Affirmative Action Was Banned. What Happened Next Was Confusing.

When the Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious admissions, the expectation — based on statistical modeling presented in court — was that the proportion of Black students at highly selective schools would go down and the proportion of Asian American students would rise. That is what happened at many colleges and universities. But as schools have released data over the last few weeks, there have been some striking outliers. At Yale University, for example, the share of Black students stayed the same. At Duke their percentage increased. And at Harvard, which was the target of a lawsuit charging it with discrimination against Asian students, the percentage of Asian students was unchanged, against the expectations of the plaintiffs.