Minority college enrollment steady in Indiana despite ruling that ended race-conscious admissions

Diverse admissions and enrollment at many Indiana public and private colleges have remained steady or increased despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that essentially bans race-conscious admissions.

Higher education officials and diversity advocates have worried the June 2023 decision would mean fewer Black and Hispanic students would be admitted to colleges across the country as schools pulled back from policies that were meant to elevate students from underrepresented races and cultures and ensure that student bodies were diverse.

And in fact, some Ivy League schools and exclusive public universities have seen dips in students of color in their 2024-2025 classes.

For example, Brown University’s Black student population decreased from 15% to 9% while the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped from 14% to 10% this fall, the school’s student newspaper reported. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, one of the defendants in the case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, saw its share of Black students drop 3% last fall.

But that generally hasn’t been the case in the first wave of admissions at most Indiana schools—in part because they had not been prioritizing race in their admissions policies.

Instead, racially diverse students have continued to apply, be admitted and enroll in many of the state’s public and private schools in steady or growing numbers.

Nationally, diverse enrollment is on the rise—especially Hispanic and Latino student enrollment, which has doubled in the last two decades, according to the Pew Research Center.

Experts say it will likely take a few years before the impacts of the Supreme Court decision fully shake out, especially given other factors that could have affected enrollment this year, like the shaky rollout of a new federal aid platform.

Melanie Heath, Lumina Foundation’s strategy director for participation, said “it’s a little early” to assess the court decision’s impact.

Enrollment is “pretty variable, even class to class,” she said. “And so you really need a longer time period to suss out what those trends look like.”

Rise, fall of affirmative action

Colleges and universities began adopting affirmative action policies in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement, so they could look beyond merit to offer seats to students from racially diverse backgrounds.

The policies were a reaction to systemic racism that made it harder for minority students to apply to, be accepted by and enroll in traditional universities.

But in recent years, opponents have argued that affirmative action policies have led to unfairness in the admissions process and discrimination against non-minority students.

Those arguments escalated to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that admissions programs at UNC and Harvard University—which accounted for race at various stages in the admissions process—violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

Since then, many colleges have been working to review their policies and adjust their processes. In fall 2024, the first post-affirmative-action class enrolled. (Most students who enrolled in fall 2023 had been accepted before the court decision.)

A 2023 study from the Brookings Institution predicted that only the most ultra-selective colleges would see fallout from the court ruling—and the early numbers appear to bear that out.

Heath, from the Lumina Foundation, said there’s been a hyper-focus on the impact at those prestigious universities. But she said most students don’t attend those schools.

“There was the fear that there would be this huge drop,” she said. “But I think that also reflects the reality that really only the most highly selective, maybe 20 to 50 institutions in the country, actively practiced race-conscious admissions practices.”

The University of Notre Dame, one of Indiana’s most selective institutions, indicated in a 2022 filing that race and ethnicity were “important” factors in its admissions process. The filing was part of the Common Data Set initiative that collects information from colleges nationwide.

In 2021, two years before the court decision, Notre Dame’s undergraduate student body was 66% white, 12% Hispanic or Latino, 6% multiracial, 5% Asian and 4% Black, according to a report in Notre Dame Magazine.

The university has not made similar numbers public for the 2024-2025 school year. But the university said it admitted 11% of all applicants this fall and reported on its website that 30% of those enrolled are U.S. students from historically underrepresented groups.

The university did not respond to IBJ’s requests for comment.

Varying results

Indiana University, Purdue University and a few private colleges in Indiana also reported in Common Data Set filings before the court’s ruling that they “considered” race in admissions but did not rank the factor as “important” or “very important.”

Still, the schools’ diversity has increased in recent years. For example, IU’s nine campuses admitted double the number of Black students in 2024 as they did a decade ago, which corresponds to a climbing number of applications. Black student enrollment has grown 25% over the past decade and 15% over the past year, according to data provided by IU.

IU’s Hispanic and Latino student population increased 6% over fall 2023 and has doubled since 2014. In addition, about 25% more Hispanic students applied in 2024 than in 2023, which led to a 21% increase in the number of Hispanic students admitted.

At Purdue University, the numbers have fluctuated since 2017 but are up overall in applications, admissions and enrollment. On average, 264 new Black students have enrolled at Purdue the past four years, but 18 fewer enrolled last year than in 2023.

Purdue’s numbers are stronger in the Hispanic/Latino category. The school has seen a 132% increase in applications from Hispanic and Latino students over the past decade. Enrollment has jumped from 304 Hispanic students in fall 2015 to 857 this year; 73 more students were admitted than in 2023.

Neither IU nor Purdue responded to IBJ’s requests for comment about admissions and enrollment.

Few changes

Overall, the state’s colleges and universities have not generally used race-conscious admissions. Ten Hoosier colleges reported they did not consider race or ethnicity at all, according to 2022-2023 Common Data Set filings.

Two studies report that affirmative action policies have lost favor over the last several years and that a significant number of schools—especially public institutions—have dropped race from their admittance measures. Nine states, including Michigan and Nebraska, previously passed laws banning affirmative action.

Dottie King, president of the Independent Colleges of Indiana, said her organization’s members have been largely unaffected by the Supreme Court decision because, excluding Notre Dame, they weren’t using race-conscious practices.

The organization, which represents the state’s private higher education institutions, hired a firm to review the impact the Supreme Court’s ruling would have on its members, King said. Schools also evaluated what impact the ruling could have on race-based scholarships, she said, and adjusted as needed.

“We just discerned pretty quickly that it didn’t really apply to us because we weren’t doing that,” she said. “We then started talking about, ‘Well, what were we doing to make sure that students from all different walks of life felt welcomed?’”

For many, that meant recruiting among diverse student populations and creating an on-campus atmosphere that would attract students from different backgrounds.

Mary Beth Petrie, DePauw University’s vice president for enrollment management, said the college did not use affirmative action in its admission and scholarship process, and thus, the court decision has not impacted enrollment. Following the ruling, she said, DePauw has updated its admissions policy’s language to be clearer and removed race from the data given to staff when reviewing an application.

Still, she said, DePauw’s admissions process seeks to build a holistic picture of a student by considering factors in their transcript like class rigor and school profile and accounting for extracurricular activities and the applicant’s narrative essay.

And even before the ruling, the Greencastle liberal arts college changed how it approached recruitment, Petrie said. New partnerships with school districts have led to an increased enrollment of students of color.

At DePauw, 6% of students are Black, 8% are Hispanic or Latino, and 2% are Asian. About 23% of students come from other countries.

“We worked hard to make sure that we were compliant [with the court decision] as well as making sure that students of all backgrounds and perspectives and races, ethnicities—regardless of where they came from—know that they will find a welcoming place at DePauw and that DePauw will be a place where they can belong,” Petrie said.

Lumina’s Heath said the ruling has inspired conversations across the entire collegiate landscape about reevaluating admissions processes and rooting out barriers that could create what Heath called an “inequitable process” that harms minority students. For example, she said, do most colleges need to require an essay, a letter of recommendation and other questions that might be more difficult for students from underrepresented communities?

Heath also said the emergence of direct admissions—a process through which students who meet specific requirements are admitted without requiring them to apply—is a key avenue to converting more on-the-bubble high-schoolers into college-goers. Indiana University Indianapolis expanded its direct admissions process in December to include more eligible students at Indianapolis Public Schools.

“We do know that simpler processes and systems are more equitable, and more complicated systems are less equitable,” Heath said. “The system that has been designed that we’re all operating within right now is one that takes time, resources and social capital to navigate. And if students don’t have those things, it is infinitely harder to navigate.”•