The Baldy Center Blog Post 48. 
Blog Author: Meghan Dawe, Postdoctoral Fellow, The Baldy Center
Blog Title: Examining SFFA’s Impact on U.S. Law Schools

In June 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States’ landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University 600 U.S. 181 (SFFA) ruled race-conscious admissions practices unconstitutional. The decision upended affirmative action efforts at universities and colleges, and forced law schools to amend their admissions practices. Beyond admissions, SFFA’s legal rationale threatens race-conscious financial aid programs, suggesting Black and Hispanic/Latinx individuals will face steeper barriers to both law school admissions and financing. Emerging evidence indicates the enrollment of Black and Hispanic/Latinx students and the allocation of race-based institutional scholarships have already fallen at some law schools. These trends are alarming because Black and Hispanic/Latinx students are already underrepresented in law schools, which are important mechanisms of upward mobility, and because pervasive and intergenerational wealth inequality already makes the cost of legal education disproportionately burdensome for Black and Hispanic/Latinx students.

Enrollment statistics for the Fall 2024 1L cohort—the first admitted post-SFFA—indicate a slight decrease in racial diversity despite an uptick in minority applications. Law schools ranked in the top 14 by U.S. News and World Report saw steeper declines: Black and Hispanic/Latinx 1L enrollment fell by 16% and 21% between 2023 and 2024. At Harvard Law School, the number of Black and Hispanic/Latinx 1Ls decreased from 43 and 63 in Fall 2023 to 19 and 32 in Fall 2024.[1] Declines in minority enrollment will compound existing racial inequalities driven by previous legislation. Law school enrollment data reveal racial diversity among law students declined by as much as 17% in the 12 states that banned affirmative action between 1996 and 2021.[2] These state-level bans were accompanied by reductions of up to 47% at top-20 law schools, with Black and Hispanic/Latinx students accounting for almost all the declines.

Scholarships have become increasingly common in the United States, and are an important resource for defraying the ballooning cost of legal education. Merit-based scholarships account for the vast majority of institutional scholarships and are disproportionately awarded to White students, with need- and race-based scholarships offering a relatively small yet important corrective for this source of inequity.[3] Since the ruling, race-based scholarships have been paused or cancelled outright by almost 50 universities and colleges, primarily public institutions, diminishing this source of financial aid by at least $60 million in the first year post-SFFA.[4] Additionally, some states have introduced legislation to formally ban race-conscious scholarships. Although these bills have not passed their state senates, some universities are preemptively cutting race-conscious scholarships to prevent future litigation.

To illustrate the significance of these recent changes, data from the first national longitudinal study of American lawyers, After the JD (AJD), provide a unique window into the racial contours of law school borrowing and repayment trajectories. Based at the American Bar Foundation, AJD follows a cohort of more than 5,000 lawyers who graduated from law school in 1998 and joined their first bar association in 2000, surveying respondents at three points in time: in 2002/2003, 2007, and 2012. AJD data indicate that Black and Hispanic/Latinx law students are more likely than White students to take on student loans and accrue higher amounts of student debt than their White peers, and that 14 years after graduation, Black borrowers are significantly more likely than White borrowers to have student debt and have significantly more debt.[5] In contrast, Hispanic/Latinx borrowers are no more likely than White borrowers to have student debt by mid-career, which is due in large part to racial differences in early-career earnings. Moreover, the gap in student debt between Black and White lawyers is even greater at mid-career than it is at graduation, highlighting the growing impact of law school financing over the early adult life-course. Importantly, the economic stakes of reduced race-based scholarships for Black and Hispanic/Latinx law students are even higher today due to the explosion in sticker prices. After adjusting for inflation, private law schools cost 1.6 times more in 2023 than they did in 1996, when AJD respondents entered law school, and public law schools cost 2.6 times more.

Although it is too soon to know the full extent of SFFA’s influence on U.S. law schools, early evidence indicates Black and Hispanic/Latinx individuals are already feeling its impact. Minority enrollment has already declined in the wake of SFFA, and the curtailing of race-conscious scholarships may further reduce racial diversity in law schools and amplify racial differences in student debt among law school graduates. Combining emerging data with existing research illustrates how SFFA is amplifying existing racial inequities in U.S. law schools, steepening the mount of an uneven playing field. If these trends continue, the legal profession may become even less reflective of the nation’s constituents—at a time when equity and representation are more critical than ever.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Akshaya Ravi, Share of Black Harvard Law Students Drops in First Class After Affirmative Action Ruling, The Harvard Crimson, Dec. 2024 (last visited Apr 17, 2025).

[2] Richard R. W. Brooks, Kyle Rozema & Sarath Sanga, Racial Diversity and Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, SSRN (2024) (last visited Apr 17, 2025).

[3] Aaron N. Taylor, Robin Hood, in Reverse: How Law School Scholarships Compound Inequality, 47 J.L. & Educ. 41 (2018).

[4] Logan Johnson, How the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Affirmative Action Is Impacting Race-Conscious Scholarships, Access Lex (2024) (last visited Apr 17, 2025).

[5] Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant G. Garth, Joyce Sterling, David B. Wilkins, Meghan Dawe & Ethan Michelson. Making Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (2023).