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.

A Harvard Law spokesperson did not immediately provide comment on the decline Thursday.

Harvard University last week 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.

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Jeff Kim, program director for the California Wellness Foundation, said his group recently gave $450,000 to support the University of California Riverside School of Medicine‘s efforts to enroll and graduate students from communities of color that are historically underrepresented.

“At the current rate of how we recruit and graduate medical students, it would take us five centuries to have enough Latino doctors to match the Latino share of the population,” Kim reported.

The foundation also gave almost twice that amount to the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, to attract more students and retire some of their medical debt. Both schools are currently expanding their programs. Affirmative action in higher education is illegal in California, so schools recruit heavily in high schools and community colleges in low-income communities.

Kim explained doctors who come from the community, speak its languages and understand its culture are able to offer better care.

“Because of historically problematic interactions with health care, certain communities are going to be less trusting,” Kim pointed out. “But if they see people from their own community, I think that drives up quality of care and access to care.”

According to the California Health Care Foundation, the state faces a shortage of physicians overall, a problem that is particularly acute in the Inland Empire and San Joaquin Valley.

Suzanne Potter, Producer | Contributor

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