Academia

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming class of 2028 saw a precipitous drop off in the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students, the university announced on Wednesday. It is the university’s first undergraduate class to be admitted since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year banning affirmative action.

For the incoming class of 2028, about 16 percent of students are Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander, compared to a baseline of about 25 percent of undergraduate students in recent years, the announcement said.

The comparison to the class of 2027 was even more dramatic. The percentage of Black students enrolled dropped to 5 percent from 15 percent, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped to 11 percent from 16 percent. White students made up 37 percent of the new class, compared to 38 percent last year.

The percentage of Asian American students in the class rose to 47 percent from 40 percent. The Supreme Court’s decision was based in part on a lawsuit against Harvard, which claimed that the university had discriminated against Asian American applicants, holding them to a higher academic standard than other racial or ethnic groups.

“The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions,” Sally Kornbluth, president of M.I.T., said in the announcement, adding, “What it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the M.I.T. community has worked together to achieve over the past several decades.”

M.I.T. is the first highly selective university to release statistics on the composition of its freshman class since the high court’s ruling.