After a sharp decline in Black first-year students at Harvard Law School last year, this year’s enrollment has rebounded to previous years’ averages, according to unnamed sources familiar with the matter who spoke with Bloomberg.
The number of Black first-year students attending Harvard Law School in the fall last year dropped by over half compared to the previous year. Harvard had only admitted 19 Black first-year students last year out of 563, a dramatic dip from the previous year when 43 Black students were admitted.
Prior to that downfall, the average Black student enrollment at the law school was almost 46 per year, according to the business news outlet.
A Harvard Law spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The decrease in Black student enrollment at Harvard Law came after a Supreme Court ruling struck down affirmative action in higher education.
In a case sparked by challenges to admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the court’s conservative majority barred colleges from considering race, leaving many searching for new ways to promote student diversity.
Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring colleges to submit data to prove they do not consider race in admissions.
The federal administration accused colleges of using personal statements and other proxies to consider race, claiming it is illegal discrimination.
Read more: Top colleges are losing diversity. State and community schools are seeing a boost
In Harvard’s undergraduate population, there were also decreases last year. Fourteen percent of incoming students identified as Black, a drop of 4% from the class before it. Latino students made up 16% of the freshman class, an increase of 2% while Asian-American numbers remained the same at 37%.
No official admissions statistics from the institution have been released about enrollment for Harvard University or Harvard Law School this year.
Other institutions also saw drops in diversity in undergraduate populations last year. Some include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Amherst, Tufts and Wellesley.
Meanwhile, nearly all public universities and community colleges that provided student demographic data to MassLive either held steady or showed increases in diversity.
