Lukas Flippo, Senior Photographer

Last week, the admissions office released the demographic data of the class of 2028, the first Yale class admitted after the repeal of affirmative action. 

The data revealed that for Yale’s class of 2028, Black and Latine enrollment remained similar to previous years, while the share of Asian American students fell and white students’ enrollment rose from the year prior. 

In a 2022 joint amicus brief to the Supreme Court, Yale argued that affirmative action was necessary to sustain the racial composition of the incoming class. Yet the demographic composition of the first class selected without affirmative action remained relatively stable, in stark contrast with some of Yale’s peer institutions and in line with trends at others. 

A variety of factors might have contributed to this result, possibly including increased recruitment efforts, the use of socioeconomic data and the continued use of race in admissions through applicants’ essays. Yale’s demographic reporting methodology — including separation of international students and non-disclosure of how many students did not report their race — further complicates the picture.

The News spoke with admissions experts to gain insight into the racial diversity at Yale and in higher education nationally post-affirmative action and to understand why the demographics of Yale’s newest class remained relatively stable compared to many of its peer institutions. 

Yale’s peer institutions see different demographic shifts

There is no single, clear trend evident among the demographic shifts among universities across the country. 

Princeton University saw a 2.2 percentage point decrease in Asian American enrollment for the class of 2028 compared to the class of 2027, while Black and Latine enrollment remained relatively stable, similar to the trend at Yale. 

Other peer institutions, such as MIT, Amherst College and Brown University, saw increases in the share of Asian American students for the class of 2028. In contrast, the share of Black and Latine students at these universities decreased compared with the year prior to the end of affirmative action. 

Harvard’s share of Black students decreased from 18 percent for the class of 2027 to 14 percent for the class of 2028. The share of Asian American students remained stable.  

What do the numbers reveal? 

In an email to the News, Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, wrote that the admissions results from Yale, Amherst, MIT and other institutions are “indecipherable” without detailed racial data about standardized test scores, recruitment policies, Advanced Placement tests and other factors. 

Students for Fair Admissions is the conservative legal advocacy group that argued the Supreme Court case that ultimately ended affirmative action. The Supreme Court ruled that Harvard and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discriminated against Asian American and white applicants with their admissions policies. 

Derek Black, a University of South Carolina constitutional law professor who specializes in educational equality in public education, told the News that the variation in white and Asian American students’ enrollment across years “would seem to dispel the notion that Yale was operating a cap or quota system.” 

“The fact that African American enrollment remained steady in what was presumably a race-blind admission process this year undercuts the notion that African American students in prior years had been admitted primarily based on race rather than merit,” Black said.

Mark Abraham, the executive director of DataHaven, an organization that collects, shares and interprets public information about Connecticut, highlighted that broader trends in the United States population might be influencing Yale’s changing demographics, especially among Black and Latine students. 

Specifically, the rise of Black and Latine enrollment at the University, Abraham said, may in part reflect national demographic change, as the proportion of U.S. children who identify as Hispanic or Latino has risen by about 15 percent over the past decade. 

Still, post-affirmative action demographic data shifts have not been the same across institutions. Not all universities were able to sustain the share of African American students at the previous levels, and they vary notably in the Asian American enrollment trend. 

Abraham told the News that he found the small change in the composition of race and ethnicity in the class of 2028 “not surprising” because of the changes to admissions practices last admissions cycle that Yale announced after the Court’s decision.

Yale’s increased recruitment efforts

Responding to the fall of affirmative action in a letter to the Yale community last September, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan and Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis wrote in a joint statement that “Yale College should build on existing programs and take new concrete steps to attract exceptional students from underrepresented communities.”

Lewis and Quinlan highlighted three “unwavering priorities” following the fall of affirmative action for college admissions: fully complying with the law, continuing to support a diverse and inclusive community and maintaining a world-class admissions process that considers each applicant as an individual.

The admissions office introduced a new initiative last cycle called the “Yale in MOHtion Student Fly-In Program.” This fly-in program for high school students and their families introduces 50 prospective students to Yale’s four cultural centers: the Afro-American Cultural Center, the Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural and the Native American Cultural Center. 

In an August interview with the News, University President Maurie McInnis said that achieving diversity post-affirmative action will be less about policies and more about the work that the University will do to yield students of all backgrounds and continue to engage with students to let them know of the opportunities at Yale, such as the financial aid that is available. 

McInnis was not serving as president during the admissions cycle for the class of 2028 or during the announcement of the new admissions policies made last year. 

The use of socioeconomic data

Abraham said that Yale’s outcome could result from policies increasing access to Yale for students from low-income backgrounds. Nationally, about 55 percent of Black and Latine children live in low-income families, compared to about 25 percent of white and Asian students. 

These changes “could have made it more likely” for students from a wide range of different backgrounds to be admitted, Abraham believes.

