Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The final hurdle: Many more
blacks than whites fail to pass the
bar examination.
Posted on 02/13/2005 3:26:14 AM PST by Pharmboy
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The final hurdle: Many more
blacks than whites fail to pass the
bar examination.
ONE would have thought, given the decades of ardent debate over affirmative action in higher education, that the main axes of the dispute had been established. Defenders of racial preferences say that they compensate for historical wrongs, ensure vibrant and varied campus discourse and help create minority role models and leaders. Opponents say preferences are nothing but a reverse form of discrimination that stereotypes and stigmatizes minority students.
But a recent study published in The Stanford Law Review by Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found a new way to inflame the debate. In fact, the study has ignited what may be the fiercest dispute over affirmative action since 2003, when the Supreme Court found some forms of it to be constitutional.
Professor Sander's study tests a simple, but startling, thesis: Affirmative action actually depresses the number of black lawyers, because many black students end up attending law schools that are too difficult for them, and perform badly.
If black law students were accepted to lesser law schools under race-blind admissions, Professor Sander writes, they would receive better grades and pass the bar in greater numbers. Even accounting for the many black students who could not attend any law school without affirmative action, the ultimate number of black lawyers would still increase, he concludes.
That assertion, which is based on a great deal of data, along with inference and speculation, has provoked an outpouring of written critiques from law professors, economists and social scientists. Several will be published in The Stanford Law Review's May issue.
Professor Sander, who is white, says he came to his conclusion reluctantly. He notes that he helped found a fair-housing group in Southern California and that his son is biracial. He says he "favors race-conscious strategies in principle, if they can be pragmatically justified."
His critics generally accept, and sometimes even praise, aspects of his empirical work. He shows three large gaps between black and white students: their academic credentials before entering law school, their grades in law school and their success on bar examinations.
But many critics dispute Professor Sander's assertion that the first gap - in undergraduate grades and L.S.A.T. scores - causes the next two, in law school grades and in rates of passing the bar.
The basic numbers are not in serious dispute.
Using a standard 1,000-point scale to reflect both L.S.A.T. scores and undergraduate grade-point averages, Professor Sander writes, the average black student's score was 130 to 170 points below that of the average white student.
Once at law school, the average black student gets lower grades than white students: 52 percent of black students are in the bottom 10th of their first-year law school classes, while only 8 percent are in the top half. And the grades of black students drop slightly in relative terms from the first year of law school to the third.
Black students are twice as likely as whites to fail to finish law school. Nineteen percent of the black students who started law school in 1991 had failed to graduate five years later; the corresponding figure for whites was 8 percent.
About 88 percent of all law students pass a bar exam on the first attempt; 95 percent pass eventually. For blacks, the corresponding figures are 61 percent and 78 percent.
Timothy T. Clydesdale, who teaches sociology at the College of New Jersey, says the law school environment, and not affirmative action, suppresses the grades of some law students.
"Something intrinsic to the structure or process of legal education affects the grades of all minorities," he writes in the fall issue of Law and Social Inquiry. Professor Clydesdale agrees with Professor Sander, however, that bar passage rates are determined primarily by law school grades.
Professor Sander concedes that 14 percent fewer black students would enter law school without preferences. But because more of those who do get in would get good grades at schools that are better suited to them, more would graduate, he said, yielding 8 percent more black lawyers.
The critics run their own numbers and conclude that without affirmative action, the number of black lawyers would fall anywhere from 9 percent to 35 percent.
James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern who has followed the debate, cautioned that none of these numbers should be taken seriously.
"In the real world, too many things would change," he said in an interview.
Professor Sander's study may be most vulnerable in its assessment of the top law schools, where the vast majority of law students of all races graduate and pass the bar.
For instance, Richard O. Lempert, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said that the university's law school had found little difference between its black and white students in rates of graduation, in passing the bar or in income afterward. "We think the fact that Michigan is an elite law school has a lot to do with it," he wrote in an e-mail message. "Sander's data, though he barely mentions it, convey essentially the same story. Thus his analysis provides no case for the Harvards, Yales and Columbias of this world to abandon affirmative action."
But the situation may be different at less prestigious schools.
Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, two Yale Law School professors who are harshly critical of other aspects of the Sander study, used its data for their own study of law schools, which showed that 41.2 percent of black law students - based on their undergraduate credentials and the law schools they attend - have less than a fifty-fifty chance of becoming lawyers. The corresponding number for whites is 0.2 percent. "For some of these people," they write in a draft critique, "the investment in law school seems riskier than getting married in Las Vegas."
"While we reject Sander's conclusion that affirmative action has reduced the number of black attorneys," Professors Ayres and Brooks write, "we are more sympathetic to his idea that there is a class of black law students who shouldn't have gone to law school."
Wherever the debate ultimately leads, said Ed Johnson, a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Professor Sander's overall hypothesis is a valuable step in trying to understand a complex phenomenon.
"His story does seem to fit the data pretty well," Mr. Johnson said. "That doesn't mean it's true. But it's hard to come up with an alternative explanation. In his favor, he's told a story that's at least a story."
Ward Connelly, call your office.
Want to really screw something up? Turn it over to the do-gooders. They'll make a mess of it in no time.
Yes...We all are told and finally made to know that all people are intellectually, emotionally, and physically equal....
Bell curve...oh no that was a raciest book was not it?
