VOA · Education
Intermediate · B1–B2learner speed5:592024-09-09public domain
The Education beat reports on schools, universities, and learning trends worldwide. Expect academic vocabulary in a news format — a good bridge between everyday English and the lecture-style audio used in exams like IELTS Section 4.
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01Some top universities in the United States are reporting drops in the number of black students in their incoming classes.
02At other colleges, including Princeton University and Yale University, the share of black students changed little.
03This fall's class is the first admitted since a Supreme Court ruling barred affirmative action in higher education.
04Several schools have seen changes in numbers of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American students, but trends are still unclear.
05Experts and colleges say it will take years to measure the full effect of the ruling.
06The end of affirmative action is not the only possible reason for the changing numbers.
07Some colleges are changing requirements, making test results more important.
08Earlier this year, there was a problem with the federal government's college financial aid process.
09On September 5th, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or UNC, reported drops in enrollment among black, Hispanic, and Native American students in its incoming class.
10It was one of the colleges at the center of the Supreme Court case.
11The population of black students dropped nearly three percentage points this fall, to 7.8%.
12Hispanic student enrollment fell from 10.8% to 10.1%, while the incoming Native American population fell half a percentage point, to 1.1%, according to the university.
13The incoming Asian student population rose 1.8%.
14The share of white students at 63.8% hardly changed.
15Rochelle Feldman is UNC's Vice Provost for Enrollment.
16She said the delay in the student aid process was another possible influence on the enrollment numbers.
17We are committed to following the new law, Feldman said.
18She also said the school administration is committed to making sure all North Carolina students know that they are welcome at UNC and can succeed there.
19Other universities reported sharp drops in black student enrollment.
20The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, said the percentage of incoming black students fell from 15% to 5%.
21Another Massachusetts school, Amherst College, reported the percentage fell from 11% to 3%.
22At Tufts University in Massachusetts, the drop in the share of black students was smaller, from 7.3% to 4.7%.
23At Yale, the University of Virginia, and Princeton, the change year over year was less than a percentage point.
24Changes in enrollment for other demographic groups were more mixed.
25At MIT, for example, the percentage of Asian students increased from 40% to 47%.
26However, its Hispanic and Latino percentage dropped from 16% to 11%.
27And MIT's percentage of white students stayed about the same.
28But at Yale, the percentage of Asian students fell from 30% to 24%.
29White students at Yale went from 42% of the class to 46%.
30Hispanic and Latino students saw an increased representation of one percentage point.
31Colleges have started looking for other ways to preserve the diversity they say is critical to university life.
32J.T.
33Duck is head of admissions at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
34He said the school would work with community organizations to reach underrepresented, low-income students and students whose parents did not graduate from college.
35He suggested that people not worry too much about year-to-year changes in enrollment.
36At UNC, Vice Provost Feldman said, The university wants to make sure anyone from any background knows they can earn their way here.
37Catherine Meyer works at the Brookings Institution.
38She said, It is hard to tell which policy change is having a greater effect.
39But so far, she said, the drops in underrepresented minority students are smaller than in previous cases.
40California passed a ban on affirmative action in 1995, and Michigan did so in 2014.
41But since those bans, Meyer said, colleges have developed more effective, non-race-based ways of recruiting and enrolling a diverse class.
42I'm Jill Robbins.
43I'm Jill Robbins.
44I'm Jill Robbins.
45I'm Jill Robbins.
46I'm Jill Robbins.
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