In June 2023, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ended race-conscious admissions at virtually all American colleges and universities. The decision was framed by its supporters as a corrective to discrimination and by its critics as the dismantling of one of the few effective policy tools for reducing educational stratification. The first two admissions cycles since the ruling are now in, and the data is starting to clarify what changed.
Early indicators suggest the policy that was intended to be neutral has produced sharp, unequal effects.
What the early enrollment data shows
The class of 2028, the first admitted under the post-SFFA regime, showed substantial declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment at several flagship institutions. MIT reported Black enrollment dropping from 15% to 5% and Hispanic enrollment falling from 16% to 11%. Amherst, Brown, Tufts, and Yale reported smaller but meaningful declines. Some institutions, including Princeton and Duke, reported relatively stable numbers, suggesting that targeted recruitment, socioeconomic preferences, and essay-based holistic review are partial substitutes — but not full ones — for explicit consideration of race.
The variation matters. The institutions with the largest declines tended to be highly selective STEM-focused schools where standardized test performance maps closely onto K-12 educational inequality. Schools that had moved earlier toward test-optional policies and broader socioeconomic preferences saw smaller swings.
The mismatch theory and its limits
A long-standing argument against affirmative action — the “mismatch” theory associated with Richard Sander and others — held that race-conscious admissions placed Black and Hispanic students at institutions where they would underperform, leading to lower graduation rates in challenging majors. The argument has been contested for decades; subsequent research, including work by Susan Dynarski and Sigal Alon, found that selective institutions actually improved graduation outcomes for underrepresented students relative to less-selective alternatives. The pipeline of Black doctors, engineers, and lawyers ran disproportionately through the schools whose admissions practices SFFA invalidated.
If those pipelines narrow now, the downstream professional consequences won’t show up for a decade. They will show up.
What the workarounds can and cannot do
Universities have responded with the tools still legal: expanded recruiting in underrepresented high schools, larger socioeconomic-preference programs, percent-plan admissions for top-ranked students at every high school in a state (Texas’s model), and essay prompts that allow applicants to discuss how their background shaped them. These tools have measurable effects but smaller ones, partly because socioeconomic and racial disadvantage in the U.S. are correlated but not equivalent. A class-based admissions policy alone produces substantially less Black enrollment than a class-plus-race one.
States that ended affirmative action earlier — California in 1996, Michigan in 2006 — provide a long-running natural experiment. UC Berkeley and UCLA have spent two decades trying race-neutral alternatives and have not fully recovered Black enrollment to pre-ban levels.
The takeaway
Affirmative action was an imperfect policy with real costs and real benefits. Removing it without replacing the underlying engine of educational inequality — segregated K-12 schools, unequal funding, opportunity gaps that begin in early childhood — has consequences. The early evidence suggests those consequences are landing on the students the policy was designed to help. The honest debate now isn’t whether SFFA was decided correctly. It’s what comes next.
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