New Report Sheds Light on Students Who Don’t Report Race

In the three years since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, eagle-eyed admissions aficionados may have noticed a bump in the share of applicants declining to report their race. At some colleges, that number increased several times over. But it was hard to tell if this growth was truly meaningful, considering the relatively small number of students who chose not to report their race pre-2024.

At Wellesley College, for instance, the number of enrolled students who didn’t report race on their application increased 500 percent. But that jump represented growth from a total of exactly one student in the two-year period from 2022 to 2023 to three students in 2024.

Now, a new report from the higher ed nonprofit Class Action aims to illuminate how many students really are opting to withhold their race and why—although the latter question proved hard to get to the bottom of, said Class Action senior fellow James Murphy.

Using data from the Department of Education, two state education departments and a few individual institutions, he found that since SCOTUS ruled in favor of Students for Fair Admissions over Harvard and the University of North Carolina, nonreporting has increased on average from 3.3 percent to 4 percent, with the highest growth at Ivy-plus institutions.

Nonreporting is still rare, the report notes, but “increased rates of non-reporting and the potentially high legal stakes involved make this a phenomenon to watch.”

Prior to the SFFA decision, some students, particularly those of Asian descent, left their race off their applications to alleviate concerns about discrimination and increase their perceived likelihood of getting into a highly selective institution, sometimes at the encouragement of their college counselors, according to reporting in The New York Times.

Since the end of affirmative action, though, the numbers have ticked up. Experts warn that if a growing number of students decline to report their race, it will obfuscate data about race in admissions. That will not only impede researchers from understanding the impact of the SFFA decision but may also impact how the Trump administration analyzes the admissions data that colleges are now required to submit as part of the Education Department’s new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, which requires colleges to submit demographic information on applicants and admitted and enrolled students.

“My concern is that the Trump administration will not actually look at this data, won’t take it into account at all. If there’s an uptick in percentage of students who are not reporting their race, that’s going to make it harder to interpret what numbers you do have for demographics,” Murphy said.

“If the numbers … showed that, ‘Oh, actually, the percentage of Asian American students didn’t increase [at an institution],’ the Trump administration says, ‘Well, huh, that’s clear to me that they are still considering race in the admissions process, because we think that with the higher test scores that this demographic has, that those numbers should have gone up.’ Well, but what about the students that we don’t know what their race is?”

Reasons for Increase?

Murphy speculated that one reason students may not be sharing their race is because they think it will improve their chances of getting into college. That could apply to Asian students as well as Black and Hispanic students, who might be afraid of institutions overcorrecting post-SFFA and no longer wanting to enroll diverse classes, he said. Additionally, students simply may not see the point of reporting their race if it isn’t going to be considered.

But he noted that such strategic choices probably aren’t the only or the main factor, considering that less selective institutions also saw an increase in nonreporters among students who probably aren’t thinking as intensely about strategies to get into college. They may have opted not to report their race because they misunderstood the SFFA decision in some way, because of political or ideological beliefs, or simply because the question is not required on the Common App, Murphy said.

The report also found a decline in students sharing their race on standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, which could indicate a larger reluctance to report race across the board.

Gina Lee, an independent college counselor in California who primarily works with Asian and Asian American students looking to attend highly selective colleges, said that nearly every one of her students asks whether they should include their race on their application. Many of them see the admissions process as inherently discriminatory against Asian people, she said, and the SFFA case only made things worse by highlighting admissions practices that some Asian students view as biased against them.

She said she tries to show her students data that highlights the high rates at which Asian students enroll in highly selective institutions, but her students are “cynical.”

“I think they’re very weary. They don’t trust anybody,” she said. The parents she works with often draw their interpretations of the admissions landscape from the media, including newspapers in their native languages.

She usually tells students it’s fine to leave their race off if they don’t feel like it’s an important part of their story.

A precedent exists for understanding how an affirmative action ban impacts reportage of a student’s race; after California’s Proposition 209 led to the end of affirmative action in the state in the 1990s, data from the University of California system showed Black and Hispanic students became much more likely than they were before to leave their race off their applications, according to a study by Princeton University economist Zachary Bleemer cited in Murphy’s report.

“The increases in non-reporting after Proposition 209, as well as the different responses among demographics in the propensity to not report, should make observers of enrollment data cautious about making assumptions about who is not reporting their race on their applications and add further reason to be humble in making claims about the demographics of a class,” Murphy wrote.