“The Waning of Racial Preferences at American Law Schools, 2021-2025,” by My UCLA Colleague Rick Sander

In June 2023, the Supreme Court broadly held that colleges and universities could not confer an admissions advantage to an applicant on the basis of the applicant’s race. The ruling was fairly clear, but its likely effects were not. There were two major uncertainties. Would the institutions that had been using large racial preferences for decades actually change their practices in a substantive way? And if they did, would Black and Hispanic enrollments at elite colleges and professional schools crash?

The schools themselves were not forthcoming about their plans, aside from generally expressing a determination to preserve diversity. Higher education leaders had long maintained two conflicting precepts: first, that their admissions officers took account of race to only a modest degree, but second, that prohibiting these modest preferences would have a catastrophic effect on minority enrollments. They did not willingly share any data on actual admissions processes that would demonstrate whether either of these claims were true.

Journalists and education scholars thus watched closely when colleges and professional schools began to release enrollment data in the fall of 2024. The picture remained muddy: some schools, such as MIT and Amherst, reported large drops in undergraduate minority (especially in Black) enrollment; other schools, such as Yale and Princeton, reported either small drops or actual increases. Among professional schools, few reported large drops in minority enrollment. So, what was happening? Were elite colleges and universities generally ignoring the law? Had they found some way around the Court’s decisions? No small part of the Trump Administration’s offensive against many schools in 2025 seemed motivated by this perception. But pretty much everyone, including higher education leaders themselves, has had few real clues about how much actual practices were changing.

This article provides the first systematic analysis of how, in an important realm of higher education, the use of race in admissions has changed over the past few years. We focus on the two hundred accredited law schools in the United States, partly because the past patterns of racial preferences in law schools are particularly well understood. We make use of a new data source—a website on which applicants themselves report the outcomes of their law school applications—that allows us to draw credible conclusions about the operation of law school admissions in each of the past five admissions cycles. Over twenty thousand applicants have used the website “lsd.law” over the past five years to self-report their academic credentials, their race, and the outcomes of their law school applications.

This data is subject to a few caveats, and it is noisier—that is, it has more inaccuracies—than data directly reported by law schools, but we find that it nonetheless provides highly credible estimates of law school admissions practices. (See Section 2 for a more detailed assessment of the data.) In particular, we have enough observations to estimate accurately the average size of racial preferences across each of six “tiers” of law school, ranked by admissions selectivity, for each of the five admissions cycles from 2020-21 through 2024-25.

We find that racial preferences at elite law schools were much the same in 2021 and 2022 as they had been for decades—that is to say, very large and very widespread for Black applicants; about half as large, and less consistently applied, for Hispanic applicants. By the 2024-25 admissions cycle, however, the size of racial preferences for Black applicants had fallen by about half, and preferences for Hispanic students had similarly fallen by half in some tiers, and in others had fallen to levels too small to be detected in our data. Presumably because of the decline in preferences, longstanding credential disparities between Black students and their white and Asian classmates fell as well—indeed, perhaps fell even more sharply. But despite the diminished use of preferences (and possibly, because of the diminished use of preferences) Black and Hispanic applications to law schools rose in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and, minority enrollments in law schools as a whole rose in absolute numbers while falling only modestly in relative terms.

Six Key Findings