Entry Two: The Effects of Preferences on Grades, Graduation, and the Bar
As I discussed yesterday, a very large majority of American law schools essentially race-norm black and white academic credentials when they admit their classes. Since the black/white credentials gap in the applicant pool is quite large, this means a typical law school has very little overlap between the highest credentials of its black students and the lowest credentials of its white students. This wouldn’t matter very much if, as critics have long argued, the LSAT and UGPA were poor predictors of law school performance. And it’s true that, individual by individual, these credentials are only rough indicators of performance. But applied to groups they are extremely accurate.
Consequently, blacks as a group have academic trouble in law school in very consistent and predictable patterns. At American law schools that use large racial preferences, half of all black students end up in the bottom tenth of their first-year class. Put a little differently, the median black student performs in the first-year at about the 7th percentile of the median white student. The gap is statistically no different in legal writing classes than in classes with timed exams. And, when we adjust for dropouts, the black-white gap gets slightly wider over the second and third year of law school.
It’s important to note that this performance gap has nothing to do with race per se; whites who attend law schools where their credentials are far below most of their peers have pretty much the same types of troubles. The performance gap is a function of preferences. (Now, it’s true that the preferences come about in the first place because of the black/white credentials gap – but that is another story, which I’m happy to address later if readers are interested.) There is no credible evidence I’ve seen that, if schools used race-blind admissions, blacks would underperform whites at all. (I will discuss this issue further, and respond to some reader commentary, this Friday.)
The most obvious consequence of the grade gap in law school is that blacks are expelled, or drop out, at much higher rates than whites (19% of blacks don’t complete law school compared to 8% of whites). Almost all of the attrition is among students with very low grades. The more serious consequence is that students at the bottom of the class apparently learn less than the same student would learn at a lower-tier school where the student was closer to the middle of the class. This is what’s known as the “mismatch effect”.
A number of studies of college students have found various types of mismatch effects. Black law students who go to schools where their credentials are far below most of their classmates are less likely to graduate, more likely to switch out of science majors, and more likely to abandon aspirations for an academic career than blacks who attend college where their credentials place them closer to the middle. These studies have been hampered, however, by the absence of any general test that college students take after graduation; no one could demonstrate that blacks actually learned less at more elite schools.
For my research, I was able to capitalize on a massive database compiled by the Law School Admissions Council in the 1990s, which tracked law graduates through up to five attempts to pass the bar. Bar exams vary state by state, but they have much in common and there are ways to control for the variations. I found that law school grades predicted bar passage rates far more powerfully than school eliteness did — it was more important to be near or above the middle of the class than at a higher-ranked school — and, again, this was equally true for blacks and whites. However, since the preferences system pushes most blacks to attend more elite schools, the tradeoff has devastating effects on black bar passage. Blacks are 50% to 100% more likely to fail the bar on their first attempt than are whites who started law school with identical credentials. Combined with the admission, at the bottom of the law school hierarchy, of blacks with very weak academic backgrounds, and one finds that nationally, blacks fail the bar at four times the white rate.
Taking the graduation effect and the bar effect together, and one finds that only 45% of blacks who started law school in 1991 graduated and passed the bar on their first attempt (compared to 80% of whites). Again, this is not a “racial” effect, but a preferences effect. I find in my analysies that the graduate-and-pass rate for blacks would rise to 74% in a preference-free system — still a little lower than the white rate, but only because the distribution of black credentials is lower than the white distribution.
Tomorrow: Black law graduates in the job market
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