Black student enrollment at Harvard Law has drastically decreased following the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action last year, according to a new report.
On Monday (December 16), a New York Times report revealed that Harvard Law enrolled only 19 first-year Black students, or just 3.4 percent of the class, the lowest number since the 1960s. Harvard Law reportedly enrolled 43 Black students in its first-year class last year.
The nosedive in Black enrollment comes after the Supreme Court ruling against race-based admissions in the summer of 2023.
In a statement, Jeff Neal, a Harvard Law spokesman, said the school continues “to believe that a student body composed of persons with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences is a vital component of legal education.”
“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 said.
Neal added that knowledge of the full effect of last year’s Supreme Court decision remains “necessarily limited.”
“When the Supreme Court ruled last year, it was understood that the decision would impact, in ways that could not be fully anticipated, the ability of educational institutions across the nation, including law schools, to attract and admit a diverse cohort of students,” Neal said.
“The conclusions that can be drawn from one year of data are necessarily limited. We continue to believe that a student body composed of persons with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences is a vital component of legal education,” he continued. “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.”
Sean Wynn, the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, said the decline in enrollment is a “crushing loss.”
“With this marked decline, the ruling has broken something fundamental about the experience of attending this law school.”
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