Students at Johns Hopkins University are pushing for more action from leaders trying to rebuild race-neutral recruitment strategies in the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action.

Colleges nationwide are seeing preliminary effects of the decision in the racial makeup of the Class of 2028, the first group to be recruited and admitted under new mandates.

At Johns Hopkins, freshmen identifying as Hispanic make up less than half the proportion of the class that they did last year – down to only one-in-ten. And around 70 students in the 1,200-member class identify as Black, representing just 5.7% of the total group.

Leaders of the Baltimore university say the recent Supreme Court ruling reversed over a decade of progress made in diversifying the campus. But some students say this recent decline stems from more than an end to race-conscious admissions.

Senior Akosa Obianwu, president of Hopkins’ chapter of the historically-Black Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, said the September email announcing the demographic shifts felt like “one big microaggression.”

“The consensus at an administrative level was to chalk this all up to affirmative action,” he said. “But that doesn't explain the fact that Hopkins has historically not put in the work to do the recruitment that it needs to do. It's never Hopkins making the first move. It's always waiting for Black and Latino students to come to Hopkins.”

Obianwu said Hopkins officials never visited his high school in Prince George’s County. He said the school should spend more time recruiting local students — especially in a state where one-third of high schoolers are Black, and one in five are Hispanic.

The fact that Harvard, Yale and Princeton didn’t see drastic diversity declines in their first-year classes, Obianwu said, makes the change even more pressing.

“If you really wanted to have a diverse student body, you will go and find diverse students,” Obianwu said. “The way I see it, especially in Maryland, there is zero excuse.”

Vice Provost of Admissions David Phillips told WYPR that he can’t speak to what happened at other universities. But he said that for Hopkins, the Supreme Court ruling was “a real gut punch.”

For example, he said, the admissions team has prioritized recruitment of diverse students for years. But under the new rules, they can no longer fly-in students for campus visits or events based on race.

“This law was a seismic change to how admissions worked previously,” he said. “We had a long-standing commitment to build a class that was diverse in many dimensions, including race and ethnicity. And we're really thrilled with where our class has been the last couple of years. So when we saw where the class came out this past year, it was really devastating.”

Last year, Hopkins ranked second in the U.S. News and World Report’s list for ethnic diversity, measured by a student’s likelihood to encounter peers from different ethnic groups on campus.

Now, Phillips said he and other university leaders are working to “craft race-neutral initiatives that we hope will help towards our goal of having a diverse class.”

In a resolution passed last month, Hopkins’ student government said officials “did not act with the necessary urgency or innovation” to prevent the “catastrophic decline” of diverse enrollment.

“Instead of taking decisive action, the university has hidden behind legal constraints, avoiding accountability for its own role in this diversity crisis,” the document, signed by 19 other student groups, said.

After months of delay, students see moves for next steps 

Cynthia Sanchez Hidalgo, chair of the student government’s Latina Caucus, said she got right to work after learning about the diversity decline in September, inviting admissions to meet with student leaders and drafting the recently-passed resolution.

“When it comes to the administration and all that, there's not really someone that's already standing up for us, so we kind of have to push open the door,” she said. “This has been a consistent pattern since I've gotten here, just an overall lack of support for Black and brown students.”

Hopkins officials didn’t sit down with the student government until last week — and even then, Sanchez Hidalgo said, the meeting only lasted an hour.

“It just wasn't enough time to talk about everything that we would have liked to talk about,” she said.

Her resolution calls for more avenues for student voice — like creating an advisory board to oversee recruitment with undergraduate representatives. It also pushes for expanded diversity training and regular progress reports from leaders.

But Sanchez Hidalgo said she’s excited about some ideas posed by Hopkins officials in their recent meeting, such as sending current students back to their former high schools to give admissions talks.

She’s concerned about other proposals, including a return to mandatory SAT and ACT scores for future admissions.

“A rich, white student is going to get all the resources to prepare for the test, like test prep classes and everything, so you're already just at a disadvantage going into the exam,” she said.

But Phillips, the Hopkins admissions leader, said test-optional policies sometimes bury students from under-resourced backgrounds.

“More context is better,” he said. “If we see someone with a certain SAT score, and that SAT score is hundreds of points above what's typically happening in that high school, that's a signal of a student who's really outperforming their environment.”

He said the university is also considering use of the College Board Landscape tool, which provides data on neighborhoods and high schools to offer more context to students’ applications.

Julie Park, a professor at University of Maryland College Park and expert in race equity on college campuses, said adding context-rich factors to application review is a strong strategy for diverse enrollment.

She also said university leaders should make financial aid information more readily available, and consider ending strategies that benefit white, affluent students like merit-based aid and athletic recruitment.

“But I think some schools will find that there is no substitute for the type of race-conscious admissions that we had prior to 2023,” she said. “And if Hopkins is really saying it's 100% because of the policy, then maybe they should put their money where their mouth is and say, ‘Have you exhausted the legal options to defend this type of policy?’”