A few days back, while I was away at the Federalist Society Faculty Division conference in New Orleans, Orin linked to a study out of Columbia’s “SALT” that reported declines in the percentage of African Americans and Mexican Americans matriculating in American law schools since 1993.
Orin tentatively attributed this decline to law schools becoming increasingly concerned about LSAT and GPA scores because these scores are so important to schools’ U.S. News rankings.
I have two related comments. First, even if we assume that 1993 is the appropriate baseline year (and the study never explains why it is), we see that 9,577 African Americans and 1,434 Mexican Americans applied to law schools in 1992-93, compared to 9,030 and 1,130, respectively, in 2007-08. In other words, there was a total of just over 11,000 African American and Mexican American applicants at the beginning of the study period, compared to just 10,160 fifteen years later. Nevertheless, almost exactly the same number of law students from these two groups matriculated in 2008 as in 1993: 4,060 in 2008, compared to 4,142 in 1993.
So, even though in 2008 there were almost one thousand fewer applicants, only eighty-two fewer individuals matriculated, meaning that a higher percentage of applicants ultimately matriculated. And this despite the fact that in the interim, public law schools in several states, including, notably, California, Florida, and Michigan, have been legally barred from considering race in admissions.
So, in fact, there is no reason to think based on the statistics provided that law schools have become any less vigorous in their admission of African Americans and Mexican Americans. ([Corrected:] The study claims that members of the two groups who apply to law school are increasingly well-qualified, but oddly enough, while the study notes an increase in GPAs and LSAT scores, it doesn’t compare these with the increases, if any, of other law school applicants. Moreover, with regard to LSATs, African Americans’ applicants’ (median? average?) LSAT has increased from 142.6 to 143.7, but the significance of this increase is unclear; 143.7 is still well below the normal cutoff for the vast majority of law schools.
And that leads to my second comment. U.S News is often blamed for discouraging law schools from admitting minority applicants with low GPAs or LSATs. Indeed, I’ve heard that one reason various ABA poobahs pushed to require more “diversity” in admissions was the vague sense that some law schools were “cheating” by reducing their minority admissions to improve their U.S. News ranking.
U.S. News, however, only considers, and only has considered, medians, not averages. While it’s possible to imagine scenarios in which the last few candidates a law school is considering include “diversity” candidates with below median scores and white or Asian candidates with above median scores, in practice in the vast majority of cases the choice will be between “diversity” candidates with below median scores in either LSAT or both GPA and LSATs, and non-minority candidates who are in a similar position.
So, for example, if a law school had one slot left, and the LSAT median of the students who had thus far committed to attending was 160 and the GPA median was 3.3, it wouldn’t make any difference for U.S. News purposes whether the school admited (a) a diversity candidate with a 148 and a 3.32, or a non-diversity candidate with a 157 and a 3.4, or (b) a diversity candidate with a 154 and a 2.7, or a non-diversity candidate with a 155 and a 3.0. It’s therefore unlikely that U.S. News plays much of a role in discouraging law schools from digging deeper into the applicant pool to admit diversity candidates.
UPDATE: Ilya, above, points to a previous post of mine that I had forgotten about, regarding a similar study from the same crew. I wrote then, “There are some real oddities with this study. First, the LSAC apparently changed its data collection methods in 2000, and an LSAC page (go to the “Data” link) warns that data starting that year is not comparable to earlier data, which would seem to make the entire exercise of comparing data from 1992 to data in 2005 moot.” So this “study” is even more dubious than I first thought.
drunkdriver says:
if the “study” was this easy to debunk, shouldn’t the scholarly reputations of the authors take a hit? This seems like an embarrassingly obvious flaw.
And why would the press lap it up so easily without consulting credible people who could shed light on its dubious merit?
January 10, 2010, 10:44 pmOrin Kerr says:
Interesting, David. Thanks.
