Entry Three: Black law graduates in the job market
(My apologies for posting my planned Wednesday post today)
Tuesday, I wrote about some of the perverse effects racial preferences have upon blacks in law school and on the bar. There was already some awareness that some of these problems existed, though most of my colleagues were surprised by their scale and by the tendency of preferences to exacerbate existing gaps. But it has been almost universally believed that an unmitigated blessing of racial preferences, from the perspective of black beneficiaries, is the entrée preferences give to good jobs. Since employers like to hire new attorneys with famous name-brands, giving blacks boosts into more elite schools is thought to enhance greatly their marketability and, eventually, their power and position in the legal hierarchy.
A new database that I describe in my article provides the first nationally representative data on young lawyers and their jobs. Although the data is not perfect, it makes it possible to weigh the effect of over a dozen background factors in shaping the types of jobs new lawyers get. Analyses of the data show, quite strikingly, that employers care — and care a lot — about how job-seekers did in law school. Law school prestige is important, but for law graduates as a whole, good grades are a much more powerful predictor of getting a higher-paying job than the eliteness of one’s school.
What this implies about racial preferences is not completely obvious. One needs to estimate both how much of an “eliteness” boost the typical black applicant gets in the admissions process, and how much the average black student’s law school GPA would go up if admissions were race-blind and the student went to a lower-ranked school. Both calculations are difficult, and subject to some debate. That said, I think the general pattern is fairly clear. Anywhere outside the most elite schools, new black lawyers are hurt by preferences more than they are helped. For a typical black graduating from a middle-ranked law school, the grades/prestige tradeoff that goes with affirmative action lowers her earnings by about twenty percent.
I found that at the most elite (top ten) law schools, blacks gain enough from the enhanced prestige of their school to roughly offset the grade disadvantage. This seems intuitively plausible, too. Yale, Harvard and Stanford are universally known as blue-chip schools, while many employers won’t know what distinctions to draw between Fordham, Iowa and Case Western. And it is probably true that some very elite employers largely limit recruiting to the top ten schools. But even at the top, I was unable to find a clear net plus for blacks from preferences — just a wash.
One might suppose that some employers use grade cutoffs, in part, as a device to discriminate against minority job candidates. This may be true for some, but the general pattern is just the opposite: legal employers pay a premium to recruit junior black lawyers. In other words, when one controls for lots of background characteristics, new black lawyers earn seven to nine percent more than other lawyers with comparable backgrounds (I found no similar premium for Hispanic or Asian attorneys). Blacks with high GPAs do extremely well in the market regardless of where they went to school.
But there’s the ironic rub. Law school preferences create a situation where high-GPA blacks are a rare commodity. Blacks with very low GPAs – or even worse, blacks who have failed a bar exam once or more – are very common, and they are penalized substantially in the job market.
One by-product of this state of affairs is the large concentration of black lawyers in government and in small firms. Part of this seems to reflect personal preferences; there’s a variety of evidence that black lawyers, on average, do more pro bono and community service than the average white lawyer and are more inclined by personal philosophy to work in government. But the concentration is also partly due to the preferences/low grades connection. Black law graduates with grades at the middle of their class or higher have a pattern of early careers that more closely resembles the white pattern than the pattern of other blacks. Jobs with local government agencies or small firms are sometimes a last resort for students with poor grades – and this is a choice blacks face far more often than they would in the absence of large admissions preferences.
My findings about the job market tradeoff between school eliteness and grades have implications for all law students, not just blacks. The implication of my findings is that going to the best law school one gets into – a strategy almost everyone seems to follow – may not be a very good strategy at all. It is important for students to realistically assess how well they will do at the schools that will have them, and to pick a school where they are likely to be at least in the middle of their class. Middle- and low-tier law schools, under this view, deserve a lot more respect than the very hierarchical world of legal education tends to accord them.
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