Sept 11 (Reuters) - The percentage of Black students in

Harvard University's freshman class dropped by more than a fifth

following a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that barred

colleges from using race as a factor in admissions, according to

data released by the school on Wednesday.

The Class of 2028 is 14% Black, compared with 18% last year,

Harvard said, while the share of Hispanic students ticked up

slightly from 14% to 16%.

Harvard, one of the world's most elite universities, was one

of two defendants in the 2023 Supreme Court case, along with the

University of North Carolina. The schools argued that promoting

racial diversity improved the educational experience for all

students on campus, but the court's conservative majority ruled

that taking race into account - commonly known as affirmative

action - was a form of discrimination.

Many colleges had warned that prohibiting them from

considering race, as admissions offices had done for decades,

would inevitably lead to a drop in minority enrollment. Thus

far, the data on the first classes admitted since the ruling at

several selective schools have presented a somewhat mixed

picture.

Some top schools, such as Yale and Princeton universities,

showed little change this fall among Black and Hispanic

students.

Others saw precipitous declines. At the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, the percentage of Black, Hispanic,

Native American or Pacific Islander students in its freshman

class dropped to 16%, compared with an average of 31% over the

previous four years.

Brown University, another elite school, saw its Black

student share drop from 15% to 9% and its Hispanic share fall

from 14% to 10%, according to the school's newspaper. Amherst

College, one of the country's top liberal arts colleges,

reported that only 3% of its incoming class is Black, compared

with 11% last fall.

The lawsuit against Harvard had accused the school of giving

preference to some minorities at the expense of Asian American

applicants. The percentage of Asian American students in

Harvard's freshman class held steady at 37%, Harvard said.

After the 2023 ruling, many schools bolstered recruitment

programs, sought to remove application barriers and pursued

other changes in an effort to increase diversity. Other

advocates have lobbied for state legislatures to pass bills that

ban admission preferences for legacy applicants.

In releasing its data, Harvard noted that it had sent

admissions staff to more than 150 cities to do student outreach

and joined a consortium of universities seeking to raise

awareness about their schools in rural communities, among other

steps.

"The change in law did not change our fundamental

commitments," Hopi Hoekstra, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and

Sciences, wrote in a letter to colleagues announcing the data.

"We will continue to work tirelessly to pull down barriers to a

Harvard education, and, in compliance with the law, to deepen

even further our commitment to broad-based diversity."