MIT cuts black freshmen share from 15% to 5%

In response to the Supreme Court's mandate, MIT has reduced (but not eliminated) affirmative action.

Yesterday, MIT became the first elite undergraduate college to announce the racial/ethnic composition of its first post-Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard freshman class. College admission aficionados like myself had been waiting around to find out, if when push came to shove, whether top colleges actually were going to obey the Supreme Court. Or would they come up with work-around disparate impact discrimination ploys, like UC San Diego has been doing since liberal California voters outlawed affirmative action a second time in 2020.

MIT revealed that due to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against Harvard in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard for discriminating against Asians in favor of blacks and Hispanics, the new entering freshman class at MIT will be:

• 5% black, down from 15% black last year

• 11% Hispanic, down from 16% in 2023

• 1% American Indian, down from 2%

• 0% Pacific Islander, down from 1%

• 37% white, down from 38%

• 47% Asian, up from 40% in a year

UPDATE: Here’s a simpler graph of the last 11 years of new freshmen classes at MIT, which leaves out 2011-2013, when MIT used a different methodology for multi-racial students that makes the top graph distracting:

Using Web Archive’s Wayback Machine, I’ve gone back and dug up similar MIT announcements about freshman class composition since 2011, so you can observe the trends:

You’ll notice a modest methodological issue involving changes in how MIT categorizes freshman of mixed race/ethnicity by looking at the Total row, which impacted changes in 2014 and, to a lesser extent, 2024: I’ll get to that later.

Basic trends include:

MIT always had a lot of affirmative action for blacks (I’ll try to estimate how much below from PSAT math scores by race). But then MIT went pretty nuts during the Racial Reckoning of the 2020s, finally letting in a crazy 15% black freshman class in August 2023. MIT’s 2024 black share of 5%, while still inflated by black privilege, sounds a lot more reasonable at a famously rigorous STEM college that attracts many superstar students.

What explains MIT’s nutty 15% black share in 2023? Perhaps MIT, seeing how crushing was the evidence of anti-Asian prejudice by the Harvard admissions department, anticipated that the Supreme Court would finally say enough is enough for affirmative action, so MIT tried to stock up on their precious stock of blackness last year by letting in a lot of warm black bodies for fear that this year they would have to at least gesture at obeying the Constitution.

Or, perhaps MIT recently boosted its black share from roughly 10% to 15% so that when the Supreme Court finally brought the hammer down, it could cut to 5% and look like it was reducing by two-thirds rather than one-half?

During the current cooldown from the “racial reckoning” mania as American institutions grope their way back toward post-covid / post-BLM sanity, the administration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has emerged as the adults in the room of elite education.

MIT has always been a serious college teaching serious subjects to serious students (Harvard economist Raj Chetty, in another one of his many “Oh, yeah, that makes sense” discoveries, found that holders of just a four year degree from MIT average a higher income at age 30 than graduates with just a four year degree from any other college in America.)

As you’ll recall, covid lockdowns in March 2020 made it difficult to administer college admissions tests like the SAT and ACT, leading colleges to suspend the test requirement as part of their admissions process. Then when George Floyd died in May 2020, there was a rush to abolish test requirements forever because George would have wanted it that way. Or something. It all seemed to make sense at the time. You had to be there. (No data has yet emerged on George Floyd’s personal SAT score.)

Indeed, the University of California Board of Regents (the appointed politicians with the final say) even overrode a strong report by the UC faculty senate’s experts quantifying the importance of the SAT/ACT in finding applicants who can best benefit from attending the U. of California (e.g., Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, etc.). The politicians not only permanently abolished the test requirement, but in the name of equity, they even banned applicants from having the option to submit test scores.

But then the zeitgeist began to shift in March 2022 when hard-headed MIT announced that Fun Time was over and it was reinstating the requirement that applicants for the undergrad Class of 2027 (entering fall 2023) must submit test scores. At first slowly and then more quickly, other famous colleges declared that they were following in MIT’s wake.

The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard gave Harvard one of its several recent black eyes. The Court ruled that Harvard’s affirmative action urge to boost blacks didn’t overrule the 14th Amendment’s demand for “equal protection of the laws” for Asian applicants.

Of course, MIT was doing the same thing, but Harvard took the fall.

