Black and Hispanic enrollment declines at Wellesley College.

College says, with 'til next year.

Unlike Yale and Princeton, Wellesley College is not ignoring the Supreme Court’s decisions on racial preferences in college admissions. In an email to the Wellesley College Community (to which I haven’t found a link), the college announced that its incoming class will be 5 percent black and 10 percent “Latine” (Wellesley word). During the previous five years, the average incoming class was 8 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic (my word).

Wellesley boasts that “54 percent [of the new class] are domestic students of color.” I’m not sure whom the college considers a “domestic student of color,” but it looks like Asian-Americans did well this year in the admissions process.

There’s no denying that Wellesley’s new class is diverse. It contains students from 43 states and D.C. and Puerto Rico, plus 22 countries. “Eighteen percent will be the first generation in their families to attend a four-year college and 55 percent come from a home where at least one language other than English is spoken.”

Nor is black and Hispanic representation de minimis. The new class just isn’t as black and Hispanic as previous classes.

The decline in black and Hispanic representation at Wellesley is due to some level of compliance with the Supreme Court’s decisions. Its president and its dean of admissions say so in their email.

Is Wellesley fully complying with the decisions? Without some data on the credentials of applicants by race and ethnicity, it’s impossible to say. I can say that Wellesley isn’t massively resisting the decision the way Yale and Princeton are, and that it’s complying as much as, if not more than, I expected.

But Wellesley’s compliance may only be temporary. The college president and its admissions dean are determined to admit more blacks and Hispanics next year. They write:

These decreases [in black and Hispanic enrollment] are disappointing, but experience is a great teacher. Having gone through our first admission cycle following the Supreme Court's decision, we have tangible information and insights that, within the confines of the law, will guide us in the future.

They go on to say that Wellesley is expanding its outreach to minority group members. That’s fine, as long as all applicants (whether in an expanded pool or not) are judged on merit, not race.

But I can’t help wondering whether part of the “experience” that will influence Wellesley’s admission policy next year is the experience of colleges like Yale and Princeton that are thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court. That’s why it’s so important that one or more of the elite scofflaw colleges be sued, whether by rejected students (Asian-American and/or white) with great credentials, by the federal government (if Trump wins, or by both.

At every elite college I’m aware of where black enrollment has declined due to the Supreme Court decisions, the college has publicly lamented the decline. I believe that all of them are chomping at the bit to find a way around the law. Colleges like Yale and Princeton that seem to believe they have found a way around it must be disabused of that idea.