As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, Johns Hopkins University reminds us why people from all corners of the globe still yearn to come to America.
In December, Johns Hopkins announced that its most recent freshman class was 45.1 percent Asian American—a ratio up dramatically from 25.6 percent in 2023. The increase, which comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action in university admissions in SFFA v. Harvard, marks a major victory for Asian American applicants and for all who care about meritocracy.
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Johns Hopkins is U.S. News and World Report’s seventh-ranked university nationally. It requires all applicants to submit standardized test scores. Its class of 2029’s middle-50-percent composite SAT scores—the range of combined verbal and math scores from the 25th to the 75th percentiles of admitted freshmen—ran from 1530 to 1570 on a 1600-point scale.
These students, in other words, are among the best in the country. And Asian American applicants, who endured generations of blatant discrimination, proved themselves capable of meeting that standard without help from affirmative action.
Critics worry about the declining representation of black (from 9.8 percent to 4 percent) and Hispanic (20.8 percent to 10.1 percent) students in Hopkins’s freshman class over the past two years. These concerns are misplaced. The mission of universities is to propagate and expand the frontiers of human knowledge—not to curate the “correct” levels of ethnic or racial diversity on campus.
Opponents of colorblindness regard meritocracy as a tool to reinforce existing “inequalities.” They claim that the SAT effectively measures parental income—an argument, rooted in bad social science, that has been amply debunked, yet stubbornly persists because, as Upton Sinclair noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
As the Johns Hopkins undergraduate population reveals, students across the economic spectrum are capable of academic achievement. The new freshman class had the university’s highest-ever percentage of low-income students—24.1 percent, up from 21.6 percent in 2023 and nearly double the 12.8 percent in 2015, as measured by Pell Grant recipients. Admission by merit favors neither rich nor poor.
Woke progressives’ calls for “diversity” and “representation” were bogus and harmful from the start. Those efforts dehumanized people by rendering them as categories, not individuals, and inspired universities’ racial-engineering policies, which considered some applicants undesirable based on their race.
Such color-coded, bean-counting “diversity” is not real diversity. The kind of diversity in academia that stimulated Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein had nothing to do with skin color. Universities must restore that kind of diversity to regain their integrity and restore their mission.
Injustice is one reason to reject racial engineering in university admissions; lowered standards are another. The proliferation of remedial courses, watered-down curricula, hollow majors, and lax grading all indicate a decline in standards. Elite universities led the way in abandoning standardized-test requirements, and during the pandemic lockdowns, many other colleges followed suit.
But the tide is turning. The nation’s most rigorous universities—MIT (#2 in the U.S. News rankings), Stanford (#4), Caltech (#11), and seven of the eight Ivies (ranging from #1 to #13)—have reinstated standardized testing, with concessions, such as those expressed by Dartmouth president Sian Leah Bielock, that “standardized tests scores are an important predictor of a student’s success in Dartmouth’s curriculum . . . regardless of a student’s background or family income.” Notably, the last point is directed straight at the discredited mantra that the SAT only effectively measures parental income.
Schools that continue to reject standardized test scores risk failure. The University of California San Diego—which, as part of the UC system, is not just test-optional but test-blind, discarding scores even if applicants volunteer them—made news this November when it reported that, from 2020 to 2025, the number of students whose math performance fell below high school levels had increased nearly thirtyfold. Remarkably, 70 percent of those students failed to achieve even middle school standards.
Dumbing down is the enemy of excellence. Given the realities of fierce global competition and growing technological complexity, abandoning the pursuit of excellence is an offense against future generations.
Johns Hopkins’s post-SFFA admissions reforms are heartening. The university chose to reject racist and demeaning criteria. Instead, it chose merit, a quality determined individually, not by racial or any other group identity. As Edward Blum, the champion of SFFA v. Harvard, wrote in warning letters to Yale, Princeton, and Duke, all American universities should, and must, follow suit.
When America honors individual merit, it draws the world.
Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images