According to the Department of Health and Human Services, non-Hispanic Black Americans make up 12.1% of the U.S. population. Given these statistics, it’s worth asking why this group is severely underrepresented at America’s elite colleges. Let’s take the Ivy League, for example. Demographic data culled from each school’s Common Data Set show the pan-Ivy African American enrollment rate sitting at a meager 8.06%. Here’s the data across the eight institutions.

Black Student Enrollment Across the Ivy League

Ivy League School	Class of 2028	Class of 2027	Class of 2026	Class of 2025	Class of 2024
Brown University	NYP*	8.20%	7.80%	7.40%	7.10%
Columbia University	NYP*	7.50%	8.30%	8.30%	N/A
Cornell University	NYP*	7.40%	7.30%	7.30%	7.20%
Dartmouth College	NYP*	6.10%	6.00%	5.30%	5.90%
Harvard University	NYP*	9.40%	9.20%	9.30%	11.30%
Princeton University	NYP*	8.60%	8.00%	8.30%	8.90%
University of Pennsylvania	NYP*	8.50%	7.90%	7.80%	8.00%
Yale University	NYP*	8.80%	8.30%	8.00%	9.10%
Average:		8.06%	7.85%	7.71%	8.21%

Harvard University is the only Ivy League school that comes remotely close to enrolling a proportionate number of Black students relative to the U.S. population. Still, even this highly prestigious institution should aim to catch up to the 12.1% benchmark. The Ivy League school with the lowest proportion of Black students is Dartmouth College, where only 6.1% of students can claim this underrepresented status.

An Ivy League education is the key to upward social mobility for disadvantaged high schoolers. There’s no excuse for failing to represent African Americans at elite institutions adequately. However, we at Ivy Coach also recognize the necessity to disaggregate the enrollment data for African Americans (i.e., the descendants of those enslaved during America’s horrific era of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery) versus Black immigrant and biracial students.

Some African Americans on Ivy League campuses feel like “a minority within a minority,” according to reporting by NBC News, due to their under-representation relative to the children of sub-Saharan African and Caribbean immigrants. Distinguishing between these groups in the data would allow us to hold these institutions accountable for failing to correct generations of systemic oppression — even if this is now only possible after students have already been admitted due to the downfall of Affirmative Action.

How Has the SCOTUS Ruling on Affirmative Action Impacted African American Enrollment?

Although collecting racial data on applicants is now a practice of college admissions cycles past, elite schools can and will continue to weigh race-based admissions criteria through the Roberts Loophole. College essays have now opened us up as the sole means of conveying race-based adversity in college applications. Black and African American applicants now face increased pressure to mold some of their application essays around identity and adversity. We’ve yet to learn how this change has impacted African American enrollment at elite schools, as glossy press releases highlighting the diversity of an incoming class are a thing of the past in a post-Affirmative Action world.

Next year, once these schools begin to publish Common Data Sets for the Class of 2028, these gaps in the data will finally be filled in. Fortunately, Ivy Coach’s tried and true crystal ball has already forecasted how this ruling will change the face of college admissions. Unfortunately, the students who didn’t take advantage of the Roberts Loophole during this past cycle, i.e., those from underrepresented backgrounds who chose not to craft their essays around identity, were more likely to face rejection. As we’ll see next year, the result has been a dip in Black and African American enrollment across the Ivy League. It’s the terrible consequence of the changing landscape of college admissions, but time will only tell just how much of a hit underrepresented enrollment has taken in elite college admissions.