On Wednesday, Feb.12, Hop Talks invited the Hopkins community to a seminar-style discussion titled “Hop Talks: Affirmative Action Impact at Johns Hopkins.” The focal topic of the event was how the recent Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action and race-conscious admissions have altered the demographics of the University’s first-year class.
Rather than a lecture, this event was a discussion series where any member of the Hopkins community was invited to participate and discuss their own experiences with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Willow Goode — the Civic Life Specialist at the Center for Social Concern — opened the discussion series with guidelines for seminar-style learning. Each discussion table was given a set of questions to guide their conversations.
In addition, each person was provided with a copy of a Hub article titled Johns Hopkins Sees Shifts in Demographic Makeup of Incoming class in Wake of 2023 SCOTUS Ruling. The piece focuses on comparing recent years’ demographic makeups, from the incoming class of 2028 to years as far back as 2010. During the discussion, these data sets supported conversations and discussion.
The first part of the discussion addressed the U.S. government’s checks and balances system. Many students were relatively optimistic, claiming that they still have some faith in the system. Next, participants were asked about whether they have noticed any changes since the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. Many students responded that they had noticed a decrease in diversity of the student population.
In an email to The News-Letter, senior Iris Gupta, a participant in the discussion, described her thoughts about how the affirmative action decision can hurt discourse on campus.
“Students have expressed concerns that the populations of certain minority groups have drastically decreased on campus since the decision. This may have a detrimental effect on students finding an inclusive community on campus, and discourse in classes or at other campus events will lose a lot of its richness as students will come from more similar backgrounds on average,“ she said.
Multiple references were made to the demographic chart in the article, which portrayed a steady increase in Asian students over the past 14 years and a decline in white students. Many students noted the statistics describing the enrollment of Black or African-American students at Hopkins, which rose from 5.8 percent amongst first-year students in Fall 2010 to 13.3 percent in Fall 2020, but declined to 5.7 percent in Fall 2024.
