Is Affirmative Action Hurting Black Students in Law Schools?

Is Affirmative Action Hurting Black Students in Law Schools?

Richard Sander seems to think so.

He writes at the James G. Martin Center:

Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought

Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had grades in the bottom 10th of their class; and Blacks were six times as likely as whites to take the bar exam multiple times but never pass.

I argued that the preferences system was utterly perverse. What was meant as a helping hand was instead placing students in schools where they were not academically prepared to succeed. My article laid out considerable evidence that, when one controlled for the effect of preferences, Blacks and whites earned similar grades and graduated and passed the bar at the same rate. The use of massive preferences was depressing Black outcomes so much that eliminating preferences would actually increase the number of Black lawyers.

Most law-review articles languish in obscurity or are read by only a handful of specialists, but my Stanford piece was downloaded some 60,000 times in the two months after it appeared. Although other scholars had already published excellent work on “mismatch” effects at the undergraduate level, my article on “law-school” mismatch was the first to attract not only a wide readership but national media attention. It also spawned dozens of critiques, some by very prominent scholars. Many pointed out, correctly, that the evidence for law-school mismatch was circumstantial; the only large data source on law-school outcomes aggregated students across schools, so one could not directly measure an individual student’s “credentials” deficit, nor observe just what outcome he or she would have had at a less competitive school.

I agreed that better data were desirable and urged schools to make disclosures that would facilitate research while protecting student privacy.

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