This year’s entering class is the first since admissions decisions were constrained by the Supreme Court’s ban on racial preferences in the SFFA case, and lots of interesting data have been coming out. Some elite universities like Yale, despite swearing in an amicus brief that there was no way to retain racial diversity without using preferences, have seen their demographics barely change. Others, like MIT and Johns Hopkins, have seen their Asian American populations increase with a concomitant decrease in Hispanic and Black matriculants and little change in the percentage of white students.
One pitfall to watch out for is that universities are changing the way they report the data. For example, in 2023, Johns Hopkins ref=”https://web.archive.org/web/20231218160541/https://apply.jhu.edu/fast-facts/”> had reported 18% white students, compared to 20% Hispanic, 14% Black, 29% Asian American, 14% international, 2% Native American, and 1% unknown.
Hopkins has just released its class of 2028 data, and now reports 34.1% white students. A huge increase thanks to SFFA? Nope. According to Hopkins, the percentage of white students actually declined from 39.1%, rather than rose from 18%. The percentage of Asian American students soared from 29% to 46%, while the representation of black students dropped from 13.8% to 5.7% and of Hispanic students from 20.8% to 10.7%.
So what’s going on here? It seems that in 2023, Hopkins reported students who checked “white” and some other box as being only members of the non-white classification. This year, they are counting students who checked more than one box as members of both categories. (As a result, this year the percentages add up to 115%, instead of 100%). Hispanic students, unlike members of other minority groups, are asked first whether or not they are Hispanic, and then, if so, which racial group they belong to (this will change under new federal rules, however). Thus, a significant percentage of Hispanic students will check that they are Hispanic by ethnicity and white by race. There will also be students of mixed racial background who will check that they are (Black, Native American, Asian American) and also white.
If we compare apples to apples, the percentage of students who check just white, or who check white and something else, has declined. But Hopkins is not providing the data that would allow us to compare the 18% of matriculants who only checked the white box in 2023 with the same group in 2024.
So if you are interested in how SFFA has affected university demographics, you need to make sure you are comparing the right data.
The post Comparing Class of 2027 to Class of 2028 Demographic Data is Tricky appeared first on Reason.com.
