DEI, College Admissions, and Who It Actually Affects

Terms

DEI

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — a broad label for institutional practices meant to recruit, admit, or support students from historically underrepresented groups. In practice it covers a range of distinct legal mechanisms, two of which this page focuses on.

Race-conscious admissions

Considering an applicant's race as one factor in a holistic admissions decision, historically justified as promoting educational diversity. Struck down nationwide by the Supreme Court in 2023.

Gender balancing

Private colleges admitting male and female applicants at different rates to keep an incoming class close to an even split, rather than letting it skew heavily toward whichever sex applies in larger numbers or with stronger average credentials.

SFFA v. Harvard

The 2023 Supreme Court case (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard) that ruled race-conscious college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause, ending affirmative action as it had operated since the 1970s.

Two separate fights getting bundled into one

"Removing DEI" gets used as a single phrase, but it's really shorthand for at least two legally distinct things happening at once. The first is the end of race-conscious admissions, decided by the Supreme Court in 2023 and reinforced by federal enforcement action since — a change that has already measurably reduced Black and Latino enrollment at the most selective colleges. The second is a newer, less familiar question: whether federal anti-DEI enforcement will also sweep up "gender balancing," a decades-old private-college admissions practice that currently gives male applicants a real advantage. These two threads affect different groups of students in opposite directions, and treating "DEI" as one single policy flattens that difference.

What already happened: Black enrollment after affirmative action ended

Harvard, Black share of freshman class, 2023 → 2025

18% → 11.5%

Princeton, Black share of freshman class, pre-ruling → 2025

9% → 5%

Amherst, Black share of freshman class, pre-ruling → 2025

11% → 6%

Black enrollment, top 50 most selective schools, 2024

−27%

Class Action (nonprofit education-equity research group); Inside Higher Ed; The Hill.

Of 29 elite institutions reporting Fall 2025 data, only two kept Black enrollment at 10% or higher, down from nine schools before the ruling; eleven reported 5% or lower. Princeton's Class of 2029 was 5% Black, its lowest share since 1968. Researchers describe a "cascade effect": high-achieving Black and Latino students who might previously have been admitted to the most selective schools are enrolling at less selective ones instead — and Black enrollment has actually risen at many public universities, state flagships, and less selective colleges over the same period. The national picture isn't simply "fewer Black college students" so much as a sharp redistribution away from the most elite tier specifically.

What's now at risk: "affirmative action for men"

Title IX, the 1972 federal law banning sex discrimination in education, carries an unusual exemption: it never applied to admissions at private undergraduate colleges. Private colleges lobbied for that carve-out in the early 1970s, when men still outnumbered women on campus roughly three to two, partly to preserve their ability to control their own gender ratio.

Women have outnumbered men in U.S. higher education every year since 1979 — in 2024, roughly 8.9 million women were enrolled as undergraduates versus 6.5 million men, and in 2023 more than 800,000 more women than men applied to college nationally. That same 1970s exemption is now being used in the opposite direction: many private colleges use it to admit men at higher rates than women, to avoid campuses skewing heavily female.

Admission rates by sex, 2024–25 cycle — Georgetown (THE FEED); The Hechinger Report.

At Brown specifically, 29,917 women applied and 1,309 were admitted; 18,960 men applied and 1,326 were admitted — a higher raw number of men accepted from a much smaller applicant pool, despite women's applications generally including comparable or stronger average test scores and GPAs nationally. This isn't hidden. Shayna Medley, a former Brandeis admissions officer, said plainly that "standards were certainly lower for male students." A former Wesleyan admissions officer told the New York Times he had to be "more forgiving and lenient" with male applicants, explaining, "we need boys." A small liberal-arts college president told the Times the same thing back in 1998: colleges "try to get some gender balance by having easier admissions standards for boys than for girls." Not every selective school does this — Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rice report similar acceptance rates for men and women — but at many others, it's been standard practice for decades.

Anti-DEI enforcement now threatens that practice

A federal judge initially blocked major parts of the January 2025 order on free-speech and vagueness grounds; the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals later vacated that injunction, a legal win for the administration. Higher-education groups continue to challenge later orders in court.

The people warning about the effect on male applicants aren't defenders of DEI generally — they're college administrators and researchers pointing out an overlooked side effect. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, put it this way: "If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight." Shaun Harper, of the USC Race and Equity Center, made the point even more directly: "Taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males." Madeleine Rhyneer, an education consultant, said colleges worry a heavily female campus starts to look to prospective students like "a women's college," which itself becomes a recruiting problem.

Nonpartisan, plainly

These two stories are both real, both well documented, and they point in different directions, which makes "does removing DEI help or hurt" impossible to answer with one sentence. Ending race-conscious admissions has already produced a sharp, measured drop in Black enrollment at the most selective colleges — that's a settled fact, not a projection. Separately, a specific and different practice — gender-balancing under a Title IX exemption that has nothing to do with race — has been quietly benefiting male applicants for decades, and named experts, including some who study racial equity for a living, warn that broader anti-DEI enforcement could eliminate that practice too, which would work against male applicants, not for them. Whether that counts as DEI "helping" or "hurting" white men depends entirely on which of these two mechanisms is being discussed, and conflating them is where most of the public confusion on this topic comes from. We're not taking a position on how admissions should weigh race or sex — that's a real disagreement with legitimate arguments on more than one side. These are the documented numbers and the named sources making each argument, plainly.

Talking points

These are the questions we think you should ask those who are running for office and will represent you.

1. Should Congress close the 1970s Title IX loophole that lets private colleges consider applicants' sex in admissions, regardless of which sex it currently advantages?
2. Should colleges be required to publicly report admission rates broken down by race and sex, so practices like gender balancing aren't discovered only through investigative reporting?
3. Should federal anti-DEI enforcement distinguish between race-conscious admissions, already struck down by the Supreme Court, and sex-based practices resting on a separate, still-valid legal exemption?
4. If elite colleges keep losing high-achieving Black and Latino students to less selective schools, does that outcome call for a policy response, and if so, whose responsibility is it — the colleges', the states', or Congress's?

Read more

• Georgetown (THE FEED): Anti-DEI policies a threat to colleges' recruitment of male applicants?↗feed.georgetown.edu

  The piece this page is built around, including the Ted Mitchell quote and admit-rate figures.

• The Nation: Trump's Anti-DEI Crusade Is Going to Hit White Men, Too↗thenation.com

  The Shayna Medley and Wesleyan-officer quotes, and the 1998 NYT precedent, cited below.

• The Hechinger Report: An unexpected target of federal college admissions scrutiny — men↗hechingerreport.org

  The Shaun Harper and Madeleine Rhyneer quotes below.

• Inside Higher Ed: Black Student Enrollment Shrinks at Selective Institutions↗insidehighered.com

  The Fall 2025 institution-by-institution Black-enrollment figures below.

• The Hill: Black, Latino admissions at top universities dropped after Supreme Court ruling↗thehill.com

  The Harvard/Princeton/Amherst before-and-after figures below.

• The Hechinger Report: Did the end of affirmative action lead to fewer Black and Hispanic students?↗hechingerreport.org

  On the "cascade effect" and the enrollment gains at less selective schools, discussed below.

• Higher Ed Dive: Trump's anti-DEI orders for colleges and others paused in part↗highereddive.com

  On the legal back-and-forth over the executive orders described in the timeline below.