleges, including Harvard and Brown, reported in December that they accepted higher percentages of first-generation students in their early admissions rounds. It’s yet to be seen how many of those students enrolled at top colleges for the upcoming academic year.
Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, wrote in a message to the campus community Wednesday that the university will fight to preserve diversity in its student population, within the bounds of the law.
“We need to make sure that the opportunity pipeline is wide open,” Kornbluth said. “And we need to be prepared to think big and long term.”
That means, Kornbluth said, the university must communicate that it meets financial aid for all undergraduates, invest in outreach programs, and use MIT resources to expand access to science and math preparation for K-12 students nationwide.
“MIT has never shied away from hard problems – and if this were a simple issue, Stu and his team would have solved it,” Kornbluth said. “This should not deter us, any more than it does for other seemingly intractable problems.”
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.