MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Harvard says the percentage of Black students enrolled in the freshman class has dropped from the prior year. The class of 2028 is the first class whose admission was affected by the Supreme Court's 2023 decision on affirmative action. The ruling struck down the ability of colleges and universities across the country to consider race and ethnicity as a factor in the admissions process. Public institutions in some states were already barred from the practice.
Zachary Bleemer has been studying the impact that access to selective institutions, or the lack thereof, has on different groups. So we called him for his take on this. He's an assistant professor in economics at Princeton University.
Harvard College has just released data related to the racial and ethnic makeup of the class of 2028. The data shows that the number of Black students declined, perhaps not as large as in some other institutions, but it did decline. What do you make of that?
ZACHARY BLEEMER: You know, 10 states have banned affirmative action over the last 30 years, and we have a lot of evidence from schools in those states - what the ramifications of these bans are. We've seen declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment of up to 50% at schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA in the 1990s. The decline at Harvard was much smaller, about a 15% decline in Black enrollment and a small increase in Hispanic enrollment.
This is the first year that affirmative action has ever been banned at private universities, and we're still learning what the ramifications of these bans look like at those schools. We've seen some schools with large declines - MIT - and others, like Yale and Duke, with essentially no change at all in their Black and Hispanic enrollment. We still have a lot more schools to go.
MARTIN: A lot of your work has to do not just with the impacts of these bans in institutions but what effect that it has on the long-term trajectories of different students. Could you just remind us of what your research has shown so far? Because you've been studying this in California, for example, where this has been the case at public institutions for some time now.
BLEEMER: What you see is a cascade of students from more to less selective universities. Black and Hispanic students who used to go to tier one schools now go to tier two schools. Those who used to go to tier two now go to tier three. And white and Asian students take their places generally at these very selective universities.
This has long-run negative educational and labor market ramifications for the Black and Hispanic students who get pushed out of these more selective schools. They become less likely to earn college degrees, less likely to earn degrees in lucrative STEM fields. And if you followed them for another 15 or 20 years, you can see long-run negative labor market ramifications. A typical Black and Hispanic student, once they're in their mid-30s, is earning 5% less than they would have been if they'd had access to more selective universities through programs like race-based affirmative action.
MARTIN: The predicate of these cases - obviously, people who have specific ideological objections to affirmative action. But their argument is it's just - it's fundamentally unfair and that these white and Asian students, who would otherwise have been admitted, are disadvantaged. Does your research show that that is true?
BLEEMER: You know, I'm an empirical social scientist. I can't say anything about fairness in this space. There's a lot of political disagreement over what appropriate admissions policies should be at both public and private universities. But as a straight matter of what you might think of as allocative efficiency - which students gain most - in a public economic sense, which is to say which students gain most in terms of their very long-run trajectories from more selective universities, the answer tends to be the relatively lower income and more disadvantaged students who are targeted by race-based affirmative action.
MARTIN: That is Zachary Bleemer. He's an assistant professor in economics at Princeton University. Professor Bleemer, thanks so much for talking with us.
BLEEMER: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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