January 10, 2010, 10:51 pmIlya Somin says:
I wonder also why the study didn’t give data for all Hispanics, not just Mexican-Americans. Most law schools target Hispanics as a group for affirmative action admissions, not Mexican-Americans alone. Did the study omit, say, Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans because their admissions numbers have gone up? I don’t know the answer to this, but it would be useful to find out.
January 10, 2010, 11:00 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Ilya, I wondered the same. It’s entirely possible that AA for M-As has gone down as law schools have a broader pool of “Hispanics” to choose from (not just the groups you mentioned, but Central Americans, Columbians, Dominicans, etc). So I’d be curious to also see the breakdown of African Americans and Mexican Americans separately.
January 10, 2010, 11:05 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Overall Hispanic Matriculation to American Law Schools is Increasing says:
[...] Archives « Declining African American/Mexican American Matriculations to Law School? [...]
January 10, 2010, 11:55 pmPatrick says:
I have a broader question and a comment:
By what standard is affirmative action apportioned with respect to law schools? Is it only on a basis of race and gender? Is it only an attempt to redress historical discriminations? Are there other factors which play a significant role in the process? My experience has suggested yes to the former two questions and no to the latter one.
Socioeconomic factors have largely vanished from the program which has been reduced to preferential treatment based on the answers to the following two questions: Are you an URM? Are you a female? But the original intent and social underpinning of affirmative action was, however, to include not only race but, as LBJ stated, “a hundred unseen [socioeconomic] forces” which included your family, your neighborhood, your schools, and “the poverty or richness of your surroundings.” In that context, an AA or MA who was born in the suburbs, went to an expensive private school and had an SAT tutor, should not be afforded affirmative action. But she is and it is to the detriment of an Asian or a Caucasian applicant who was born in the inner-city, attended public schooling, and lived at the threshold of poverty. Diversity, whatever that word means, has not extended beyond racial or gender lines in recent times.
Again, if affirmative action is only to redress historical, institutional discrimination, I concede.
January 11, 2010, 10:46 amtheobromophile says:
The problem with analysing 1993 to 2008 has a few more issues: number of applicants. LSAC only keeps data that go back to the late 1990s (but, IIRC, the 2000 numbers are similar to the numbers in the early ’90s): in 2008, there are about 50% more LSAT takers and 17% more applicants in 2008 than in 2000.
Aside from the fact that, with more applicants, schools can raise their standards (e.g. there are more 99th-percentile LSAT scorers in 2008 than in 2000), there’s also about 35,000 more students who take the LSAT but don’t even bother applying to law school. I find it hard to discount the effects of that; the focus on admission rates or total admissions ignores people who never even apply.
January 11, 2010, 10:58 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I wonder about the designation of “Mexican-American” – do children of immigrants, who were born here, refer to themselves as such? Grandchildren?
January 11, 2010, 12:57 pmOnPoint says:
Regarding the “Hispanics” v. “Mexican American/Chicano” options skewing the data – that vary from application to application: they compiled the data from LSAC site which does not “lump” the wide barrage of nationalities into a single all-encompassing, generic category of “Hispanic.” So the data is not skewed as the LSAC site standardizes that information preventing the data from being confounded.
Regarding “Why the special attention to ‘Mexican-Americans’” argument: Read the Treaty of Guadalupe (~1850). By its terms, most of the California, NM, Texas, etc.etc. properties should have been in the name of the original owner families through and to ~1950. The unethical interpretation and violations of this “Treaty” and their consequential impact effect on Mexican-American’s perception as well as the alive and present mis-treatment of them by hillbilly minute-men…the smell of that blood is fresh – and openly ignored. They deserve to have direct representation within our legal system and are precluded from doing so due to a number of foreclosing circumstantial factors. It’s a very complex issue – easily attacked when casually touched upon by an article. Because this can of worms has not been properly documented, studied, and understood – it’s easy for the people to ignore and shrug it off with a – “well, it’s a dog eat dog world” statement. Just ask the people in Flint, Michigan what they think about America’s recent realization that corporate interests are diluting the foundation of our legal system. They’ll likely give you a similar response to this different issue (or is it any different?).
January 24, 2010, 7:01 pm