Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor

Yale College’s class of 2028, the first admitted post-affirmative action, saw stable racial demographics, deviating from many predictions on the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision and raising questions. 

In 2022, Yale argued in a joint amicus brief to the Supreme Court that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.”

However, the class of 2028 saw stable Black and Latine enrollment while the share of Asian American students slightly decreased and white students slightly increased. This differed from peer institutions such as MIT, Columbia, Brown and Cornell, which all saw decreases in Black and Latine enrollment.  

After the Court struck down the use of race-conscious admissions, Yale’s admissions office implemented several changes to its admissions policies to comply with the Court’s decision. One newly used tool stood out as a possible explanation for the class of 2028 demographics — the Opportunity Atlas. 

The News examined the Opportunity Atlas, how it has influenced Yale’s admissions process in the last cycle and whether its use complies with the Supreme Court’s decision banning the use of race in admissions.

What is the Opportunity Atlas?

The Opportunity Atlas is a comprehensive dataset of children’s outcomes in adulthood using data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. The tool was created by Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts based at Harvard University, funded by foundations such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

The Opportunity Atlas estimates children’s adult outcomes, such as average earnings and incarceration rates, by parental income, race and gender, based on census data.

The tool uses anonymized data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses linked to data from Federal income tax returns and the 2005-2015 American Community Surveys to obtain the necessary information. The data covers 20 million children, approximately 94 percent of all children born during the time period analyzed.

“My colleagues and I created the Opportunity Atlas to help policymakers of all sorts understand how childrens’ pathways out of poverty vary from one neighborhood to the next and ultimately be able to target their efforts to more effectively create equality of opportunity,” John Friedman, co-director of Opportunity Insights, wrote.

Yale introduced the Opportunity Atlas as a new tool the admissions office would use after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. Then, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and Dean of Undergraduate Admission and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan outlined that admissions officers would “incorporate new place-based data” from the Opportunity Atlas complemented by “the dozens of race-neutral and place-based data points included in the College Board’s Landscape tool.”

The College Board’s Landscape Tool is a resource that provides consistent high school and neighborhood information so admissions officers can consider each student within the context of where they have learned and lived. The information in Landscape is not student-specific; instead, it provides insight into where a student has received their education.

When reached by the News, Quinlan wrote “Yale’s whole-person review process considers each applicant as an individual, and no single criterion determines an admissions outcome. Decisions are made by a committee, which considers quantitative, qualitative, and contextual insights.”   

Yale admissions has been using the College Board’s Landscape tool since 2017. Quinlan wrote that the tool has improved the University’s ability to evaluate applicants from under-resourced areas and increased the matriculation of lower-income students. The Opportunity Atlas was first used during the last admissions cycle.

Mark Abraham, executive director of DataHaven, wrote to the News that the use of block-level data from the Opportunity Atlas might have helped the admissions office identify students who grew up in neighborhoods with far fewer opportunities to gain advanced degrees and higher-paying jobs over the past few decades. Abraham added that these are often historically Black neighborhoods in metropolitan areas.

“If Yale had only used data about neighborhood income levels or high school characteristics in their admissions decisions, they would not have been able to identify those ‘low opportunity’ neighborhoods with anywhere near as much accuracy as the Opportunity Atlas allows,” Abraham wrote to the News. 

Abraham said that his impression from analyzing Opportunity Atlas’s methodology is that many of its datasets at the census tract level are statistically modeled estimates that consider the historical racial and ethnic composition of those neighborhoods to calculate characteristics like incarceration rates, as opposed to direct measurements of incarceration rates. As Black adults have higher incarceration rates, the individual census tracts with more Black adults are estimated to also have much higher incarceration rates, he wrote.

Abraham wrote that “in other words, those neighborhoods are more disadvantaged, so if the incarceration rate estimate was used in an admissions process that attempted to give more points to neighborhood disadvantage, candidates applying from neighborhoods that had more Black residents might receive very different scoring in admissions compared to applicants from a neighborhood that historically had more white or Asian residents.”

Based on his experiences with statistical indices, Abraham thinks some observers might interpret that as using race as a variable in the admissions process, while others would not. However, he wrote that he has “no idea if those are the measures from the Atlas that admissions committees would be using to score applicants.”

The question of legality

In the Court’s majority opinion striking down affirmative action, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote 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.”

However, Deborah Hellman, a law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, previously told the News that the Court was not clear enough about exactly what constitutes consideration of race.

According to Hellman, since the ruling does not rule out the consideration of a student’s lived experiences, which may include their race-related experiences, it is “not at all clear” which admissions practices remain legal. Universities, therefore, Hellman said, may have interpreted the Court’s ruling in different ways.

Yale’s admissions office was not able to access the racial identity of any applicant until after the selection process concluded. 

However, the Opportunity Atlas considers race, as well as data disaggregated by gender and family income. This information is used to identify which areas in America provide children with the best chance to rise out of poverty. 

Richard Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, wrote to the News that the Opportunity Atlas “certainly could” explain Yale’s stable racial demographics post-affirmative action. He wrote that the tool is “exactly the kind of analysis” that could eliminate or mitigate the racial impact of conventional admissions criteria.  

He added that he believes the tool complies with the Students For Fair Admissions decision as the decision does not prohibit changes to admissions policies as long as race is not a factor in the decision.

“I think it is a great idea and in fact, because the law prohibits the use of policies that have an unjustified racial impact, if this yields a qualified and successful entering class, it is arguably required that all selective universities do something like it,” Ford wrote. 

Since the release of the latest racial demographics data, Yale has already faced pushback.

On Sept. 17, Students For Fair Admissions sent letters to Yale, Princeton and Duke — schools that saw a decrease in the share of Asian American enrollment — questioning whether the schools complied with the Court’s decision. The letter expressed concern that the University did not comply with the Court’s decision since their results do not align with their amicus brief which argued that the share of Black and Latine enrollment would drop without the consideration of race in admissions.

In a Sept. 19 email to the News, a University spokesperson wrote that “Yale’s admissions practices fully comply with the law and the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling.”

What measures did other schools use to maintain diversity?

Other than Yale, peer institutions Princeton, Dartmouth and Duke also saw stable post-affirmative action racial demographics. 

For the class of 2028, Princeton modified its essay question on the Common Application asking students to “reflect on how [their] lived experiences will impact the conversations [they] will have in the classroom, the dining hall or other campus spaces.” In addition, Princeton announced that its Board of Trustees would develop an ad hoc committee charged with evaluating new admission policies to go into effect in future application cycles.

In 2024, Duke also implemented changes to the admissions process, such as no longer numerically rating essays and standardized testing scores. Duke’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Christoph Guttentag, explained that the essays are “considered as we think holistically about a candidate as a potential member of the Duke community.”

Dartmouth did not announce any new admissions changes to its admissions policies post-affirmative action. 

The News reached out to the admissions offices of the other seven Ivy League institutions, Duke and MIT, and asked whether they used the Opportunity Atlas in their latest admissions cycles. The University of Pennsylvania responded that its admissions office does not use the Opportunity Atlas. The rest did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The News was unable to independently verify whether other institutions use the Opportunity Atlas. 

Yale’s admissions office did not comment further on their specific uses of the Opportunity Atlas.

Friedman told the News that he is happy to see that the Opportunity Atlas has been helpful for Yale’s admissions office and said he hopes that “its success will encourage broader use of the Opportunity Atlas by admissions offices and others focused on increased college access.”

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

Chris Tillen contributed reporting.