The 2025 Post-SFFA Enrollment Tracker

Updated January 7, 2025

In June 2023, the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill (SFFA) banned the consideration of race in the admissions process. (It did not, however, prevent admissions offices from considering how race may have affected an applicant’s experience and character.) Last year, I built a post-SFFA enrollment tracker using data released by highly selective colleges and universities. 

This is the 2025 edition of the post-SFFA enrollment tracker. As of January 7, 2026 and the release of Northwestern’s demographics, it contains 29 colleges and universities (including 4 that were not in the data last year). On December 9, 2024, the tracker included 37 colleges and universities. 

Here are the 12 universities and colleges that reported demographic profiles of the first-year class in the fall of 2024 but have not yet released the full profile for this year’s class:

Institution	Status
Barnard College	“61% of Domestic Students are Students of Color“
Boston University	27.7% of the class is “underrepresented students”
Brown University	No data shared
Carnegie Mellon University	No data shared
Dartmouth College	23% “US underrepresented students of color”
Middlebury College	26% “Domestic Students of Color”
New York University	No data shared
Northeastern University	No data shared
Pomona College	55% “domestic students of color”
Rice University	No data shared
Vanderbilt University	No data shared
Wesleyan University	No data shared

Stanford University took an interesting path. Last year, Stanford went out of its way to point out that it normally reports data according to the federal standard in which multiracial students (who are not Hispanic) are counted as a separate group. It provided a second report in which multiracial students are counted multiple times, but, the press release implied, only because its peers had used this other reporting method.

Cut to this year.

What happened in the space of a year that changed the reporting policies of more than a dozen universities?

The Trump Administration began putting heavy political and financial pressure on elite universities. Admissions practices have figured significantly in the White House’s attack on higher education , so it is not surprising that some colleges are hoping to avoid notice by working their numbers or simply not sharing them now. It’s understandable, even.

But it’s also wrongheaded.

The numbers are going to come out. In fact, many more numbers will come out, thanks to the imminent launch of ACTS, a massive new admissions data collection that will expose admissions practices like never before. Colleges and universities have a responsibility to get out ahead of that ACTS survey and begin explaining how and why they admit and enroll the students they do. Because you better believe that as soon as it has the ACTS data, the Trump administration is going to tell that story for them.

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Here’s how enrollment shares have changed at the twenty-four institutions that have released data.

As with last year, it is important to understand these numbers in context, so here are a couple points to remember:

1. As with last year, I’m tracking highly selective institutions that considered race in their admissions decisions pre-SFFA. The vast majority of institutions of higher education never considered race in their admissions process.
2. It is important to exercise caution before reaching any conclusions about enrollment outcomes or making any inferences about how an institution’s practices were affected by SFFA. It will likely take several years before we can see the larger effects of SFFA on college admissions. I recommend caution with all interpretations. These charts show us what happened with enrollment; they do not show us why it happened.
3. The colleges and universities in the tracker are not all calculating demographics that same way.  Some institutions are using the federal method, in which every student belongs to one and only one demographic category. Some institutions, marked with an asterisk in the tracker, use self-reported demographics, which allow a multiracial student to be counted in more than once category.  For example, a student who identified as Asian and White would be counted in both groups in the self-reported method; in the federal method they would only be counted in the category “Two or More Races.” Some institutions reported percentages for all groups but White students. They appear in the table for White enrollment with no data.
4. The tracker this year shows three data points:  the average percentages for the freshman classes that began in 2022 and 2023; the percentages for 2024; and the percentages for 2024.
5. Keep in mind that single digit percent change could very easily reflect the regular ebb and flow of college admissions. We have little data on who applied to these colleges and who was admitted.The tables do not show us anything about what policies and practices changed and what stayed the same at these institutions, whether it be recruiting, financial aid, yield-strategy, or evolving missions. It is entirely possible that an institution that saw significant changes did so in spite of their efforts not because of them, or that the changes would have been even more extreme if they had stayed with the status quo. 
6. I added the category “Two or More Races” to the tracker this year for any institutions that reported this percentage. Once again, I have left out enrollment for indigenous populations because the number of students enrolled from these categories are too small (often single digits or zero) to reflect changes in enrollment due to SFFA.
7. At some institutions, the percentage of first-year students who did not identify by race/ethnicity has continued to grow, but at others, such as USC and Smith, non-reporter numbers returned to previous levels. This data point continues to be a source of mystery.

Tracking this data is challenging, so if you see a new Class of 2029 profile released please email me at jstephenmurphy@gmail.com.