Bloomberg, Harvard Law’s Fast Track to the American Elite Is Losing Black Students:

Harvard Law School has a long history of catapulting Black students into the American elite. Barack Obama graduated in 1991. Kenneth Chenault led American Express Co., while Ken Frazier rose to CEO at Merck & Co. and investment bank Lazard Inc. tapped Ray McGuire as its president.

A generation before them, Conrad Harper became the first Black partner at Wall Street law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Decades later as president, Obama would appoint Ketanji Brown Jackson (class of 1996) as a federal judge on her way to becoming the first Black woman to join the US Supreme Court.

Now, Harvard Law’s status as a training ground for potential Black stars in the worlds of business, politics and culture could be under threat after the Supreme Court banned the use of race in admissions across the college system.

A year after the decision, just 19 Black students began their studies in the prestigious legal program — or 3.4% of the total class — data from the American Bar Association for 2024 show [New York Times, Black Student Enrollment At Harvard Law Drops By More Than Half]. That’s down from 43, or 7.6%, in the previous year, and mirrors a drop in Black first-year undergraduate enrollments to 14% from 18% at Harvard overall.

Given the outsized role that credentials and connections play in the workplace, shrinking Black enrollment has repercussions beyond the classroom, said David Wilkins, a Harvard Law professor who has studied race in the legal profession.

“You’re also closing off the entry point to those important jobs where the people in them have transformed American society,” said Wilkins, who taught another famous Harvard Law grad — former first lady Michelle Obama — as a student. …

Among elite law schools, Harvard’s first-year class is the largest in size; about 560 students, compared with Stanford Law and Yale Law at roughly 200 each, according to the ABA. Harvard is also somewhat of an outlier in seeing a drop in Black enrollment. At Yale, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Duke — the country’s other top law programs — the number of Black first-year students increased in both actual terms and as a share of the total class.

The fact that Harvard was specifically named in the Supreme Court case might have contributed to the decline, said law professor Wilkins; Black first-year student law enrollment also fell at UNC. He also cited the resignation last year of Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, as a possible deterrent.

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