Tufts reported a decline in the racial diversity of its incoming first-year class, who represent the first wave of students to be admitted after the Supreme Court’s ruling last year to overturn race-based affirmative action in college admissions. 44% of the Class of 2028 identify as students of color, down from 50% last year.
The announcement comes as several other universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Amherst College, have revealed similar declines in the diversity of their incoming class — at MIT, the percentage of incoming Black students dropped from 15% to just 5%. With data only beginning to trickle in from universities across the country, it remains unclear how much of this drop in diversity is tied to the court’s affirmative action ban versus other factors in the admissions process, such as a decrease in the number of students of color applying to certain schools. But Tufts’ data provides one of the nation’s earliest indications that the court’s decision has changed the racial composition of college campuses.
Breaking down the data
Black students experienced the heaviest drop in their share of the first-year class, dipping from 7.3% of the Class of 2027 to just 4.7% of the incoming class. Nearly all other racial and ethnic groups on campus experienced declines, with Asian American students dropping to 19.7% from an earlier 20.3% and multiracial students dropping from 11.4% to 8.0%. According to Tufts, there was also a decrease in the enrollment of Indigenous students, although the university did not disclose exact percentages in their original statement nor when asked by the Daily.
By contrast, the number of white and Hispanic/Latinx students in the Class of 2028 has risen from last year. White students, who represented 46.8% of the Class of 2027, now compose 49.3% of the Class of 2028. For Hispanic/Latinx students, the increase was more modest: 11.6% of the Class of 2028 identifies as Hispanic/Latinx, up from an earlier 10.5%.
The number of students who chose not to report their race or ethnicity also rose from 3.3% to 6.7%. Tufts’ Director of Admissions, JT Duck, said that this increase could help explain recent shifts in racial demographics.
“The actual size of the decline in certain groups is not as clear as the data might suggest because of this, and we would recommend resisting comparing one group’s increase against another group’s decrease given that context,” he wrote in a statement to the Daily.
In his statement, Duck wrote that the national ban on affirmative action directly impacted his admissions team and contributed to them admitting a less racially diverse first-year class. He explained that admissions officers plan to increase their outreach to underrepresented, low-income and first-generation high-school students, as well as their recruitment in small towns and rural areas.
“As for why certain groups went up or down, we’re continuing to examine the data, which only became visible to us late in the summer after the entire admissions process had concluded,” Duck wrote.
Students react to drops in diversity at Tufts
In conversations with the Daily, students expressed concern about the ramifications of decreased racial diversity on campus. Most, however, said they were not surprised at the data.
“I think when the affirmative action decision was repealed by the Supreme Court last year, all of us were just holding our breath, especially a lot of us in the Black community,” Rhoda Edwards, TCU Africana Community Senator and the President of the Black Student Union, said.
Edwards is also a coordinator for the pre-orientation program Students’ Quest for Unity in the African Diaspora, which introduces incoming first-year students to the history and community of Black students at Tufts. According to Edwards, the percentage of students enrolled in the program dropped by nearly half this year, which she said reflects the drop in Black first-year students.
To Edwards, drops in racial diversity should be understood as a threat to all students on Tufts’ campus, not just those from marginalized groups. She stressed that a diverse campus provides opportunities for people to cultivate “cultural consciousness,” or the practice of learning how to accept and coexist with people from different cultural backgrounds.
“But there has to be diversity for you to do that to begin with,” Edwards said. “If there’s no longer a presence of any racial group, identity group, on campus, there’s nothing to be culturally conscious of, because there’s only one culture.”
TCU Diversity Officer Donovan Sanders stressed that as racial diversity declines on campus, students from marginalized groups begin to feel increasingly alienated.
“I’m not surprised [by the data], but it still impacts me as someone who’s a Black student and a minority student here at Tufts … not being able to see students who look like me walking around me,” Sanders said.
But students were wary of blaming recent demographic shifts entirely on the Supreme Court’s ban of affirmative action. Declining diversity amongst the student body is also a reflection of Tufts’ efforts to create a welcoming campus for marginalized groups, students argued.
“College access as a whole is a really large field,” Nessren Ourdyl, Vice President of the TCU Senate and a volunteer with the Tufts College Access Mentoring Initiative, said. “I think Tufts can play a better role in … promoting a better campus culture and campus experience for those who are already here, in order to ensure that students do feel like that they can apply and get in and attend a school like Tufts — and graduate as well.”
Sanders and Ourdyl said that many students of color are deterred by Tufts’ low social mobility ranking: on the Wall Street Journal’s 2023 social mobility index, Tufts ranked 391 out of 400 colleges. Students of color are also discouraged from applying, they said, because of Tufts’ history of low retention rates for faculty of color: Between fall 2022 and fall 2023, for instance, the percentage of Black full and part-time faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences dropped from 5.8% to 4.8%.
“If there are no faculty and staff [of color] here, students [of color] are probably not going to want to be here, because they don’t see people that look like them represented in places of power,” Sanders said.
The students expressed hope that, going forward, Tufts increases programming that caters to students of color, provides more support to identity centers on campus and hires and retains a more diverse slate of faculty members. Ourdyl stressed that as the university steps up its efforts to recruit applicants from underrepresented communities, it should adopt a more personal, individualized approach. As a volunteer for the Tufts College Access Initiative, Ourdyl works closely with students in underserved areas of Massachusetts to help encourage them to apply to Tufts and guide them through the college process.
“It’s really powerful that it’s coming from students and undergrads like us. Because when we talk to students, they see reflections of themselves in us,” Ourdyl said. “Sometimes the work and the responsibilities … lay on the people who are most deeply affected by those [demographic] changes, like students of color. I’m hopeful that in the future, the university can be a little bit more supportive of that, too.”
Self-reported racial identities of Tufts undergraduate first-year students for the classes of 2027 and 2028 are pictured.
