Asian American share of Harvard freshmen climbs to 43% three years after affirmative action ruling

Asian Americans now make up 43 percent of Harvard University’s freshman class, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of race in college admissions.

That is 2 percentage points more than last year’s 41 percent, according to the university’s admissions data released on Tuesday. 

The figure is also the highest in a decade and nearly double that of five years ago, Bloomberg reported.

Meanwhile, the share of freshmen who identified as African American or Black fell 2.2 percentage points, from 11.5 percent last year to 9.3 percent this year — the third consecutive annual decline.

The shift in the racial makeup of Harvard’s freshman class comes after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions.

U.S. universities had long used affirmative action policies that allowed race to be considered in admissions in an effort to increase the diversity of their student population, which critics argued gave an advantage to Black and Hispanic applicants while putting their white and Asian counterparts at a disadvantage.

Harvard University and the University of North Carolina were defendants in lawsuits that challenged these policies. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the universities’ use of race in admissions violated the constitutional equal protection clause.

Since then, the share of Asian American freshmen at Harvard has risen while the share of Black freshmen has fallen. Some have interpreted this as a sign that the previous policy may have affected applicants’ chances differently, depending on their race.

However, the court ruling cannot be entirely blamed for the shift.

Starting with the class of 2028, Harvard changed how it calculates its student racial demographics. The university now bases such data only on students who voluntarily disclose their race, which makes it harder to compare recent figures with those from earlier years and gauge how the student body is changing. Nine percent of this year’s freshman class did not report their race or ethnicity, according to the university. 

Changes in freshman demographics alone are also not enough to determine how affirmative action previously affected any particular racial group.

International students accounted for 15 percent of this year’s freshman class, unchanged from last year.

More than 55,000 students applied for Harvard’s latest application cycle — a 15 percent increase from last year.

BY HAN YOUNG-HYE [[email protected]]