Harvard joins the massive resistance. Brown does not.

Harvard has finally revealed the racial and ethnic composition of its incoming freshman class. The numbers show that, like Princeton and Yale, Harvard is thumbing its nose at the Supreme Court:

Of students who identified their race, 14 percent identified as African American or Black, a decrease of 4 percent from Class of 2027 data. Thirty-seven percent of students identified as Asian American, representing no change from the year prior. Sixteen percent of students identified as Hispanic or Latino, a 2 percent increase from the previous year.

Although the percentage of blacks has declined, it’s at the same level as the percentage at Yale — 14 percent. There’s no way either school could reach that level without favoring blacks to a significant degree because of their race.

Black representation among adolescents in America is around 15 percent. Black representation among high school graduates is lower than that. Black representation among high school graduates who achieve at the level that whites and Asian Americans must attain to have any hope of being admitted to Yale or Harvard is much lower.

How much lower? In this post, I demonstrated how massively Yale has had to favor blacks to get black representation to 14 percent. For example, it had to admit blacks in the fourth decile from the bottom of its rating system at a rate of 12 percent — about the same rate at which Asians in the tenth decile, the top one, are admitted. Blacks in the tenth decile were admitted at a rate of 60 percent. The admission rates for Whites and Asians in the fourth decile were just 2 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively.

Harvard could not have a class with the same black representation as Yale without engaging in the same magnitude of illegal race-based discrimination.

Harvard’s admissions numbers come as no surprise. It was never likely that Harvard would comply with the Supreme Court’s decision finding that it practices unlawful racial discrimination. Once I saw the data from Yale and Princeton, it was nearly certain that Harvard would be part of the massive resistance to that decision.

On the other hand, I am surprised by the numbers from Brown. At that Ivy League institution, black representation in the incoming class has declined by 40 percent — from 15 percent to 9 percent.

Hispanic representation fell from 14 percent to 10 percent. Asian representation rose from 29 to 33 percent. (The share of freshmen whose race/ethnicity is unknown grew from 4 percent to 7 percent.)

I don’t know whether these numbers reflect full compliance with the law by Brown. I suspect they don’t. However, at least they don’t reflect massive resistance.

I had expected the Ivy League to massively resist the Supreme Court in lockstep. It’s encouraging to learn that at least one of its members is charting a different, less discriminatory and more lawful course.

I’ll conclude with a few words about an explanation offered by the New York Times for the difference between the numbers at Yale-Princeton-Harvard and those at elite but somewhat less selective colleges:

Admissions experts suggested even before the new numbers came out that the most coveted schools, like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, would be best positioned to maintain their Black enrollment because the students who were admitted to them were very likely to accept. So in that view, they are unicorns, part of a highly selective ring of schools that scooped up the top students and remained relatively unaffected by the ban on race-conscious admissions.

In my opinion, this scenario has it backwards. If admissions decisions were non-discriminatory across-the-board, Yale-Princeton-Harvard should be admitting many fewer blacks, thereby increasing the pool of highly qualified blacks for schools further down the food chain.

For example, if Yale admitted blacks in, say, its eighth decile (third from the top) at about the same rate it admits whites and Asian-Americans in that decile, many more blacks with excellent, but not Yale-worthy credentials would be rejected. This would increase the pool of black applicants with credentials worthy of admission to schools on the next rung down. As a result, the decline in black representation at these schools would, if anything, be less steep than at Yale. (One should also ask the Times’ “admissions experts” to explain the steep decline in black representation at MIT, which is about as selective as Yale-Princeton-Harvard.)

Yale-Princeton-Harvard may be “scooping up” the best black high school seniors, just as they have always done. But they are still granting them preferential treatment based on race, just as they have always done.