No More Monoliths

Many colleges and universities have now released demographic student data for their first freshman class admitted after the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. As expected, those who have weaponized the decision to thwart progress on civil rights and racial justice quickly pointed to cherry-picked data to support their argument against fair access to educational opportunities. When several colleges reported the predictable decline in Asian American students, SFFA swiftly responded with hand-wringing and legal threats, accusing the colleges of circumventing the court’s decision.

But those who are working to strip away educational opportunities for underresourced communities are deriving narratives based on limited and opaque data that disregards key information about students’ identities, circumstances and strengths. We currently lack meaningful student data to determine the true impact of the Supreme Court’s decision, the barriers students face and the solutions needed to ensure equitable access to education for everyone.

Indeed, no clear trends emerge in the demographic data released to date. For example, the data does not tell us why some groups saw an increase in enrollment, such as Asian Americans at Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Latinos at University of Virginia, nor does it tell us who these Asian American and Latino students are. Are they wealthy or low-income? Are they predominantly from a few countries of origin in Asia or Latin America or a wide array? Are they descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves? In other cases, data is simply missing; Harvard did not report white enrollees at all, and not all institutions allowed students to self-report as multiracial. Finally, the data also does not explain why some communities saw drastic changes in enrollment at some institutions while other communities saw only modest changes at others.

Read the rest of Advancing Justice | AAJC's very own Niyati Shah and Juhwan Seo's op-ed in Inside Higher Education here.