[新聞] Asian enrollment at Johns Hopkins is skyrocketing. No one can say why.
Asian enrollment at Johns Hopkins is skyrocketing. No one can say why.
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The Baltimore university is an outlier among its peers.
Rachel Wu was looking around a dining hall at the Johns Hopkins University
when she noticed the shift: There are a lot more Asian students at the elite
Baltimore university these days.
“It’s starting to feel like all the freshmen are Asian,” said Wu, an Asian
American junior.
Last fall, 45% of Hopkins’ first-year students were Asian, the university
reported in December, up from about 26% just two years ago. The massive shift
came after the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision that forbade colleges from
considering race in admissions, but other selective colleges did not see such
a dramatic swing. It’s flummoxed experts and threatened Hopkins’ reputation
as one of the most racially diverse campuses in its class.
Doug Donovan, a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins, declined requests for
interviews with admissions officers. The university also did not respond to
written questions. He said in a statement that Hopkins complies with federal
law and does not consider race or ethnicity in admissions.
Researchers thought they would see “very marginal, minimal shifts” in Asian
enrollment at elite universities like Hopkins after the U.S. banned
affirmative action, said OiYan Poon, co-director at the College Admissions
Future Co-Laborative.
So far, they’ve been mostly right. The share of Asian students at Columbia
and Brown universities slightly increased from 2023 to 2024, the most recent
year for which federal data is available, but it held steady or decreased at
other Ivy League schools.
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Students for Fair Admissions, the group that fought for the ban on
affirmative action, was made up of white and Asian families who alleged that
Harvard’s admissions process put them at an unfair disadvantage. Harvard now
reports its first-year class is 41% Asian, up from 37% in 2023.
At Hopkins, the trend defies convention. From 2023 to 2024, Hopkins’
first-year class jumped from 26% to 41% Asian. The undergraduate student body
as a whole rose from 23% Asian to 29% Asian in that time, while the share of
Black and Hispanic students shrank.
For years, the university championed a number of initiatives to increase
economic diversity, and racial diversity followed. In 2014, the campus
quietly ended “legacy” admission preferences that gave an advantage to
children, grandchildren and siblings of alumni, who were more likely to be
white.
And in 2018, a $1.8 billion gift from alumnus Michael Bloomberg eliminated
student loans from financial aid offers. In the seven years since the
businessman’s gift, the percentage of Pell Grant-eligible, or
limited-income, Hopkins students rose from 15.4% to 24.1%, the highest level
in the university’s history.
During that time, the share of first-year students from underrepresented
minority groups grew, from 22% in 2018 to 31% in 2023.
After the 2023 ban on affirmative action, the share of Black students in
Hopkins’ first-year class nosedived. The year before the ban, Black students
made up 10% of the first-year class. The year after, they amounted to just 3%.
A student walks through Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus on
Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023.
From 2023 to 2024, Hopkins’ first-year class jumped from 26% to 41% Asian.
The undergraduate student body as a whole rose from 23% Asian to 29% Asian in
that time, while the share of Black and Hispanic students shrank. (Kylie
Cooper/The Banner)
Nationwide, students of color who scored high on the SAT were less likely to
be enrolled at elite colleges in the first year after affirmative action
ended, according Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban
Institute. This is “in part because of a perception that after affirmative
action they wouldn’t be able to get in,” he said.
.
White and Asian students could also now, after the Supreme Court decision,
feel more confident in their applications.
“There may be a shift in the applicant pool which impacts enrollment,” Cook
said.
Asian culture is very visible on campus. One spring day, a group of Asian
students were selling bubble tea, a popular Taiwanese drink, to fundraise for
their table tennis team to get to nationals. A week later, students in the
Filipino club were accepting donations in exchange for pie to the face.
Lao Sze Chuan, a Chinese restaurant in Charles Village, Baltimore, remains
sparse during the day as a heat dome covers the city on June 26, 2025.
Lao Sze Chuan is one of several new Asian restaurants in the nearby Charles
Village neighborhood. (Florence Shen/The Banner)
Students milling around campus on a warm spring afternoon said there were
stark differences in the racial makeup of Hopkins’ undergraduate classes.
Half the undergraduate student body was admitted before the affirmative
action ban, and half was admitted after.
Poon, who has been studying race-conscious admissions for much of her career
and who is Asian, said she would need to “get under the hood” of the
admissions process at Hopkins to better understand how the shift happened.
“I wonder what institutional priorities they were working with,” Poon said.
“How did these priorities guide their recruitment strategies for that class,
their reading and evaluation of applications, and how they ultimately
selected and shaped their class?”
Hopkins now requires applicants to submit standardized test scores, which
could influence who enrolls, Poon said. Like many colleges, Hopkins had
stopped requiring SAT and ACT scores during the COVID-19 pandemic but
recently reinstated the requirement. The U.S. Department of Education
applauded that decision last month and noted the “substantial shifts” in
first-year student demographics.
The “drastic spike” in Asian enrollment at Hopkins likely has to do with
the university’s reputation, said Julie Park, a professor at the University
of Maryland, College Park who studies race-conscious admissions. Even before
affirmative action ended, about a quarter of the university’s student body
was Asian, an unusually high share among elite colleges. The number has been
slowly rising for over a decade.
“I think there can be a snowball-type effect,” Park said. “Like attracts
like, and a school can get a reputation for being friendly to a particular
group, which could encourage more students in that group to apply.”
Hopkins could also attract more Asian applicants because of its pre-med
reputation, said Park. The university is known around the world for its
top-tier medical school.
“The pre-professional medical track is very popular with a lot of families”
in the Asian community, she said.
And while science, technology and math fields were diversifying under
race-conscious admissions, some fear that trend will slow or even reverse,
Park said.
Researchers only have one year of federal data for the college landscape
post-affirmative action, and Park warned against making conclusions and
predicting long-term trends. But universities’ self-reported demographics of
their first-year classes offer some early hints at what’s ahead.
Noah Martinez, a Filipino American junior from Seattle, said one of the
reasons he chose Hopkins was because of its diversity. But since affirmative
action ended, he said, things have changed.
“The underclassmen are really not as diverse anymore,” he said. “It feels
like everyone is Asian now.”
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