Posted on 04/25/2002 11:50:47 AM PDT by xsysmgr
On Thursday the Center for Equal Opportunity releases another in its series of studies documenting the use of racial and ethnic admission preferences in higher education. The study being released today, however, is the first ever to analyze law schools. The results are not pretty. Somebody oughta get sued.
The center used the freedom-of-information laws to get data from the three public law schools in Virginia — from the University of Virginia, William & Mary, and George Mason University. Consequently, it will be hard for the schools to deny the numbers themselves. If they're wrong, it's because the schools supplied bad data.
The data were then turned over to two independent social scientists, Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai of Rockville, Maryland. They crunched the numbers and wrote the report, "Racial and Ethnic Preferences at the Three Virginia Public Law Schools." The study, along with similar reports by CEO about undergraduate and medical-school admissions, is on its website.
If you thought that law schools would be less likely to play fast and loose with laws and precedents that cast a cold eye on blatant racial and ethnic discrimination, you would be wrong. In fact, of all the schools that CEO has studied — 47 undergraduate institutions, six medical schools, and now these three law schools — the University of Virginia School of Law wins the dubious distinction of discriminating the most.
At UVa, the odds favoring a black candidate over an equally qualified white candidate were an astonishing 731 to 1 in 1999 and 647 to 1 in 1998. William & Mary is no slouch when it comes to discriminating either: The odds ratio favoring blacks over whites there was 168 to 1 in 1999 and 351 to 1 in 1998.
To put it in other terms: In 1999, if you had an LSAT score of 160 and an undergraduate grade-point average of 3.25 — these are the two measures that law schools typically weigh most heavily in making admissions decisions-you had a 95 percent chance of getting into UVA if you were black, but only a 3 percent chance of getting in if you were white. At William & Mary, in 1999, if you had an LSAT of 155 and an undergraduate GPA of 3.0, your chances of getting in were 84 percent if you were black but only 3 percent if you were white. The black-white gap in GPA during the first-year of law school was greatest at William & Mary: six-tenths of a point on a 4-point scale.
What about the third school, George Mason University School of Law? It alone appears to be treating black and white applicants on a nondiscriminatory basis. There was no statistically significant evidence of racial or ethnic discrimination at GMU in the 1999 data provided, and while the odds ratio in 1998 was statistically significant (2.9 to 1), it was still quite small in comparison to UVa and William & Mary.
The pattern at Virginia law schools differs from what we've found at other institutions of higher education in some respects. At other schools, frequently Latinos as well as blacks were given preferential treatment, and frequently Asians were not. So it is interesting that there is no evidence that Latinos were given a preference over whites at any of the three law schools. And there was statistically significant evidence that Asians received preferences at the three schools, although it was miniscule compared to the preference given African Americans, and was never greater than 3.92 to 1.
The amazing degree of black-white discrimination is particularly irksome here, not just because it is lawyers breaking the law, but also because the University of Virginia — when CEO caught them discriminating in undergraduate admissions-acted like it might clean up its act. Since then, however, it has refused to reveal the role race still plays in admissions. Today's study underscores the need for UVa to tell the state's taxpayers the extent to which it is discriminating against (or for) them and their children on the basis of race.
When schools are caught discriminating, the usual defense is to say that race is "just one factor." It will be interesting to see if UVA will be that brazen this time around. Race is just one factor, all right: one that can make the difference between having a 95 percent chance of getting in, or a 3 percent chance.
— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
Experience shows that these admissions disparities are reflected in drop-out rates, and bar exam passage, not to mention future professional competence, which is mitigated by the drawing of less-capable minorities into government jobs.
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