High-Ranking Law Schools That Show a Drop in Black Enrollments

Last week JBHE reported on the highest-ranked law schools that had shown an increase in black enrollments over the past decade. Now we report results at the law schools where black enrollments have declined over the past 10 years.

Ten of the 15 highest-ranked law schools have shown a drop in black enrollments over the past decade. Columbia University School of Law had the steepest decline. In 1997 blacks were 12.2 percent of all students at the law school. A decade later black enrollments had dropped to 7.7 percent. In actual numbers, black enrollments at Columbia’s law school deceased from 135 in 1997 to 95 in 2007, a drop of nearly 30 percent.

The second-largest decline in black enrollments occurred at Yale Law School, the nation’s highest-ranked institution. There, black enrollments declined 1.6 percentage points from 9.2 percent to 7.6 percent. There were 53 black students enrolled at Yale Law School in 1997. Ten years later there are 44 black students, a decline of 17 percent.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.