Harvard then stumbled through more scandals, such as its new DEI hire president being discovered to be a plagiarist, suggesting that leadership of American academia has shifted from the Harvard side of Cambridge, MA to the MIT side of Cambridge.

Does letting in only 5% blacks in 2024 show that MIT is obeying the spirit of the Supreme Court’s decision? It’s a sizable improvement, but few grasp just how yawning is the Asian-black test score gap in the 21st Century.

Let’s look at scores on the PSAT, the pre-SAT test taken by pretty much all high school students in America in 10th or 11th grade. PSAT scores are higher when taken in 11th grade than in 10th grade, so let’s just look at the scores of the roughly half of high school students who take the PSAT in 11th grade. We’ll look at the 2018-2019 school year results to avoid any covid issues.

Among 11th graders, what share score in the highest tier of PSAT math subtest scores (700 to 760), the kind of score you really need to not be a waste of space at MIT:

• Asians: 26%

• Whites: 7%

• Hispanics: 2%

• Blacks: 1%

Share scoring in the highest tier of the PSAT English subtest:

• Asians: 14%

• Whites: 6%

• Hispanics: 1%

• Blacks: 1%

For the highest tier combined,

• Asians: 17%

• Whites: 4%

• Hispanics: 1%

• Blacks: 1%

Here is the share of all PSAT takers in 2019 of any score:

• Asians: 8%

• Whites: 41%

• Hispanics: 27%

• Blacks: 10%

• Amerindians: 1%

• Mixed: 4%

• No Response: 8%

Among the highest tier of 11th grade math scorers,

• Asians: 39,250 or 47.6%

• Whites: 31,400 or 38.1%

• Hispanics: 4,700 or 5.7%

• Blacks: 1,175 or 1.4%

• Pacific: 44 or 0.1%

• Mixed: 5,831 (MIT doesn’t report a Mixed category)

• No Response: Unknown.

So, this would suggest that MIT in 2024 is handing out at least twice as many spots to Hispanics as math ability warrants and at least three times as much as black math ability warrants. And at the MIT edge of the elite tier of the PSAT scores, the gaps are probably quite a bit bigger.

So, affirmative action racial preferences are down at MIT, but are hardly dead.

When considering the 15% of MIT freshmen who were black in 2023, the term "sacrificial lamb" comes to mind.

In contrast, 2024's 5% black share at MIT suggests the concept of "fighting chance."

Appendix: Methodological Issues with my graph and table:

It appears than in 2011-2013, MIT forced all applicants to pick just one racial/ethnic box, which is why the racial stats for those years sum up to about 90% of freshmen. (International students are another 10% or so, but they aren’t included in the race stats, which are only for American citizens or permanent residents.

Then in 2014, the white share soared from 39% to 51%, likely due to allowing mixed freshmen to check both a nonwhite box and, finally, the white box. (I’d imagine that a large percentage of MIT students are part white and part Asian.) The total number of boxes checked soared from 92% of freshmen in 2013 to 110% in 2014. Because the 9% International have no race (according to MIT’s methology), you can calculate the number of racial boxes checked by the average American MIT frosh by dividing 110% by 91% = 1.21 races per freshman in 2014.

In 2023, freshmen averaged 1.24 races each, but in 2024, for unexplained reasons, that dropped to 1.12 races, the lowest since picking more than one box was allowed in 2014. I don’t see an explanation from MIT. It’s not a big deal, but some people might want to try to figure out what is going on. I’d suspect it has something to do with putting a slight spin on the data for the benefit of the courts, but I haven’t figured out why or what.

You also might be able to back out the mixed stats from this data, but I haven’t bothered.

Finally, why have I paywalled an increasing number of posts lately, but I didn’t paywall this one, which took a lot of work?

No particular reason other than I’m trying to mix things up. I post non-paywalled items to boost my number of free subscribers by showing the quality of my posts, and I post paywalled items to convert free subscribers to paying subscribers. The long term trend is clearly toward more and more paywalled content, but it’s going to be pretty random for awhile.

One reason I didn’t rush into Substack was because at my advanced age, I wasn’t looking forward to playing these kind of games the way I would have been highly excited about calculating how to revenue-maximized thirty years ago.

Now, at my age, I just want to write and hit the post button.

But, to make a living, I have to worry about this kind of stuff.