Differing Definitions: Making Sense of the Demographic Data

Read more about the community’s response to the changed demographics here.  

Three percent of Amherst’s class of 2028 identifies as Black. Much has been made of that fact — on campus, and in articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But on its website, the admissions department posts another number: according to students’ own reports of their identities, 9% of the class of 2028 is Black, but according to “federal reporting guidelines,” it’s 3%. What exactly does this mean? How are students’ racial and ethnic identities reported?

To better answer these questions, The Student spoke to Matthew McGann, the dean of admissions and financial aid at the college, and organizer of an amicus curiae brief in support of race-conscious admissions.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Tufts, Princeton, Yale, and MIT are among the institutions that have released the racial statistics for their freshman class. Yale reported a 6% decrease in Asian first-years, while the percentage of Black first-years stayed essentially the same. And MIT’s percentage of Asian first-years increased by 7%, both according to self-reported statistics.

However, some schools shared the information according to federal reporting guidelines, rather than self-reported data. As a result, there’s a danger of comparing “apples to oranges,” McGann said.

Federally reported guidelines

The federal government requires the college to report racial and ethnic data to them using a particular formula, which McGann described as less expansive than the self-reported model. In a student’s application, they are asked to answer three federally mandated questions — which are now hidden from the admissions office until the admissions process is complete.

The first question asks about students’ citizenship status. Undocumented students or non-citizens are placed into one category, while U.S. citizens are placed into the other. For international students, this is the only identity that is reported. International students make up 16% of the Amherst class of 2028.

U.S. citizens proceed to the next question: “Are you Hispanic or Latino?” If a student says yes, they are considered only Hispanic or Latino according to the federal reporting guidelines, regardless of their answer to the third question.

The last question asks about racial identity, and gives five options: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian American, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White. But if students select more than one of these, they are placed into the multiracial category.

McGann gave the example of Vice President Kamala Harris: “If she were to select both Asian and Black or African American on this question, she would not be considered Black or Asian for the federal reporting purposes,” McGann said. “She would be considered two or more races.”

Multiracial students make up 8% of the class of 2028 according to these standards.

Self-reported identities

On the other hand, self-reported identities allow for students to select multiple categories, and be included in the percentage of all of them. In this reporting strategy, the categories do not add up to 100%. For example, an Afro-Caribbean student would be included in the percentage of Black or African American students as well as the percentage of Latinx students, McGann said.

On its website, the admissions department posts self-reported identity information for all first years and for domestic first years. 9% of all students selected Black as one of their identities, and that number drops to 6% among domestic students.

Choosing not to report

Yet another aspect of the data is the percentage of students who chose not to report their race on their college application. At Amherst, that number nearly doubled, increasing from 4% last fall to 7% this fall.

“You could have constructed an argument that suggested more students might [report their race] now that there was a legal ruling saying that racial status on its own would not be a factor in admissions decisions,” McGann said. “In fact, the opposite happened. More students declined to report, and it’s hard for me to know exactly why.”

Graphics courtesy of Julius Tyson '25.