Earlier today, MIT Admissions released demographic data for the undergraduate class of 2028, the first cohort admitted after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard, which prohibited considering race in undergraduate admissions. As Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services Stu Schmill ’86 predicted in a blog post last June, the ruling has led to a decrease in the proportion of enrolled first-year students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.
MIT News spoke with Schmill about this change, the importance of diversity in MIT’s education, and what lies ahead. Schmill also penned a personal reflection on the MIT Admissions blog.
Q: What is the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on MIT’s class of 2028?
A: Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities receiving federal funding can no longer consider race in undergraduate admissions decisions. As I explained in a blog post at the time, we anticipated this would result in a decrease in the number of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT. This has indeed occurred.
As a reference point, in recent years about 25% of our enrolled undergraduates identified as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander. For the incoming class of 2028, this figure is around 16%. (For comparison, federal data shows that 45% of K-12 students in U.S. public schools are classified as members of these groups.)
Although this represents a substantial change in the demographic composition of the class of 2028 compared to recent years, I want to clarify that it does not result in any overall change in the quantifiable characteristics we use to predict academic success at MIT, such as high school performance or standardized test scores. By these measures, this cohort is neither more nor less prepared to excel in our curriculum than other recent, more diverse classes.
I emphasize this crucial point because many people have told me over the years that MIT should only care about academic excellence, not diversity. But every student we admit, regardless of background, is already situated at the far right of the academic excellence distribution. Since I became dean, we have only considered candidates who meet our extremely high threshold for academic preparation. Recognizing the substantial educational benefits of diversity, we then worked to assemble from this highly qualified group a class that reflected both the breadth and excellence of their collective interests, aptitudes, and experiences.
The proof of our success in achieving both academic excellence and significant diversity lies in our outcomes, both on our campus and beyond. In recent years, as MIT has diversified, collective academic performance has improved, as have retention and graduation rates, which now reach unprecedented highs for students from all backgrounds. At the same time, according to data from the American Society for Engineering Education, over the past 10 years, MIT has graduated more engineers from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups than any other private college or university (and nearly all public universities) in the U.S., while being widely regarded as the world’s leading STEM institution and a major driver of innovation. These simultaneous achievements of our community represent a synthesis – not a tension – between diversity and excellence.
Q: Why is diversity important in an MIT education?
A: I am convinced, based on empirical data and my personal experience, that MIT’s education is stronger when our student body is, above a high bar of academic excellence, highly diverse.
Any MIT alum can tell you they learned as much from their peers as from their professors; this was certainly as true for me as a Course 2 [mechanical engineering major] in the 1980s as it is for my advisees today. When you bring together people with different ideas and experiences who share interests, aptitudes, and a fit with MIT’s mission, they contribute their individual talents to collective excellence.
We also need this diversity to attract the best students. As MIT has become more diverse, more of the most talented students in the country, from all backgrounds, have chosen to enroll at MIT – and they specifically tell us in surveys that attending a diverse institution is important to them and that they value this quality in their MIT experience.
It is not really surprising that today’s students prefer a diverse academic community: they come from the most multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural generation of Americans ever. Another reason we care about diversity is that it makes us the most powerful magnet for the next generation of scientists, engineers, and knowledge creators.
Q: Why did MIT need to consider race in the past to achieve diverse classes?
A: As we argued in an amicus brief in the SFFA case, the educational benefits of diversity are well established. Empirical evidence shows that what matters for creativity and innovation is having highly qualified people with a wide variety of experiences and backgrounds working together in teams to generate new solutions to difficult problems.
Unfortunately, deep and persistent racial inequalities remain in K-12 education in the U.S., and they are most pronounced in STEM fields. This means it is challenging to translate the diversity of U.S. public schools into higher education from the outset.
Let’s start with these troubling facts: According to federal data, among public high schools where 75% or more of students are Black and/or Hispanic:
- nearly two-thirds do not offer calculus;
- more than half do not offer any form of computer science; and
- nearly half do not offer any form of physics.
Research shows that students who do not have the opportunity to build strong foundations in math and science in high school are much less likely to succeed in earning a STEM degree. At the same time, research from Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project shows that school segregation – which is strongly associated with achievement gaps – has steadily increased since the early 1990s. By some measures, school segregation now approaches levels not seen since Brown v. Board of Education 70 years ago.
In the day-to-day work of MIT’s admissions office, we see for ourselves the startling extent of persistent educational inequalities in the U.S.: whether we are on the road or at home reading applications, we can see differences in opportunity from state to state, district to district, school to school, and even sometimes within schools.
We have tried to help bridge these gaps by pointing prospective students to free resources to help them better prepare for college-level STEM work, whether at MIT or elsewhere. In my blog post today, I talk about MIT’s long history of expanding access to educational opportunities for students from all backgrounds. I believe MIT can, will, and must do even more to open the door to opportunities in the future.
Q: What does all this mean?
A: Well, before the SFFA decision, we could use race as one factor among many to identify well-prepared students who emerged from an unequal K-12 educational environment. We could see that these students met our high standards of academic excellence, were well-suited for our education, and would thrive at MIT.
Following the SFFA decision, we cannot use race in the same way, and this change is reflected in the outcome for the class of 2028. Indeed, we did not solicit information about race or ethnicity from applicants this year, so we do not have data on the applicant pool. But I am confident that we have left out many well-qualified and well-suited candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds whom we would have admitted in the past and who would have excelled.
I want to stress that this change in the composition of our incoming class is not due to our reinstated testing requirement. In fact, the class we admitted last year under testing had the highest proportion of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in MIT’s history, as universal testing helped us identify objectively well-qualified students who lacked other means of demonstrating their preparation. As I explained at the time, standardized tests are imperfect, but they are, in important ways, less unequal than other elements we can consider.
We will continue to use tests to help identify students who might not otherwise demonstrate their readiness for our education; however, the SFFA decision limits our ability to select, from the pool of highly qualified applicants, a class that deliberately draws from a wide range of backgrounds.
Q: Where does MIT go from here?
A: Given the clear educational benefits, we still consider many types of diversity: fields of study and potential research areas, extracurricular activities and achievements, as well as economic, geographic, and educational background – but not race.
In response to the decision, we have expanded our recruitment and financial aid initiatives designed to enhance access to MIT for students from all backgrounds. These efforts include a new targeted outreach program to identify and encourage students from rural America to apply to MIT. They also include a new policy under which most families earning less than $75,000 a year pay nothing to attend – the kind of clear commitment that has been shown to break down barriers. This has also allowed us to quintuple the number of students we match with QuestBridge, a national talent search program for high-achieving, low-income students from all backgrounds, and represents an ongoing commitment from MIT leadership to keep our education affordable for all through the $165 million we allocate annually to undergraduate financial aid.
Clearly, we still need to do more to ensure MIT remains a destination for top talent from all backgrounds. My team has been meeting with faculty, students, and administrative leaders to gather ideas on what we might do in the future. And in her community message today, President Kornbluth emphasized her commitment to making MIT’s education accessible to those « whose talent and potential have been masked or limited » by structural and societal factors, as was the case with the Task Force on Educational Opportunity chaired by former MIT President Paul Gray in 1968. Through this ongoing work, we seek to find the best path forward for the Institute today and for future generations.
To be clear, there is no quick and easy solution to resolving racial inequalities. But MIT does not shy away from the hard problems of science or society, and we will do everything we can, within the bounds of the law, to continue offering an exceptionally rigorous and inclusive educational experience that our current, past, and future students can be proud of.
