Anti-affirmative action group warns Duke about enrollment trends
About a year after it successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the consideration of race in college admissions in a landmark case involving UNC-Chapel Hill, a prominent anti-affirmative action group is now warning three other elite colleges about possible litigation over their admissions policies — including Duke University.
Ed Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, sent separate letters on Tuesday to attorneys for Duke, Yale University and Princeton University, questioning each of the schools’ recently announced demographic data for their first-year classes of students and expressing concern that they are not complying with the Supreme Court’s rulings in the UNC case and a related case involving Harvard University.
At Duke, Blum called into question the proportion of Asian and Asian American students enrolled in the university’s first-year class this fall, which is 6 percentage points lower than the proportion in last fall’s class.
A crux of SFFA’s argument against UNC was an allegation that the university gave underrepresented minority students an advantage in the admissions process, while hindering “high-achieving” Asian American and white applicants. UNC denied the accusation throughout its nearly decade-long defense of its admissions policy.
Inside Higher Ed reported on the three letters Thursday morning. Blum provided The News & Observer with the letter to Duke on Thursday afternoon.
“SFFA is prepared to enforce Harvard against you through litigation. You are now on notice,” Blum wrote in his letter to Duke, adding an instruction for the university to “preserve all potentially relevant documents and communications.”
In a statement to The N&O on Thursday, Frank Tramble, Duke vice president for communications, marketing and public affairs, said the university “is committed to compliance with the law.”
“We value every student and are excited to welcome another outstanding class,” Tramble said.
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Impacts of Supreme Court ruling remain murky
Colleges and universities around the country in recent weeks have begun to release their enrollment data for their current first-year classes, including racial and ethnic demographics of the students.
The information has been highly anticipated, given that the classes were the first in decades to be admitted without the consideration of race — a change that supporters of affirmative action predicted would decrease the diversity among students at selective, elite colleges.
That was the case at some colleges, including UNC, which reported noticeable decreases in the proportion of Black and Hispanic students in the class of 2028, though its head of admissions said it was too early to “see trends with just one year of data.” Harvard also reported a dip in the proportion of Black students it enrolled, though representation of Asian American students remained the same as last fall.
Duke, however, enrolled a class this fall with similar racial breakdown to that of its previous class, except for the decrease of Asian and Asian American students. About 29% of the university’s first-year class this fall identifies as Asian or Asian American, compared to about 35% last fall.
In its letter to Duke, Blum noted that the university previously said in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court that, without affirmative action, it would not be able to “obtain the diverse student body” it had previously enrolled, and that other elite colleges — including Harvard — have reported higher proportions of Asian American students than Duke this fall.
Blum told Duke that “based on SFFA’s extensive experience, your racial numbers are not possible under true race neutrality.” He also said that any efforts by the university to consider socioeconomic status, which has been suggested by experts as a possible alternative to considering race in admissions, “would not cause a decrease in Asian-American enrollment.”
The university announced last summer that it would offer free tuition to accepted students from North Carolina and South Carolina whose families make $150,000 or less per year. The university has not explicitly tied the reasoning behind the initiative to the Supreme Court ruling, but Dean of Admissions Christoph Guttentag told Inside Higher Ed that it has helped offset the impacts of the decision.
Blum asked the university to explain the “discrepancy” in its enrollment numbers, “including any new, substantial race-neutral alternatives that you adopted in response” to the Supreme Court ruling.
“Without that information, SFFA will conclude that you are circumventing the Supreme Court’s decision,” Blum wrote.
Blum did not provide additional comment to The N&O about the letters Thursday.
SFFA is currently attempting to extend the ban on racial considerations in admissions to the nation’s military academies, with the group involved in ongoing litigation against the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion last year in the UNC case did not explicitly end the academies’ ability to consider race, but SFFA argues that such considerations violate the equal-protection principle in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Avi Bajpai contributed to this report.
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