New numbers on minority admissions at selective colleges present a mixed bag.

Last week, MIT revealed the racial and ethnic make-up of its class of 2028. The data showed a significant decrease in the number blacks and Hispanics admitted and a significant increase in the number of Asian-Americans. White representation remained about the same.

Now, we have numbers from four additional selective universities: Amherst, Tufts, Emory, and the University of Virginia. They are a mixed bag.

At Amherst, the percentage of blacks entering the college fell dramatically — from 11 percent to 3 percent. At Tufts, it fell from 7.3 percent to 4.7 percent.

These results are encouraging for those of us who favor non-discriminatory admissions policies. They indicate that there will be significant compliance with the law at some selective colleges and that compliance won’t be limited to ones that focus, as MIT does, on STEM.

Black representation also decreased at the University of Virginia, but only from 7.9 to 7.1 percent. I don’t know whether this amounts to a significantly significant decline, but it doesn’t seem like much of one.

At Emory University, the decline was also slight — from 12.6 percent to 11.1 percent. Black representation at Emory College, which does not include the university’s somewhat less selective (I think) Oxford college, is 12.1 percent.

It’s clear to me that Emory is not complying with the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Harvard and UNC cases. But proving this might be difficult because Emory, no doubt, will claim that it’s basing the decisions that enable it to keep black representation high on factors other than race, including barriers that black applicants claim to have overcome.

It’s doubtful that the University of Virginia is complying, either. However, black representation there never reached Ivy League (or Emory) levels. Therefore, the racial discrimination occurring there, if any, probably hasn’t been as egregious.

UVa is a public university. Therefore, it might be possible to obtain the data necessary to study differences, if any, in the SAT scores for Asians, whites, blacks, and Hispanics who have been admitted. This information would give us a very good idea of whether (and to what extent) the University is violating the law.  

I worry that if non-compliance at institutions like Emory (and perhaps UVa) goes unchallenged or survives challenge based on specious claims that factors other than race are keeping black representation high, institutions that are complying might backslide (though they, at least, would have to explain why their numbers changed from the class of 2028 baseline). The presidents of MIT and Tufts both expressed disappointment that their entering classes are less diverse than before.

How did Hispanics fare this year at the four institutions for which there is new data? At Amherst, their representation fell from 12 percent to 8 percent. At Emory it fell slightly. At Amherst and Tufts, it rose slightly.

Asian Americans, the main beneficiaries at MIT, did not benefit much from the decline in black representation at Tufts and Amherst. Instead, it was white applicants who benefitted. At Amherst, the percentage of whites in the entering class rose from 33 percent to 39 percent. At Tufts, it rose from 46.8 percent to 49.3 percent.

Why didn’t the pattern at these two colleges align more closely with what happened at MIT? Perhaps the difference reflects MIT’s focus on STEM.

In any case, what we see so far is a mixed bag with regard to compliance with the law and with regard to which group benefits most from compliance. I expected greater uniformity.

We’re still waiting for the release of entering class data from Harvard and the University of North Carolina. They should be coming very soon.