I think in general Affirmative action does more harm than good. If you're black and qualified you are viewed as black first, male or female second and your qualifications are somewhere in the background. If you're black and unqualified, the same value system applies. Instead of being evaluated based on your individual abilities, you are evaluated based on the color of your skin. Moreover, as the number of unqualified blacks increases, the perception of the competence of blacks decreases. It has a very negative effect.
Unfortunately most professions do not have an exam to weed out the unintelligent and liberals can stack them with subpar people. Maybe we should professionalize other fields in such a manner to uphold standards.
According to the article, performing well in an easier, inferior law school better prepares one to pass the bar than performing poorly in a more demanding environment? Using that logic, nobody should be going to Harvard or Yale law school.
If by performing poorly, you drop out, yes. You have to have a law degree to take the bar exam.
I believe it was. And, yes, I've read it.
Rosa Parks is noted for not giving up her seat because of her race. Proponents of AA dont mind when others are forced out of theirs due to race.
Affirmative action is racism against whites. Reverse discrimination. Plain and simple. Call it anything you like but when people are given preference because of color of skin its detrimental to people of other races.
Affirmative action does exactly what it was designed to stop. It gives preference to people because of their color.
I worked in a law firm where we always tried to get as many black students as possible into our group of summer associates (and we only recruited at top tier law schools). Then we would make offers to almost all of them, although simply for being black, regardless of how dismal their grades were, they would receive offers from just about every top firm in the city. And then they would get in and not pass the bar exam, time and again, no matter how many review courses we paid for - finally, the firm had to institute a policy that an associate could have "only" three chances to pass the Bar exam, and then their employment would be terminated.
The interesting thing was that we had this problem only with black men. Black women, on the other hand, came in and did as well on passing the Bar Exam as any of the other new attorneys.
Part of the problem was that the black males, in many cases, didn't take it seriously. Some of them spent most of their day of the phone, in some cases "organizing" some of the pressure groups, like "BALSA" (theoretically a black-Asian-Latino law students pressure group, but in practice almost entirely black); others refused to do assignments that they thought were "beneath" them (all first years get crummy assignments); and none of them studied, simply because they had never had to do so before. They were also completely incapable of writing, but again, I think this was because they had never been in a situation where they were expected to perform as well as anyone else. They had the same attitude as JFK Jr. (who also failed several times): they were special, and the ordinary rules didn't apply to them.
I think in many cases, being in a more realistic environment in school would have helped them. That is, Harvard and the others had a lot riding on producing black law school graduates, so there was a tendency to pass them along, no matter what (judging by the way they wrote). They may not have gotten great grades, but they shouldn't even have graduated in the first place; however, those schools were too nervous to simply make them repeat courses until they got it right, partly because of the existence of pressure groups such as BLSA.
The other thing that should be borne in mind is that blacks represent between 10-13% of the population. Black males, of course, are half of that small percentage, and black males who make it to college are probably an even smaller percentage. So the pool is quite small to begin with, but law schools are under a lot of pressure to have black students, particularly the more high-profile law schools, so they take a disproportionate number. Naturally, this means the schools have to fill in with some people who just aren't as good. Perhaps in a slower, less demanding school, these candidates would have gotten more attention or would even have had a more realistic idea of what was involved in the legal profession and the work involved in their future career. Perhaps they should never have gone to law school in the first place.
But again, the odd thing was that black women did just fine, so I would suspect a lot of it had to do with attitude and the fact that the black males had probably been passed along in a very undemanding way ever since elementary school, simply because there was a desire to encourage them. I should mention, btw, that to my knowledge, few of these were people from lower income backgrounds; some of their parents were attorneys, others were physicians, etc. And their parents were of the generation that would have had to fight very hard to get there.
A long way of saying it's a complicated situation, but I agree that the rush to get black students, any black students, no matter how unqualified, into top of the line schools probably does two things: it means candidates will be taken in who aren't qualified, and it creates unrealistic expectations in the students, who are shocked and angry when the real world finally won't let them slide by anymore.
It's perfectly rational...I don't see what the big deal is.
Yes it was racist, and nothing more than Junk Science.
I did not know it was Junk Science. Can you tell me why?
Yes and no.
The main benefactors of affirmative action are white women.
White Women
Affirmative Action Works!
White Women Benefit Most, Widely Absent
These are but few examples, but there are many more.
Affirmative action is wrong and should be ended right now.
Over the years in my industry (pharmaceutical), I have had the good fortune to be in a position to be a mentor to many young people. Of all the people that I have helped (or at least tried to have helped), I can truly say that the most extraordinary have been a group of four African American women. All four are remarkable people, but even in this group there is one that stands out, and I can truly say that she is--of all the people that I have ever met in my life--at the top of the list.
I identified her outstanding abilities when she worked as an intern for me, and encouraged her to choose our industry as a career. Suffice it to say that she became tops in her chosen path.
Another young black woman who had to do a project for me at the last minute actually had worked in another department. The person who had been working on it abruptly quit, and here she was stuck with something that all thought she was ill-prepared to handle. Well, she not only did it, but brought it in ahead of schedule and in better shape than the original (a very bright white guy) author would have. In an interesting twist of fate, a few years later this woman was in another position and able to hire me for a freelance project!
My PERSONAL experience with these four extraordinary African American women was incredible yet disappointing in other ways: I have always wondered where the equivalent in AA men were--at least in my industry--(don't get me wrong, I know that there are many great AA men out there it's just that I haven't seen them in my area).
Although nature certainly counts, my belief is that when it comes to black men, nurture is the main thing throwing them off compared to the women that I have seen. And one of the main ways this came about was through gummint do-gooding.
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