- Messages
- 1,048
The share of Black students enrolled this fall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has dropped in the wake of the landmark Supreme Court ruling that rejected race-conscious college admissions, numbers released Thursday show.
UNC was one of two schools, along with Harvard University, whose admissions practices were challenged in high-profile cases. The decision last year upended decades of legal precedent and changed the ways the country’s most selective colleges choose their students.
The ruling was expected to result in a significant drop in the number of Black and Hispanic or Latino students, as happened in states that had previously barred preferences for applicants based on their race.
So far, some highly selective schools, such as MIT, have reported a drop in the number of students of color, but others, such as Yale and Princeton universities, did not.
Changes in campus diversity since the ruling remain unclear because only a small number of schools have disclosed information about the racial makeup of their new undergraduate classes, the first crop of students admitted after the decision. Harvard, one of the most closely watched, along with UNC, has not yet released racial information about its incoming class. Even the numbers that have been disclosed offer an incomplete picture — data from the schools often does not include raw numbers or comparisons to prior years. The schools’ reported numbers also don’t always reflect the number of students who did not report their race.
At UNC, 10.5 percent of first-year and transfer students enrolling in the fall of 2023 identified as Black or African American, according to university officials. This fall, 7.8 percent did. The share identifying as Hispanic or Latino dipped slightly from 10.8 percent to 10.1 percent. The number identifying as Asian or Asian American rose slightly, from 24.8 percent last fall to 25.8 this year. The number of White or Caucasian students held steady — 63.7 last fall and 63.8 percent this fall.
