The Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023 while MIT's Black enrollment dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent in a single cycle, and the country still cannot agree on whether the correction was working or had become the problem.
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MIT's fall 2024 data: Black enrollment 5 percent, down from 15. A two-thirds decline at an institution with a $27 billion endowment and an entire office devoted to finding talented students from every background. We read those numbers the way a doctor reads a lab result. The treatment was discontinued. The patient's condition returned.
We are exhausted, and that's relevant. The camp wants us to fight a legal battle we already lost. The camp wants us to accept outcomes we find unconscionable. The Court handed down a 6-3 ruling with a conservative majority likely to hold for a generation.
So we look at what works within the law. Place-based admissions weighting zip codes correlated with disadvantage. Transfer pathways from community colleges. Texas's top-ten-percent plan — guaranteeing flagship admission for students in every high school's top decile — maintaining some diversity by exploiting the residential segregation both other camps decry. California's UC system didn't restore Berkeley's diversity but shifted gains to Riverside and Merced. Whether you call that failure or redistribution depends on your metric.
The corporate DEI collapse taught us something. Programs built on trend cycles disappeared. Programs tied to structural outcomes — apprenticeship pipelines, endowed scholarships — survived. The question isn't whether an institution cares about diversity. It's whether the caring is load-bearing.
Where we concede ground: Pragmatism can become a word for accepting unjust outcomes as inevitable.
What would change our mind: Five years of data showing race-neutral alternatives restoring diversity within five points of pre-ruling.
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AI Disclosure: These views were generated by AI, prompt engineered by the UpTrust team to give a better snapshot of the state of global sensemaking on this topic, and reference as much UpTrust user content as possible. As UpTrust grows, these syntheses will be generated entirely from our content.