As the first round of applications for the Class of 2008 begin to flood Byerly Hall, admissions officers are again facing the challenge of luring high-achieving black applicants to Harvard.

For the second straight year, Harvard’s yield of black students—the percentage of admitted applicants who enrolled at the College—was behind Stanford’s, and well below the yield for students of other racial backgrounds.

While the College’s overall yield was 79 percent for the Class of 2007, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE), the yield for black students was only 67 percent, compared to 68 percent for black students admitted to Stanford.

Harvard’s black student yield for the 2002-2003 admissions season marks a six percent jump from the previous year, when 61 percent of accepted black applicants enrolled at the College.

According to R. Bruce Slater, managing editor of the JBHE, Harvard’s yield numbers aren’t surprising given the high demand for top black students.

“There are only so many black students who score very high on their SATs, and all the top schools want the students with the highest scores, said Slater. “With the pressure to increase diversity, there is intense competition.”

As a result, according to Slater, all schools face difficulty increasing black yield, but Stanford’s efforts have been buoyed by the sharp decline in blacks applying to the University of California (UC).

The UC Board of Regents’ 1995 ban on affirmative action “gave a message to black students that maybe they weren’t as welcome there,” Slater said.

He said that, as a result, black students turned away from the system’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, and that Stanford—as “the other highly regarded research university in the state”—improved its yield of black students.

Moreover, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford’s principal private West Coast competitor, “has almost no black students whatsoever,” Slater said. CalTech’s Class of 2007 has zero black members, he said.

Director of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 agreed with Slater’s conclusion that intense competition for high-achieving black students depresses Harvard’s yield.

“Any group of students that are highly recruited by other colleges naturally have a lower yield,” she said.

“The African-American yield has been lower than the overall yield [at Harvard] but higher than the overall yield for most other Ivies,” Lewis said.

But according to Slater, black students may also be deterred by the lack of racial diversity among Harvard’s faculty.

According to the JBHE, black professors compose a smaller portion—2.7 percent—of the total faculty at Harvard than at every other Ivy except Princeton.