College Enrollment Patterns After SFFA v. Harvard

• In Event: Navigating Higher Education Opportunity: From Affirmative Action Reform to Community College Pathways

Abstract

In June 2023, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard effectively outlawed the consideration of applicant race in college admissions nationwide, with potentially important consequences for both college access and campus diversity. The Court’s ruling was widely expected to reduce the number of Black, Hispanic, and Native students entering selective colleges starting in fall 2024. At the same time, many commentators expressed hope that selective colleges might now turn to “class-based” affirmative action as an alternative strategy for bolstering campus diversity (e.g. Kahlenberg 2025). 

In this paper, we examine whether these predictions were borne out in practice using national administrative data covering nearly 80 percent of U.S. high school seniors. Linking more than 12 million domestic PSAT, SAT, and AP takers in the high school graduation cohorts of 2021 to 2024 to their college enrollment records from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), we assemble a uniquely comprehensive student-level dataset that affords us a “bird’s eye view” of enrollment patterns across the four-year college sector in the years before and after the SFFA ruling. We further link the student data to neighborhood income measures from the American Community Survey (ACS) and college characteristics from IPEDS and the College Scorecard.

Our analysis proceeds in two parts: first, we estimate SFFA’s impacts on the racial and socioeconomic composition of colleges’ incoming classes using difference-in-differences designs that leverage preexisting state affirmative action bans; second, we fit student-level multinomial logit models to describe changes in students’ chances of entering selective colleges by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and academic achievement.

We find that SFFA substantially reduced racial diversity at highly selective institutions in fall 2024. The underrepresented minority (URM) share of first-year domestic students at highly selective colleges declined 4 to 5 percentage points (18 percent), with smaller declines at selective public colleges. These changes reflect pronounced shifts in students’ college destinations: high-achieving URM college-goers were up to 10 percentage points (about 14 percent) less likely to enroll in highly selective colleges in 2024 than in 2023, instead “cascading” into less selective institutions with lower graduation rates and earnings outcomes.

In contrast, enrollment patterns by neighborhood income remained mostly stable, though we find evidence consistent with increased efforts to enroll lower-income students among Ivy Plus institutions. After SFFA, highly selective colleges experienced small increases (~1 percentage point) in the enrollment share of entrants from lower-income neighborhoods, driven in part by increased entry among high-achieving non-URM students, but these changes were far smaller than the declines in URM representation. We find little evidence that concurrent disruptions to the 2024-25 FAFSA explain our results.

Our findings suggest that SFFA primarily reshaped where students enrolled rather than whether they enrolled, with important implications for high-achieving students’ college opportunities and exposure to diverse campus environments. By APPAM 2026, we will extend our analysis to incorporate Fall 2025 enrollment data, enabling us to assess whether these effects persisted, attenuated, or intensified in the second post-SFFA admissions cycle.

Author

• Samuel Imlay, College Board
  Presenting Author