In the days and weeks after George Floyd’s fentanyl overdose, America’s universities proudly proclaimed an imminent “racial reckoning” on campus. “Diversity,” understood in a very specific way, became the top objective. Harvard’s university press published books on how to eliminate schools that were “too white.” Activists demanded the abolition of “white supremacist” standardized tests, and dozens of schools swiftly complied.

Two years have passed. Last fall, American colleges welcomed their first 100% post-George Floyd classes, and the results are clear: At one elite school after another, ordinary white Americans are being treated as academia’s “undesirables” and are slowly being cleansed out.

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The University of Chicago avoids saying how many whites attend — nobody wants that information — but in 2019 its freshman class was 22 percent Asian, 10 percent black, and 16 percent Hispanic. Two years later, much had changed. The freshman class of 2021 was the first one whose entire application cycle took place after the great “racial reckoning” of 2020. And sure enough, its numbers shifted greatly from just two years before. This time around, 27 percent of freshmen were Asian, 10 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic.

It’s unclear whether these figures include or exclude international students, and there also aren’t precise figures for multiracial students or the handful of American Indians and Pacific Islanders who must attend the school. But the shift is so dramatic it still tells a clear story: UChicago’s white percentage has dropped roughly eight percentage points in just two years, from about 52 percent to 44 percent. 

America’s demographics are changing rapidly, but they aren’t changing that rapidly. Whites are still an absolute majority of public high school graduates (and both private high schools and homeschooling are whiter than public schools). From 2019 two 2021, the composition of public high school graduates changed from 53.2 percent white to 52.0 percent, a drop of just 1.2 percent. UChicago’s two year shift was more than six times the actual rate of change nationwide.

UChicago isn’t alone: All across America, two years into the media-announced “racial reckoning” of America, top universities are squeezing out white Americans for the sake of admitting others from more preferred racial categories.

Last week A New Radical Centrism, a dissident Twitter account, highlighted that at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, supposedly only 19 percent of the most recent class are Caucasian.

Johns Hopkins directly confirms the figures in its statistics.

Strip out the 15% international students (which are typically treated as ‘null’ for race purposes), and whites are just 22.4% of JHU’s domestic undergraduate class, less than half their share of the country’s actual high school graduate population. Even in Maryland, whites are about 40% of public high school seniors.

But perhaps JHU has always been shunned by white students? Not so. The class of 2021, just four years ago, was 50% whiter.

At MIT, the fall of 2019 class was 42% white.

Just two years later, America’s other three major racial categories were all steady or higher, but whites were down five percentage points.

Look around and the same pattern is unfolding over and over:

• At Caltech, non-Hispanic whites have dipped from 27% in the fall of 2019 to 22.7% in the fall of 2021.
• At nearby USC, the fall of 2019 was 32% American whites. Two years later, they were down to 26%.
• Stanford’s figure is nearly identical: From 27% white in 2019 to 23% in 2021, with all gains going to Asians and Hispanics.
• At Brown, the class went from 49% “students of color” in 2019 to 55% in 2021.
• Similarly, the University of Pennsylvania went from 51% to 56% “of color” in two years.
• At technically-still-an-Ivy Cornell, whites fell from 35.6% in 2019 to 31.2% in 2021.
• At UC-Berkeley, the white percentage of the entire undergraduate school went from 23.9% in 2019 to 20.7% in 2021.
• At Rice, the Caucasian share dropped from 35% in 2019 to 30% in 2020.

The pattern is consistent: At one elite school after another whites are already a minority, and their numbers are falling faster than mere demographic change would predict.

All of this would be perfectly defensible, of course, if it simply reflected the outcome of a fair admissions process. But it doesn’t. Even before 2020, America’s university admissions have been nakedly discriminatory based on race. Data uncovered by the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case shows that whites have the second-lowest admissions rate at Harvard, despite having the second-best academic profiles behind Asians, who also face discrimination.

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{snip} The 2020 “racial reckoning” has produced more pressure than ever to maximize “diversity.” Over the past two years, using Covid and equity as excuses, the vast majority of American colleges have made their admissions” test-optional,” no longer requiring objective measures like the SAT or ACT from applicants. At the University of California, admissions officials aren’t even allowed to consider the scores of applicants who did take tests.

The purpose of going test-optional is clear-cut and frequently stated by the people advocating such policies: admit fewer whites and more non-whites who have relatively lower scores:

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So more Asians are being admitted, and there’s pressure for more blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians to be admitted too. But if those groups are going to grow, another group has to take the hit. Fortunately for America’s admissions gatekeepers, the decision is easy: just crush the kulaks.

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