More than a decade after the City University of New York ended open admissions to its four-year colleges, a marked shift has occurred at its top institutions as freshman classes now enter with far better academic credentials and also a different demographic mix

The changes began in 2000, with new minimum requirements for test scores for college admission, continued as academic standards were raised in stages over the years and accelerated sharply with the recent recession, as CUNY’s bargain prices beckoned far more applicants. At the university’s five most competitive four-year colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — nearly 12% of freshmen entering in 2001 had SAT scores of 1,200 or more. In 2007, for the last pre-recession class, the figure was up to 16%, and by fall 2011, it had jumped to 26%. At the same time, black representation among first-time freshmen at those colleges dropped, to 10% in fall 2011 from 17% in 2001. Over the same period, the Hispanic share rose slightly for several years, then fell once the recession began, to 18%, while the white portion fell slightly, to 35%. Asians are now entering the top colleges in the greatest numbers, composing 37% of those classes, up from 25% a decade earlier. The ethnic changes at CUNY’s top colleges confirm the predictions made during the battle over ending open admissions, one of the city’s most charged political disputes of the 1990s: Proponents said that the colleges would rise in status, while opponents said that black and Hispanic enrollment would fall. “We’re not condemning CUNY; we just don’t think they’ve taken into account the long-term effects of what’s happening,” said David R. Jones, the president and chief executive of the Community Service Society of New York, an antipoverty group, which has just completed a study of the changes. “If you’re taking a lower percentage of blacks and Latinos out of high school, you should try to make sure this doesn’t continue.” The changes at CUNY mimic, to some extent, changes in the city’s top public high schools, which admit students solely on the basis of an entrance exam and have become steadily more Asian and less black in recent years. The shift is evident in the faces at Baruch College in Manhattan, where the enrollment is almost half Asian and about 10% black, a regular topic of discussion, said David Mayomi, 33, a black student who studies international business and lives in Brooklyn. “This is our city, and we represent a large part of the community, but we represent a small percentage of the people here,” he said, questioning whether the college gave preferential treatment to Asians. Another student, Joyce Chan, 21, said that when Asian students chose to attend a CUNY college, their parents often pushed for Baruch because of its specialty, business education. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science whose parents are immigrants, Chan was initially accepted into Baruch’s honors program, which offered her a free computer, an iPod and a travel stipend, in addition to complimentary tuition, she said. But a recent F grade in a math class forced her to withdraw from it. “Our parents want us to have jobs that are stable,” said Chan, who is majoring in public affairs. “They want us to have jobs that are better than what they have. Business and medicine and law are stable.”