Johns Hopkins follows MIT rather than Harvard

Blacks fall from 13.8% to 5.7% at JHU.

Announcement: I’m doing appearances in Chicago next week: dinner on Thursday evening September 26th downtown and a speaking event on Friday night September 27th on Chicago’s north lakefront. See Passage Press’s website for tickets.

The most famous colleges in America such as Harvard and Yale typically have roots in colonials times as academies for training ministers.

Fortunately, there was a wave of ambitious, modernizing, STEM-oriented colleges founded after the Civil War with robber baron big money, such as Cornell, Stanford, U. of Chicago, MIT, and Johns Hopkins, which were inspired in part by advances in German academia.

Johns Hopkins became famous for inventing the modern American medical school. Traditionally, medical schools were more academic-oriented with professors lecturing passive students in amphitheaters. Both Darwin and Galton, for instance, studied medicine this way in the first half of the 19th Century, but neither seemed to get much out of it.

Nor did patients. Their grandfather Erasmus Darwin was the most famous doctor in England, but a good part of the reason was he was a master of prognosis: he was an expert at choosing patients who were likely to get better on their own. Thus, when he was asked to become King George III’s personal doctor, Erasmus, correctly foreseeing that the madness of King George was likely to only get worse, declined the honor.

In the late 19th Century, the Johns Hopkins medical school helped introduce the old-fashioned sounding but new-fangled system of medical training by apprenticeship as well as the usual book learning. Johns Hopkins had a teaching hospital where professor-doctors did research and did rounds, accompanied by students and interns.

For example, many years ago I had surgery at a teaching hospital. As was the custom then, instead of kicking patients out at 6pm the way they do now to recuperate at a home even if you have just had a brain transplant or whatever, I spent one night in the hospital to make sure nothing had gone wrong. It was not particularly restful, however, because they kept waking me up to give me a sleeping pill.

And then at 6:00 AM, just as I was starting to enjoy some uninterrupted dreamless, all the lights went on and a middle-aged man with a forceful manner in a white coat walked in followed by 25 younger people. “Roll over, sir,” he commanded groggy me.

“Hey!” I said, “I was sleeping.”

No one took any note of my objection to the proceedings, as Herr Professor-Doktor announced to his acolytes: “You don’t get to see a surgical wound like this everyday! Come take a look.”

An hour later I was dressed and checking out.

But that’s how medicine progresses.

Anyway, that’s a digressive introduction to Johns Hopkins’ announcement today of its latest undergraduate admissions statistics, its first freshman class admitted since the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.

As I’ve been recounting, MIT went first this year and announced that it had cut the black share of its freshman class from 15% to 5%. Harvard, in contrast, finally announced that 14% of its latest freshmen were still black, same as it had announced last year. But, Harvard also declared, it had changed its methodology this year so that under its new system of counting,, last year’s freshman class actually was 18% African-American, so it’s not like Harvard was totally giving the finger to the Supreme Court by letting in 14% black this year. Or something.

This seems to reflect an emerging split among prestige colleges with MIT taking the lead in rolling back the worst woke policies (like faculty hiring DEI loyalty oaths and giving applicants the option of not submitting test scores), but Harvard dragging its feet at admitting that the Great Awokening has proved a disaster.

So, what about Johns Hopkins? Did it follow MIT or Harvard?

Despite its great history, Johns Hopkins has suffered in recent decades from being in crime-plagued, depressing Baltimore. But back in 2018, former crime-fighting NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg gave his alma mater Johns Hopkins a colossal $1.8 billion donation to be used for undergraduate financial aid, making it financially feasible for JHU to assemble one of the most meritocratic freshmen in the country, if it chooses to do so.

Today, Johns Hopkins announced,

This fall, Johns Hopkins University welcomed its first class of incoming first-year undergraduates since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 decision to restrict the use of race in admissions. The Class of 2028 continues to reflect the strong academic qualifications of recently admitted classes, along with high levels of socioeconomic diversity. But for the first time in many years, the percentage of students from underrepresented groups dropped significantly.

So, JHU is going the MIT route of taking the Supreme Court seriously (although likely still doing some affirmative action), with its black share falling from 13.8% to 5.7%.

Interestingly, Johns Hopkins was test optional for this year, so it may be harder to get even to 5.7% in the future.

Hispanics also fell in half from 20.8% to 10.7%.

Interestingly, whites continued to fall, from 39.1% to 34.1%, while Asians shot up from 32.1% to 46.0%.

The question few are wondering about, because so much of our intellectualizing about race is out-of-date black and white thinking, is what happens when top colleges would be 60+% Asian without putting a racial thumb on the scale?

Would even Asians like that?

Follow-up: Don’t forget next week in Chicago.