Fourteen months after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the university on Thursday reported sharp declines in enrollment of new Black and Hispanic students compared with a year ago.
Last fall, Black students accounted for 10.5 percent of new enrollees at U.N.C., and Hispanic students represented 10.8 percent of the incoming class.
But new figures from Chapel Hill show that the number of Black first-year and transfer students dropped more than 25 percent for this academic year. The number of new Hispanic students declined about 7 percent.
“We have had some change in demographics from last year, although it’s really too soon to know if that’s a pattern or one-year change,” Rachelle Feldman, U.N.C.’s vice provost for enrollment, said during a call with reporters on Thursday.
The university, she said, was “following the law in every way in our admissions process.”
Black students who enrolled this semester now make up 7.8 percent of the 5,624 new students. Hispanic students account for 10.1 percent of the class. Students who identified as Asian or Asian American made up nearly 26 percent of this year’s entering class, up a percentage point from last year. U.N.C. like many universities, allows students to identify as more than one race, allowing percentages to add up to more than 100.
The Supreme Court’s decision to curb considerably the use of race in admissions last summer shook higher education, forcing admissions offices from coast to coast to rethink their procedures. But the cases before the justices focused on only two schools, one private and one public, both with extraordinary pedigrees: Harvard, the country’s oldest university, and North Carolina, which, in 1798, became the first public university in the United States to confer degrees.
The group that brought the cases, Students for Fair Admissions, had accused U.N.C. of illegal, deliberate discrimination and of using racial preferences instead of “available race-neutral alternatives capable of achieving student body diversity.”
Though U.N.C.’s admissions process did not use racial quotas, university records show the process allowed admissions officers to award a “plus” related to the applicant’s race or ethnicity “depending on the individual circumstances revealed in the student’s application.” The university’s guidelines said that an applicant’s race and ethnicity did not guarantee admission.
The university contended that its approach, which a federal judge initially upheld, aligned with years of Supreme Court precedents and that its admissions program was designed to promote educational diversity.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the rest of the court’s conservative supermajority struck down both the Harvard and U.N.C. programs in a single opinion, saying they “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful end points.”
After the decisions, U.N.C.’s provost, J. Christopher Clemens, said the university would “make admissions decisions based on achievements, character traits or other criteria that do not serve as a proxy for race.”
The statistics that other schools have released in the opening weeks of this academic year have revealed mixed effects of the Supreme Court’s decision.
In recent years, Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students accounted for about a quarter of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example. But the university said that students who identified as members of those ethnic groups made up about 16 percent of the class that just enrolled for the fall semester.
Amherst College said that the share of new Black students this school year declined by 8 percentage points compared with last year’s. But the University of Virginia reported a far smaller shift, amounting to less than a percentage point, and Yale University reported no change.
The outcomes for Hispanic and Asian American students were also varied. M.I.T. said 47 percent of its new class was Asian American, up from 40 percent last year. But at Yale, where some 30 percent of last year’s entering class identified as Asian American, 24 percent did this year.
Hispanic students made up less of the new classes at M.I.T. and Amherst, dipping to 8 percent from 12 percent at Amherst, for example, but accounted for greater portions of the Tufts, Virginia and Yale classes.
Universities are expected to refine admissions standards in the coming years, and opponents of affirmative action have insisted that those changes will make any shifts in student body demographics fleeting. But university officials and others have warned that those adjusted admissions procedures could be slow in coming and lead to significant setbacks for students of color.
U.N.C. raised the possibility that the Department of Education’s troubled rollout of a redesigned financial aid form might have affected enrollment. The university acknowledged, though, that it did “not know the extent those issues had on its applicant pool.”
At U.N.C., where Ms. Feldman, the vice provost, described the just-completed admissions cycle as “a year of uncertainty,” the share of white students rose by a tenth of a percentage point. The percentage of students who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native dipped to 1.1 percent, from 1.6 percent last year. And students who said they were native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander increased by a tenth of a percentage point, to 0.3 percent.
