The first complete post-affirmative action admissions cycle is on the books, and the enrollment drop at MIT should end any quiet hope that selective campuses could simply nudge outcomes back to where they were.

MIT enrolled 5 percent Black or African American first-year students in the Class of 2028. That compares with an average of 13 percent across the previous four classes. Hispanic/Latino enrollment came in at 11 percent, down from a four-year average of 15 percent. Asian American enrollment rose to 47 percent, up from 41 percent, while white enrollment stayed nearly flat at 37 percent.

Those are not marginal shifts. A campus that had enrolled roughly one Black student in every eight freshmen enrolled one in twenty. The Supreme Court's June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina removed race as a permissible factor, and the first class enrolled under that rule entered through a recruitment process many campuses were still rebuilding.

Early Enrollment Data From MIT and Amherst

Amherst College's Class of 2028 profile told a similarly sharp story. Black or African American enrollment fell to 3 percent, from roughly 11 percent the prior year. Hispanic/Latino enrollment declined to 8 percent, while Asian American enrollment rose to 18 percent. Amherst's president, Michael Elliott, called the declines concerning and said the college was working to strengthen outreach. Amherst matters because the college is wealthy, test-optional, and had been one of the more aggressive liberal arts recruiters of low-income students. A 3 percent Black first-year share is not a data glitch.

Harvard College's Class of 2028 enrolled 14 percent Black or African American students, down from 18 percent the year before, and 16 percent Hispanic/Latino students. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Black enrollment fell to 7.8 percent from a 10.5 percent average in recent years, according to the university's reported class profile. Yale's numbers stayed close to previous years, and several large public universities saw only small movement.

The unevenness is the point. You cannot read one institution's number and declare the national effect. Selective, test-intensive STEM schools like MIT and liberal arts colleges with small applicant pools like Amherst absorbed the biggest visible shifts. Larger flagships and universities with existing percentage-plan pipelines moved less, though their data also reflect application and yield changes that have not fully separated from policy.

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Flagships and Ivies: A Mixed Picture

Brown University's Class of 2028 profile showed Black or African American enrollment at 9 percent, down from 15 percent, while Hispanic/Latino enrollment fell to 10 percent from 14 percent. Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and several other selective campuses released profiles that moved by a point or two in either direction, though the denominator is tiny: a single class can shift several percentage points because the entering cohort is only a few thousand students. The scale of the MIT change is visible in the first-year class profile MIT publishes each fall.

Some of these early numbers may reflect who was in the applicant pool before any policy change. The Supreme Court's decision arrived after many seniors had already chosen their high school courses, extracurriculars, and application lists. Recruitment changes take years to show up. But the first-year data still matter because college leaders now have a baseline they did not want. An institution that sees Black enrollment fall by eight percentage points this year cannot wait three cycles to find out whether its outreach pipeline will recover.

One thing the data does not show is a single national floor. Some institutions, including Yale and the University of California system, were already operating under court or voter-approved prohibitions on race-conscious admissions, or had built race-neutral admissions architectures long before 2023. Their enrollment stability is a useful contrast to campuses that had leaned heavily on race as a late-stage review factor.

Race-Neutral Strategies Are Not a Switch You Flip

Race-neutral recruitment under the current legal standard means you cannot use an applicant's race as a plus factor. You can still recruit widely, read essays that discuss lived experience, and consider how factors such as first-generation status, neighborhood income, high school quality, and family education level shape an applicant's record. The legal line is clear enough: the Supreme Court's opinion forbids race as a selection factor but leaves room for essays and outreach tied to individual experience.

The challenge is that many of those levers are slower or more expensive than directly using race. A college can add an admissions officer for the Central Valley or the Mississippi Delta and see results in three years, not one. You can expand a transfer guarantee from a community college district and change who applies, but not who gets admitted today. Officials at selective schools have been discovering that the old race-conscious shortcut was doing a lot of quiet work inside a holistic review file.

Some strategies have evidence. Texas's Top 10 Percent rule grants automatic admission to state universities for students in the top decile of their high school class, and it has produced measurable school-level diversity without using race. California's Eligibility in the Local Context program performs a similar function for the top 9 percent of graduates in each high school. The University of California built those pipelines after Proposition 209 banned race-conscious admissions, and its long-run experience is the closest available case study for other systems.

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What Race-Neutral Recruitment Actually Requires

You can see the shape of a workable race-neutral plan in what institutions with stable numbers did years ago. They built feeder relationships in specific high schools. They created automatic admission or transfer guarantees. They made need-based aid visible early enough to matter, because an admitted student who cannot see a price is not actually recruited.

Practical moves that have recorded results in post-Proposition 209 California and Texas include:

• Percentage-plan admission guarantees that use high school class rank rather than applicant race.
• Targeted outreach to schools and districts with low college-visit rates, staffed by full-time regional recruiters.
• Transfer guarantee programs from community colleges with pre-admission advising and in-state tuition bridges.
• Need-blind packaging and no-loan policies for families below a published income threshold, announced years ahead of the decision.

None of these is a perfect substitute for race-conscious review. The evidence from California shows that race-neutral policies can maintain some diversity measures while changing the composition in ways that still frustrate campus leaders. The University of California's own academic senate has repeatedly documented gaps between the state's high school demographics and the system's admission offers, particularly at Berkeley and UCLA. Statewide, the system has increased low-income and first-generation enrollment through targeted outreach, but Black and Latino shares in some professional and graduate programs remain below state population shares.

If you are an admissions director, the strategic error would be to treat one year of post-SFFA data as the problem. The problem is your applicant pool, your yield funnel, your financial aid packaging, and your feeder math. Race-conscious admissions used to compress all of that into one committee conversation. Race-neutral recruitment forces you to fix the pipeline in public. Enrollment offices that are already coping with state DEI bans reshaping university hiring may find the staffing piece especially tight.

NACAC's State of College Admission report tracks how recruitment budgets are shifting toward high school partnerships and direct admission. The schools making progress treat recruitment as a multiyear enrollment operation, not an autumn email campaign.

The Data to Pull Before Your Next Enrollment Meeting

On some campuses, the first post-decision class has not yet completed its sophomore year. That means retention data is thin and enrollment leaderboards get overread. But you already have enough to act. Pull your admit and yield data by race, first-generation status, Pell receipt, high school cluster, and application route. Compare it against the three pre-2023 cycles. Isolate where the funnel narrowed: application volume, admit rate, yield, and the average financial aid gap between your offer and the competing package.

One concrete step this week: split your applicant pool into your five largest feeder high schools and your five largest nontraditional pipeline sources, then run the admit-to-enroll conversion for each. If the conversion gap is not in applications but in admitted students who never deposit, stop spending on another recruitment brochure and find out what the admitted students in those clusters were offered at the school that took them.

Admissions officers are the first people to see a post-affirmative action enrollment slide. They are also the people most likely to be asked to fix it without extra staff, a longer runway, a higher discount rate, or any shared definition of success. The institutions that move fastest will be the ones that treat this not as a public relations problem but as a funnel problem with a data trail.