College Enrollment Patterns After SFFA v. Harvard

We study how U.S. high school students’ patterns of college entry changed in the first year after the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA v. Harvard ruling. Drawing on a rich dataset linking more than 12 million domestic PSAT, SAT, and AP takers in the 2021-2024 high school graduation cohorts to their college enrollment records, we examine post-SFFA changes both in students’ college destinations and in the sociodemographic composition of colleges’ entering classes in fall 2024. We uncover several notable findings. First, high-achieving underrepresented minority (URM) college-goers were up to 10 percentage points (14 percent) less likely to enroll in highly selective colleges in fall 2024 than fall 2023, with URM enrollees “cascading” down the college selectivity distribution into less selective colleges with lower graduation rates and earnings outcomes. Second, using difference-in-differences designs that leverage preexisting state-specific bans on race-based admission preferences, we estimate that the URM student share of first-year domestic students at highly selective colleges declined 4 to 5 percentage points (18 percent) in the first year after SFFA, with smaller declines at selective public colleges. In both analyses, we find evidence consistent with a pivot to class-based affirmative action among Ivy Plus institutions, but topline changes in enrollment patterns by students’ neighborhood median income are minimal. We find little evidence that concurrent disruptions to the 2024-25 FAFSA explain our results.