Racial Preferences on the Sly? – WSJ

The Supreme Court ended racial preferences in college admissions in a pair of landmark cases in 2023, but one fear is that schools will find ways to duck the ruling and use race by other means.

The group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) suspects this about Yale, Princeton and Duke universities, and on Tuesday it asked the schools for information on how they chose the current freshmen who will graduate in the class of 2028.

The colleges aren t permitted to use overt race categories or application essays or other means to circumvent the ban on preferences. But the schools admitted fewer Asian-Americans than in the previous year, which raises suspicions since Asian-Americans were the plaintiffs in the 2023 cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

SFFA President Edward Blum notes in his letter to Duke that, compared to the Class of 2027 (when you explicitly gave racial preferences to African Americans and Hispanics), you now have fewer Asian Americans. Your Class of 2028 is 29% Asian American, a decrease of 6 percentage points. Princeton s admission of Asian-Americans fell to 23.8% from 26% and Yale s to 24% from 30%.

That contrasts with other schools, including Harvard, Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that saw the percentage of Asian-Americans rise this year. MIT says 47% of its 2028 graduating class is Asian.

via www.wsj.com

It certainly looks like it.