The number of Asian students entering Harvard Law School this fall semester increased dramatically, after the Supreme Court banned the use of affirmative action in college and university admissions last year.
While Asian enrollment rose by nearly 30 percent, increasing from 103 to 132 students in this year’s freshman class, black and Hispanic enrollment dropped off considerably. Harvard Law enrolled only 19 first-year black students this year compared to 43 the previous year, enrollment data submitted to the American Bar Association and released Monday shows. This is the fewest number of black students that Harvard Law has seen since the 1960s. The number of Hispanic students also decreased from 63 students last year to 39 students currently.
White enrollment also increased from 280 to 325 students.
The law school’s class of 2027 was the first admitted after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2023 that the race-based admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause. Prior to the ruling, Harvard and UNC scored applicants on a vague personality metric. The schools claimed the personality scores were essential to ensuring genuinely diverse classes, but the plaintiffs in the suit pointed out that Asian applicants received disproportionately low scores on the subjective metric.
Since the landmark Supreme Court decision, several higher-education institutions have done away with their unconstitutional admissions policies.
Among them, Harvard Law changed its admissions process by requiring applicants to submit a “statement of purpose” and “statement of perspective” in which students shared how their “experiences, background, and/or interests have shaped” them for the better. In the past, the law school asked for a personal statement in which students could touch on their diversity.
In September, Harvard Law revealed that the share of racial minorities enrolled in its freshman class dropped by 8 percentage points compared to 2023. The data released this week details the enrollment of each racial demographic.
A spokesman for Harvard Law, Jeff Neal, said that it’s difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from a single year of admissions data, but he noted the Supreme Court’s decision did impact the ability of law schools to “attract and admit a diverse cohort of students.”
“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,” Neal wrote in a statement to the Harvard Crimson.
Harvard University similarly saw a decrease in first-year black students, from 18 percent to 14 percent from the previous class, according to September’s data.
The latest enrollment numbers are consistent with evidence that Students for Fair Admissions brought in its two cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina before the Supreme Court: that subjective admissions criteria were used to disadvantage Asian students who performed disproportionately well on standardized tests such as the SAT, while black and Hispanic students who scored lower on such tests on average were given an admissions boost.
As a result of the landmark ruling, black enrollment has more often decreased while Asian enrollment increased. However, there are a few exceptions to the rule.
Stanford Law, for example, enrolled 23 black students this fall compared to 12 the same time last year, although the number of Asian students slightly increased from 35 to 44 students. At the UNC School of Law, Asian representation decreased from 18 to 15 students. Black, Hispanic, and white students all saw less severe declines at this particular law school as well.
Notably, the American Bar Association changed its reporting methodology to include students who are not U.S. residents in the racial and ethnic categories instead of reporting them separately like last year. This change complicates year-to-year comparisons and could shed light on why some schools see large increases in Asian students.