The first-year undergraduate class at Dartmouth College this fall is “the most socioeconomically diverse” in the New Hampshire school’s history,campus officials said Monday,with the number of students from “underrepresented backgrounds” increasing despite last year’s US Supreme Court ruling that ended race-conscious admissions in higher education.
In a statement, Dartmouth said more than 28 percent of the first-year class of 1,184 students are people from underrepresented backgrounds,a category the college says includes “Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, and Native or Indigenous students.” That compares to 26.5 percent in last fall’s incoming class, officials said.
The percentage of Black students dipped slightly, from 10.9 percent of last year’s class to 10.2 percent this fall. The percentage of Hispanic or Latino first-year students is nearly 13 percent, up from about 10 percent last year, officials said, while the percentage of Asian Americans declined from 23.3 percent to 21.8 percent.
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Dartmouth said 5.3 percent of the new class is Native American or Indigenous, down from 5.9 percent last fall. And 48 percent of the first-year contingent is white, down from 52.3 percent last fall, officials said.
Other colleges have reported a decline in the number of Black and Hispanic students this year. Boston University, for example, released enrollment data last week that showed its population of Black first-year students droppedfrom 9 percent last year to 3 percent.
At Dartmouth, officials said a record 19.4 percent of first-year students received Pell Grants, which are awarded to students from low-income backgrounds, a jump of more than 5 percentage points from last year.
“In our selection of the Class of 2028, we were careful to comply with the limitations the Supreme Court imposed,” Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, said in a statement.
He called the new arrivals“the most socioeconomically diverse class in Dartmouth’s history.”
“We took to heart the court’s acknowledgement of holistic admissions review, which Dartmouth has practiced for over a century,” Coffin said. “We continued to consider applicants’ academic achievements as well as their academic passions and curiosity. And we continued to value applicants’ accomplishments and the ‘lived experiences’ — inside as well as outside the classroom — that shaped their narrative and identity.”
Other schools in the region have seen their diversity numbers drop in the wake of the high court ruling.
Northeastern Universityreported that the number of Black freshmendecreased slightly from almost 8 percent to just over 5 percent.
At Boston University, president Melissa L. Gilliam saidthe decline was “concerning and disappointing” and attributed the downturn to the Supreme Court ruling.
Gilliam said the university will establish a task force to look into the issue. She said the priority is improving how the school communicates with potential students beyond the work of the admissions team, including outreach through summer programs, improving its financial aid program, building more pipelines for students of color, and ensuring they are comfortable on campus.
“Diversity is a core value of this institution, and we have to learn and improve,” she said.
The changing demographics, particularly the diminishing percentage of Black students, are what many colleges and universities feared would happen after the 2023 ruling.
“We continue to place tremendous value on the educational benefits of a diverse student body, and seek to enroll students from a broad range of life experiences within the bounds of the law,” said Renata Nyul, Northeastern’s vice president of communications.
At Northeastern, the university’s population of Hispanic students dropped by less than a percentage point. Its percentage of Asian American students ticked up from 22 to 25 percent.
Amherst College, Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, the defendant in the 2023 affirmative action lawsuit, all reported enrolling fewer Black first-year students compared to last year.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is bucking the trend, reporting its most racially diverse incoming class to date. University officials have said they aggressively recruited students of color in anticipation of a drop in applications because of last year’s ruling.
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report.
Travis Andersen can be reached at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-09-16 08:18:00
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