In particular, while selecting the class of 2028, the Yale admissions office has used a new tool — Opportunity Atlas. The tool is a nationwide mapping project that measures economic mobility at the census tract level. 

Opportunity Atlas is used in addition to the College Board’s Landscape tool, which provides data about an applicant’s high school and neighborhood and has been shown to improve the committee’s evaluation of applicants from under-resourced areas, according to the message from Lewis and Quinlan.

Abraham said that the use of block-level data from the Opportunity Atlas might have helped the admissions office identify students who grew up in “low opportunity” neighborhoods where children have had far fewer opportunities to gain advanced degrees and higher-paying jobs over the past few decades. 

According to Abraham, the Opportunity Atlas helps identify such neighborhoods much more precisely than using just neighborhood income levels or high school characteristics alone. In the “statistical portrait,” these are often the historically Black neighborhoods in each metropolitan area.

Abraham pointed to other changes in the student population from years prior, such as the share of students from independent private schools and boarding schools, indicating the possible impact of changes in admissions practices and the use of the Opportunity Atlas. 

In the class of 2028, the share of independent day school students dropped from 20 percent the year prior to 18 percent. Likewise, the share of boarding school students fell 2 percentage points from the year prior. The share of public school students in the class of 2028 rose to 67 percent from 63 percent the year prior. 

Inconsistencies in data reporting across universities

Comparing demographic data and trends across universities is complicated, as different universities use different reporting methodologies. 

In particular, Yale includes international students as a separate category, not counting them toward racial and ethnic categories in the demographic report, which most other universities do not. 11 percent of students in the class of 2028 are international. 

When reporting demographic data, Yale also includes students who have selected multiple races in all categories. According to the News’ class of 2028 survey, of the 536 respondents to a question about their racial identity, more than 20 percent selected more than one racial or ethnic identity. Due to this, Yale’s data for the class of 2028 does not add up to 100 percent.

Yale’s reported numbers for the class of 2028 do not include students who chose not to indicate their racial identity when applying. The university did not report the number of such students in the class of 2028 or previous classes. 

While applicants had an opportunity to decline to report their race identification in the previous year as well, the number of admitted students who chose to do so for class of 2028 almost doubled at Harvard and Brown, which report this information.

Continued use of race in admissions

Though the admissions office did not have access to applicants’ race during the admissions process, students applying to Yale last cycle still had the opportunity to discuss their race or background in their supplemental essays. 

In the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said that universities could consider an applicant’s discussion of race, “so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” 

Last admissions cycle, Yale College modified their supplemental essay prompts to allow students to respond to one of three questions intended to “invite students from all backgrounds to reflect on the experiences that have shaped their character and strengths.”

Richard Sander, a law professor at the UCLA School of Law and a prominent critic of affirmative action, said that if the numbers are reported accurately, then he suspects that Yale did not comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling, taking into account the race of applicants, deduced from their essays and the demographics of their high schools and hometowns.

“If their race numbers really don’t change, I think that means that they’re looking for any evidence they can find that a student is African American or Black, and they’re admitting them under the same criteria they were before,” Sander wrote.

Blum wrote to the News that Yale’s results are “bewildering” since Yale argued in its 2022 joint amicus brief to the Supreme Court that the racial composition of the incoming class is not possible without implementing the type of racial discrimination to Court barred. 

Blum referenced the portion of the brief that stated, “The optimal means of creating a diverse student body — and thereby achieving Amici’s educational objectives — involves a limited consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions.”

New Haven civil right attorney Alex Taubes LAW ’15 told the News that what the Supreme Court has not addressed is the use of other metrics such as disadvantage, location and other types of factors that could still optimize the incoming class for diversity of experiences. 

It is not clear how or whether Yale considered race in the most recent admissions cycle through applicants’ supplemental essays. The News could not independently verify if the admissions office did not comply with the Supreme Court ruling by improperly considering race.  

Yale’s admissions office declined to comment on the demographic data for the class of 2028 beyond a Yale News press release. 

Test-optional class of 2028

The class of 2028 was admitted through a test-optional admissions cycle due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Other institutions, such as MIT, required their students to submit a standardized test score during the previous admissions cycle. However, there is not a consistent trend even among universities that were test-optional in the past admissions cycle, such as Harvard, Princeton and Brown.  

In February, the University announced a new test-flexible policy starting with the class of 2029. Under this policy, students will need to select which standardized tests to submit, including the ACT, Advanced Placement exams, International Baccalaureate tests or SAT. 

In the announcement on the new testing policy, the admissions office said they were “keenly aware” of the research on the correlation between standardized test scores and household income as well as the persistent gaps by race. 

However, they said that including test scores as a component of a whole-person review process “can help increase the diversity of the student body rather than decrease it.”

The Office of Undergraduate Admissions is located at 38 Hillhouse Ave.

Adam Walker, Josie Reich and Chris Tillen contributed reporting.