Black Student Enrollment at Harvard Law Drops by More Than Half

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.

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“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.

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A look at enrollment at other top law schools showed that the number of Black and Hispanic students declined less severely at several, according to the bar association numbers. {snip}

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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.

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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.

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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 percentage points. 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.

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