Nobody Knows Nuthin'
Why did Johns Hopkins' Asian share jump from 26% to 45% after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action? It's a mystery.
From The Banner:
Asian enrollment at Johns Hopkins is skyrocketing. No one can say why.
I can.
Ellie Wolfe
4/14/2026 5:30 a.m. EDT
The Baltimore university is an outlier among its peers.
Rachel Wu was looking around a dining hall at the Johns Hopkins University when she noticed the shift: There are a lot more Asian students at the elite Baltimore university these days.
“It’s starting to feel like all the freshmen are Asian,” said Wu, an Asian American junior.
Last fall, 45% of Hopkins’ first-year students were Asian, the university reported in December, up from about 26% just two years ago. The massive shift came after the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision that forbade colleges from considering race in admissions, but other selective colleges did not see such a dramatic swing. It’s flummoxed experts and threatened Hopkins’ reputation as one of the most racially diverse campuses in its class.
From JHU’s report:
On top of the 45% of the latest Johns Hopkins freshman class who identify as only Asian-American, another 13.5% are Internationals, most of whom are likely Asian. And a few percent are part-Asian but didn’t pick that as their primary race. So, the majority of freshmen on campus would now look at least part Asian.
Researchers thought they would see “very marginal, minimal shifts” in Asian enrollment at elite universities like Hopkins after the U.S. banned affirmative action, said OiYan Poon, co-director at the College Admissions Future Co-Laborative.
That’s because they were fools. Unsilenced Science has been posting graphs for years showing Asians pulling away from other races in average SAT score.
The Asian-white gap on the ACT is slightly smaller, but still over a half of a standard deviation:
So far, they’ve been mostly right. The share of Asian students at Columbia and Brown universities slightly increased from 2023 to 2024, the most recent year for which federal data is available, but it held steady or decreased at other Ivy League schools. …
Hopkins now requires applicants to submit standardized test scores, which could influence who enrolls, Poon said. Like many colleges, Hopkins had stopped requiring SAT and ACT scores during the COVID-19 pandemic but recently reinstated the requirement. The U.S. Department of Education applauded that decision last month and noted the “substantial shifts” in first-year student demographics.
So, what happened?
Paywall here.
