The University of Pennsylvania, along with Middlebury, Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, all reported a drop in the share of students of color in their first-year classes this fall, according to newly released institutional data. They’re the most recent highly selective colleges to release demographic data for the Class of 2028, the first class admitted after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023.
Penn’s share of incoming underrepresented minority students declined by two percentage points from last fall’s incoming class, from 25 percent to 23 percent. The university did not provide data on individual racial groups, though its proportion of students of color—a group that includes Asian American students, whose representation in selective incoming classes rose at many institutions this fall—remained the same as last year, at 57 percent.
Officials at Swarthmore told The Philadelphia Inquirer that 52 percent of its first-year class are domestic students of color, including Asian Americans—down four percentage points from last year. Haverford reported a 2.4-point drop in Black and Hispanic student enrollment, as well as a 0.8-percentage-point decline in Asian American enrollment.
Middlebury, a small, private liberal arts institution in Vermont, saw a much steeper decline in diversity: the college reported only 26 percent of incoming students were domestic students of color, down from 35 percent last year. Middlebury also did not break down the data by group, and the number includes Asian American students.
Middlebury dean of admissions Nicole Curvin wrote in a statement that the college received about the same number of applications from students of color this past cycle as usual, suggesting that the decline in enrollments from underrepresented students could be a direct result of changes to the admissions process brought about by the Supreme Court ruling. Middlebury president Laurie Patton called the past year “a learning experience for all of us in higher education.”
Middlebury’s nine-percentage-point drop in students of color is in line with more dramatic changes in diversity at schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Amherst College. But enrollment data from selective colleges has so far been mixed, with some colleges—including Penn and Princeton—reporting relative stability, while others, like Duke University, reported a slight increase in diversity.
