Harvard Law’s Enrollment Of Students Of Color Drops After Affirmative Action Ban

Photo: Reuters/Faith Ninivaggi

BOSTON, MA (REUTERS) – The percentage of students of color in Harvard Law School’s new class fell to 43% from 51% in 2023, according to new data the school posted to its website, opens new tab.

The new class is the first admitted after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 barred colleges and universities from considering race in admissions resulting from a pair of cases filed against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

The new Harvard Law data is not broken down by race, meaning it does not reflect possible shifts between different minority groups such as Asian, Black and Hispanic students.

The Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, prompted concern within the legal industry that longstanding efforts to bolster attorney diversity would falter.

Plaintiffs in the cases argued that considering race in admissions was discriminatory against white and Asian American applicants.

This year’s 8-perentage-point decline in students of color at Harvard Law equates to about 45 fewer non-white first-year students out of a class of 560 at the elite law school. At 43%, the proportion of students of color is Harvard’s lowest since 2017. That figure reached a high of 56% in 2021, school data shows.

Harvard University also reported that the percentage of Black students in its freshman class dropped by more than a fifth. That class is 14% Black, compared with 18% last year, Harvard said, while the share of Hispanic students ticked up slightly from 14% to 16%.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming freshman class this year dropped to 16% Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander students compared with 31% in previous years, which officials attributed to the affirmative action ban.

Half of the law schools ranked in the top 14 by U.S. News & World Report have disclosed some diversity figures, with five saying that their proportion of students of color either held steady or increased over last year.

Along with Harvard Law, the University of California, Berkeley School of Law is the only other top 14 law school to thus far report a year-over-year decline—falling to 50% students of color from 57% last year. A Berkeley Law spokesperson said the California school, which has been under a state-imposed affirmative action ban since 1996, did not change its admissions process and that the makeup of its class fluctuates every year.

The American Bar Association will release detailed, school-specific enrollment data broken down by race in December.