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Several experts said decreases in Black and Hispanic student enrollment to the Class of 2029 are not enough to indicate a trend in the College’s demographics following the data release Thursday morning.

Harvard released its much-awaited demographic data yesterday, which denoted significant changes to the number of enrolled students of color compared to previous classes.

Hispanic enrollment declined 5 percentage points from 16 to 11 percent following a slight increase last year, while Black enrollment fell slightly from 14 to 11.5 percent, remaining consistent with last year’s decrease. In contrast, Asian American enrollment rose to 41 percent after it had remained at 37 percent for the past two years.

Changes in this year’s release generally coincided with predictions made as part of Students for Fair Admissions’ Supreme Court case against Harvard, where the Court banned consideration of race in admissions in 2023. Experts in the case indicated that a ban on affirmative action would decrease the Black and Hispanic student population while increasing the Asian population at the College.

Harvard’s admissions practices have faced persistent scrutiny since the ban on affirmative action, with critics eager to determine Harvard’s compliance. The Trump administration threatened consequences for federally-funded institutions that use race-based decision making in a February Dear Colleague letter, and the White House has since made commitments to monitor compliance with the SFFA ruling in higher education.

Tyler M. Ransom, a professor of economics at the University of Oklahoma who co-authored several papers on what the SFFA ruling revealed about racial preferences, said additional changes to Harvard’s admissions practices and data representation make it difficult to determine whether Harvard is compliant with the Court’s decision.

“They have these competing incentives, where they don’t want to get in trouble with the federal government, but then they also don’t want to get in trouble with their alumni base and other stakeholders,” Ransom said.

Edward J. Blum, a legal activist who leads Students for Fair Admissions, called on Harvard to provide more detail on racial breakdowns of their admitted classes in a statement to The Crimson.

“In order to prove their admission policies are not discriminatory, Harvard and all competitive colleges should release their incoming class data by race. This should include standardized test scores, GPAs, class ranking, legacy status and family income,” Blum wrote.

A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment for this piece.

Harvard changed the way it represented its racial demographic data during last year’s admissions cycle, calculating proportions as the number of students who self-identified as a certain race over the number who reported their race, rather than the entire class.

Julie J. Park, a consulting expert for Harvard in the lawsuit and professor of higher education at the University of Maryland, found the decrease in Latino enrollment “interesting,” but cautioned against drawing any immediate conclusions about the College’s demographic trends with just two years of comparable data.

“It definitely makes things confusing and difficult to compare from year to year,” Park said.

Vinay Harpalani, a University of New Mexico law professor whose research focuses on race in admissions, said the fluctuation in this year’s data may not be indicative of a general trend for the College.

“It’s really hard to make big inferences or come to many big conclusions based on just a year or two. You have to really look over the trends over time,” Harpalani said.

“If you go back, say, 10 years before SFFA,” Harpalani added, “you’ll see that there are variations in the percentages of different groups year to year, and it could vary by probably about as much as what you saw in the last two years.”

—Staff writer Cassidy M. Cheng can be reached at cassidy.cheng@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cassidy_cheng28.

—Staff writer Elias M. Valencia can be reached at elias.valencia@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @eliasmvalencia.