Ed Blum Puts Colleges ‘On Notice’ Over Diversity

Selective colleges began unveiling demographic data for the Class of 2028, the first admitted after the 2023 affirmative action ban, just a few weeks ago, and already legal threats are flying.

Students for Fair Admissions, whose lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina led the Supreme Court to strike down race-conscious admissions last June, wrote letters on Tuesday to the general counsels of Yale, Princeton and Duke Universities asking for details about their admissions processes, accusing them of noncompliance with the ruling. In the letters, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, SFFA president Ed Blum said he was “deeply concerned” that the institutions had violated the affirmative action ban.

After some selective colleges reported stark drops in Black and Hispanic enrollment this fall, Yale and Princeton reported that their numbers had remained relatively stable; Duke reported a slight increase. All three also reported declines in the proportion of Asian Americans in their classes: The share fell by two percentage points at Princeton and six points at Yale and Duke.

In the letters, Blum questioned why Yale, Duke and Princeton’s first-year demographics diverged from those of colleges that reported substantial increases in Asian American enrollment and declines in Black enrollment, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University. He threatened to sue if the universities did not provide detailed explanations of their demographic trends.

“You are now on notice,” he wrote. “Preserve all potentially relevant documents and communications.”

Spokespeople for all three universities told Inside Higher Ed that their admissions offices acted in accordance with the ruling. Blum declined to comment for this story.

SFFA sued Yale over affirmative action once before, in 2021. The parties reached a settlement in September 2023, under which Yale agreed to stricter enforcement of the ban on race-conscious admissions.

Blum’s letters are a preview of the potential onslaught of litigation to come from groups like SFFA, which have taken it upon themselves to enforce the Supreme Court decision. One murky outcome of the ruling that Blum appears set on clarifying is the so-called essay carve-out. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that colleges could consider race as one part of an applicant’s lived experience as expressed in a personal essay; at the same time, he said they couldn’t use essays as a proxy for affirmative action—a warning that Blum quoted in his letters.

Art Coleman, founding partner of the higher ed law firm EducationCounsel LLC, said higher ed institutions have been preparing for this eventuality at least since the ruling came down last June. Blum’s latest campaign may mark an escalation, he said, but it was foreshadowed by civil rights complaints and lawsuits that other anti–affirmative action firms filed during the last application cycle.

“These letters are no surprise,” he said. “Institutions have been doing the due diligence and hard work of assuring compliance with this ruling for well over a year … retraining admissions staff, re-examining policies and the like. I don’t think this changes the underlying substance of what colleges are doing on an admissions front.”

Other colleges with stable to slightly improved racial diversity this fall may be next in SFFA’s crosshairs. Williams College reported a small decline in white and Asian American students—by 2.6 and 1.1 percentage points, respectively—and a bump in Black and Hispanic enrollment of less than a percentage point each, according to data reported by the student-run Williams Record.

Meike Kaan, Williams’s chief communications officer, confirmed the numbers in an email to Inside Higher Ed. She said the college was in full compliance with the court decision and attributed the results to race-neutral initiatives that have been underway for years, such as broadening recruitment efforts and replacing loans with grants in 2022.

“Our decision to award financial aid without relying on the FAFSA may also have played a role this past year,” she wrote.

So should colleges like Williams brace for a lawsuit?

Sonja Starr, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said that Blum’s letters were likely more of an intimidation tactic than an impending legal threat. Still, she said, there was a good chance that at least one university will be sued over alleged noncompliance in the near future.

“Any particular institution has a good chance at avoiding litigation, but it will come,” she said. “Organizations like SFFA have good litigators, and they’re going to be patient and wait for a good case to emerge—like they did with Harvard.”

A Tenuous Claim

In the letters, Blum wrote that “based on SFFA’s extensive experience, your racial numbers are not possible without substantially increasing socioeconomic preferences and eliminating legacy preferences, yet you’ve announced no such changes, and you’ve reported no substantial increase in the number of students receiving Pell grants.”

It’s true that none of the three colleges has eliminated legacy preferences; only a handful of selective colleges have done so since the Supreme Court decision. But there is ample evidence that Princeton, Duke and Yale have diversified their classes along socioeconomic lines. The number of Pell-eligible freshmen at Duke has doubled in the past two years, from 11 percent of the incoming class in 2022 to 22 percent this fall; Yale’s increased from 22 percent in 2023 to 25 percent this fall, according to institutional data.

Princeton made greater socioeconomic diversity an explicit admissions target this past cycle. Last August, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, the university formed an ad hoc committee on undergraduate admissions to review how it could “act vigorously within the law to achieve the racial and other forms of diversity that are essential to Princeton’s excellence.” In March, committee members released their recommendations, which included admitting a class of which at least 70 percent of students qualify for need-based financial aid. The university hit that goal this fall, boosting the number of qualifying students to 71.5 percent, up from 66 percent in 2023.

Duke also expanded its financial aid offerings last year and promised free tuition for students from North and South Carolina whose families make under $150,000 a year. Christoph Guttentag, Duke’s dean of admissions, told Inside Higher Ed earlier this month that the Carolinas Initiative, along with a retooled recruitment strategy implemented last fall, helped offset the effects of the affirmative action ban.

Coleman said such efforts clearly had an impact on demographic outcomes this fall, and that Blum’s contention that they couldn’t be responsible is unserious.

“This is fundamentally a continuation of the noise that somewhat arrogantly suggests [colleges] must be not complying with the law because their data looks too good,” he said. “That’s offensive, and it fails to fully appreciate the array of strategies that institutions can legitimately pursue to advance their constitutionally recognized diversity interests.”

‘One Year Isn’t a Trend’

In comparing Princeton and Duke to colleges like MIT and Brown, the SFFA letters assume that the numbers colleges are reporting are calculated in roughly the same fashion. But colleges have approached demographic data reporting in a variety of ways, making it difficult to draw telling comparisons. Some colleges, like Duke, reported percentages that add up to more than 100 because they include mixed-race students as two different racial data points; others, such as Princeton, considered mixed race an entirely separate category.

And one data point looms large over any conclusions drawn from year-to-year trends in racial makeup: The number of students who declined to report their race nearly doubled across all highly selective colleges that have released data so far, sometimes by a greater margin than the racial changes at the center of the national dissection of demographic trends.

At Princeton, the portion of students who declined to report their race increased from 1.8 percent of the Class of 2027 to 7.7 percent this fall, according to data the university sent to Inside Higher Ed—a value change nearly double the decline in Asian American enrollment that Blum’s letter highlights.

Kaan, the Williams spokesperson, wrote that while the college was “pleased” the demographic makeup of the incoming class had remained consistent, one year of data was not enough to draw conclusions—either about a university’s practices, or about the full impact of the affirmative action ban.

“Just as we constantly assess and tweak our holistic admission process and take great care to ensure legal compliance … other schools have and will continue to make numerous changes,” she wrote. “This makes the environment especially dynamic. One year isn’t a trend.”

Coleman said groups like SFFA aren’t likely to be persuaded by that argument, and while he believes there’s no reason to panic, he also doesn’t anticipate the enforcement push to wane.

“Nobody is excited about getting sued, but we’re in an era where we all know there is going to be intensive oversight of higher ed from the radical right,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s going to be more business as usual than an aberration for most colleges.”