The number of Black students entering Harvard Law School dropped sharply this fall after last year’s Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, according to enrollment data released on Monday.
Harvard Law enrolled 19 first-year Black students, or 3.4 percent of the class, the lowest number since the 1960s, according to the data from the American Bar Association. Last year, the law school’s first-year class had 43 Black students, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
While changes in data calculation might explain some year-to-year changes, the decline at Harvard was much sharper than at other elite law schools. It was notable not only for its severity but also because of the school’s past role in educating some of the nation’s best-known Black lawyers, including former President Barack Obama, the former first lady Michelle Obama, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.
The Supreme Court decision, and the fact that Harvard College was named in the case, played a role, according to David B. Wilkins, a Harvard law professor who has studied Black representation in the legal profession.
“This obviously has a lot to do with the chilling effect created by that decision,” Mr. Wilkins said on Monday.
“This is the lowest number of Black entering first-year students since 1965,” he added, pointing to numbers compiled by the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard, where he also serves as faculty director. That year, there were 15 entering Black students. Since 1970, there have generally been 50 to 70 Black students in Harvard Law’s first-year class, he said.
The law school also saw a steep decline in Hispanic students, to 39 students, or 6.9 percent, this fall, from 63 students, or 11 percent of the total, in 2023. Enrollment of white and Asian students increased.
A spokesman for Harvard Law, Jeff Neal, said in a statement that the school continued “to believe that a student body composed of persons with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences is a vital component of legal education.”
Mr. Neal also noted that it was difficult to draw conclusions from one year of enrollment data, and added: “Harvard Law School remains committed both to following the law and to fostering an on-campus community and a legal profession that reflect numerous dimensions of human experience.”
A look at enrollment at other top law schools showed that the number of Black and Hispanic students declined less severely there, according to the bar association numbers. At a few schools, enrollment for Black and Hispanic students actually increased. At Stanford, for example, the number of Black first-year students nearly doubled to 23 this year, from 12 last year.
Black and Hispanic enrollment also decreased at the University of North Carolina. The university was also named as a defendant in the cases decided by the Supreme Court, brought by the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions. Black first-year students at U.N.C. dropped to 9 students this year, from 13 last year; Hispanic students dropped to 13 from 21 last year.
Each year, the American Bar Association compiles and releases information on its 198 accredited law schools that includes not only demographic data but also information on acceptance rates, Law School Admission Test scores, faculty and expenses.
The A.B.A. changed its reporting categories this year to include students who were not U.S. residents in the racial and ethnic breakdown of the class. Last year, they were a separate category. The change complicates year-to-year comparisons, and could help explain why some schools, like New York University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, had big increases in Asian students.
The share of Black first-year undergraduate students at Harvard this fall also dropped, to 14 percent from 18 percent last year, according to data released in September.
Mr. Wilkins said the admissions numbers at Harvard illustrated the negative impact of the Students for Fair Admissions litigation and the additional barriers it had created for prospective Black lawyers.
But Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a critic of affirmative action, said that the racial breakdown of the new law school classes showed a number of positive trends.
While some top tier schools lost Black enrollment, across all law schools the number of Black students enrolling in law school increased by about 3 percent, to 3,060 this fall from 2,969 in 2023, according to the A.B.A. It was tricky to say whether this was a meaningful increase, partly because of reporting changes, Mr. Sander said. He also noted that the Black enrollment data did not include students who said they were multiracial or declined to report their race.
“But the real point is that there was no meaningful decline,” he said.
It appeared, he said, that the overwhelming majority of law schools had not changed their admissions practices, but rather that applicants rejected by top schools no longer considering race had cascaded down to less competitive schools.
He argued that the drop in Black enrollment at Harvard and U.N.C. might ultimately be beneficial, “because those students are going to go to another school where they’re better matched and they’re poised to succeed.”
Mr. Sander is one of the architects of the hotly disputed “mismatch” theory, which holds that students do better at schools that closely match their credentials on entry tests and grades. He argued that students who ended up at less competitive schools would more likely receive higher grades and pass the bar at higher rates.
“Students prefer going to a school where they are not going to get a preference, because they think they’ll be more competitive there, which I think is true,” Mr. Sander said.
Mr. Sander said he agreed with critics who warned that a drop in the number of Black lawyers would be bad for society. But he said that the opposite seemed to be happening and that there could, on the contrary, be an increase in the number of Black lawyers.
At Harvard Law, professors had been bracing for the numbers after the university released a statement in September revealing that the enrollment of “students of color,” a broad category, had dropped by 8 percent. At the time, the law school had not provided a more complete class profile.
Mr. Wilkins said that professors teaching first-year sections noted a noticeable decline in Black students, particularly a very small number of Black men: six.
The president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, Sean Wynn, called the enrollment decline a “crushing loss” and referenced the Supreme Court ruling.
“With this marked decline,” he said in a statement, “the ruling has broken something fundamental about the experience of attending this law school.”
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