On Sept. 6, Brown student inboxes were slammed with disappointing news: The racial profile of the Class of 2028 was significantly less diverse than in years prior.
While education experts had already warned of drops in diversity as a consequence of the recent Supreme Court decision to ban race-based affirmative action, the data still came as a blow. We can point our fingers at the Supreme Court, but Brown is also a culprit. Peer universities in the Ivy League preserved the diversity of their incoming class by reforming their admission policies. Brown failed to do this internal work, and the diversity of the first-year class plummeted as a result. Moving forward, Brown admissions officers need to prioritize robust recruitment programs, re-mandate a test-optional policy and engage in creative problem-solving to produce new solutions.
Brown is not alone in its struggle to retain campus diversity in a post-affirmative action world. Tufts and MIT also saw significant drops in the enrollment of Black students. Amherst too recorded a notable 8% drop in Black admissions. The SCOTUS decision made an already challenging admissions process even more difficult. Universities are now responsible for striking a careful balance between preserving student diversity — which lies at the heart of many institutional missions and carries invaluable benefits — and ensuring legal compliance with race-neutral admissions. Colleges are likely still trying to figure out what that balance might look like.
Yet there is only so much grace we can give Brown when some of its other peer institutions hit the nail on the head. At Princeton, Black enrollment dropped by less than one percentage point while the Hispanic population dropped by only 1%. At Yale, the incoming freshman class had an increase in Hispanic students while its proportion of Black students was the same as the year prior. If both schools were able to emerge, seemingly unscathed, from loss of affirmative action (and delays with FAFSA), there is no reason why Brown could not have achieved similar results.
Promptly after the ruling, Yale announced new admission strategies. Changes included enhanced recruitment programs, test flexible policies and the use of the Opportunity Atlas, co-directed by Professor John Friedman of Brown’s Economics Department. This last change especially presents a particularly important intervention into the admissions process that Brown could replicate. As Friedman previously explained to The Herald, incorporating data on a student geographic background (including economic mobility trends, incarceration rates and degree attainment rates) “provides a new and more direct way for admissions officers to understand the advantages or barriers that students faced because of the neighborhoods in which they grew up.” While Brown has pursued numerous other measures, such as partnering with community organizations and HBCUs, it has not publicly disclosed the use of any such geographic data, which could present a new avenue of not just recruiting but contextualizing applicants in the absence of race.
The issue of diversity in our post affirmative action climate requires creative problem solving, exemplified by peer offices of undergraduate admissions. As the picture of college admissions comes into sharper focus, Brown needs to start flexing those kinds of creative muscles if we want to reverse the drop in Black enrollment we saw this year. To be certain, the true effects of these policies are bound to remain a bit opaque for at least a couple years. But that shouldn’t negate the fact that other institutions seemed to have gotten something right while Brown faltered. University leaders should not wait for the numbers to shake out to pursue creative and aggressive strategies to preserve campus diversity — it won’t be long until a new round of applications reaches their tables.
Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board and aim to contribute informed opinions to campus debates while remaining mindful of the group’s past stances. The editorial page board and its views are separate from The Herald’s newsroom and the 134th Editorial Board, which leads the paper. This editorial was written by the editorial page board’s members Paul Hudes ’27, Paulie Malherbe ’26, Alissa Simon ’25, and Yael Wellisch ’26.
