The number of black and Latino students who were accepted at one of eight highly selective high schools in New York City increased from last year, according to admissions statistics released on Wednesday by the city’s Education Department. The uptick for the two groups reverses a years-long decline in admissions to the schools, where admittance is based on a single test.

About 730 black and Latino students scored well enough on the test, records show, to qualify for entrance to the specialized schools — a group that includes large, traditional institutions like Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and the Bronx High School of Science, which enroll thousands of students, and small schools like the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, whose enrollment is 373.

The number was 14 percent higher than last year’s and 12 percent higher than that in 2010, based on the records, giving education officials reason for cautious celebration. Black students received 6 percent of the offers, while Latinos accounted for 8 percent.

Specialized high school admissions represented a small fraction of the data released as part of the city’s admissions announcement, which, for the first time, happened on a single day for all 77,137 eighth-grade students who applied for placement during the first round. Of those, 7,391, or 9.6 percent, were not matched with any high school, officials said. That is a slight improvement from last year, when 10.5 percent of applicants were not matched to any of the schools to which they initially applied.