Law schools eager to raise their national rankings are demanding higher scores on the Law School Admission Test, but they're paying a price in terms of racial diversity as fewer and fewer black applicants make the cutoff.
That's the controversial argument of John Nussbaumer, an associate dean at Michigan's Thomas M. Cooley Law School and author of a widely debated paper in this month's edition of the St. John's University Law Review. His thesis says schools increasingly ignore their mandate not to overemphasize the LSAT. It is striking chords far beyond academic circles as the legal profession ponders how to reverse a steady, 10-year decline.
Since 1994, when first-year black enrollment peaked at 3,432, that number has dropped 13% to 2,975, according to data from the Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT. By contrast, Asian and Hispanic enrollments have climbed: Asians by 44% to 3,759, and Hispanics by 26% to 2,610.
Blacks are getting denied at the gate, Nussbaumer says, because schools are increasingly concerned with LSAT scores: The average law student's score has jumped from 154.3 in 2001 to 157.3 in 2005.
However, we learn from the same article that applications to law school increased 30% between 2001 and 2004, which would no doubt have raised the LSAT scores of incoming students regardless of US News, so how do we know how much, or whether, U.S. News has affected LSATs?
And I'm also skeptical that U.S. News would lead to a decline in admissions of African Americans. U.S. News only counts the 50th percentile LSAT. Any law school that wanted to admit more black students without affecting its U.S. News score could simply matriculate black students with LSATs below its median, instead of white students who also had LSATs below its median. This would not affect U.S. News rank at all, even if the black students had much lower average LSATs than the white students. Perhaps there are law school admissions officers who don't understand how U.S. News and/or basic statistics works, and thus they are focusing on averages and not medians, but I'd need some evidence that this is true.
The good news is that the article points out that the ABA is making efforts to encourage minority students to think about law school early in their education.
I thought it was the case that U.S. News had switched to using the 25th and 75th percentiles, rather than the 50th.
If that's correct, the focus ought to be more on the strengths and weaknesses of the accreditation process than on the USN&WR itself.
How is this good news? It sounds rather racist to me.
http://www.cooley.edu/rankings/overall2005.htm
I especially like how they've ranked Temple Law School ahead of Stanford and Chicago (27, 39 respectively)
But why is it no one has tied this issue in with the issues raised by the various writers debating the arguments debating Richard Sander. Sander, of course, argued that affirmative action harms blacks, and some of the statistics are alarming. There is also lots of criticism out there of this argument.
But could it be that the arguments surrounding over-emphasis of the LSAT and the possible negative effects of affirmative action are related?
http://www.cooley.edu/rankings/intro_general.htm
btw, this kid that works down the hall from me whho got like a 140 or something ridiculously low on his LSAT got into thomas cooley. fine institution.
1) the inability of african americans to perform on standardized tests (bakke, gratz, grutter, washington v. davis)
2) sandra day o'connor
thanks, i'm done venting. this post sounds politically incorrect, but its the truth. proceed to post replies accusing me of racism. i can deal with that, i'm dating a black girl.
I suspect that the value-added by a given school is very different for different classes of student and any ranking system should take this into account: A student with a working-class background and marginal LSATs might gain much more from a three-year stint at Suffolk Universty or Cooley Law School than he would from an affirmative action experience at Harvard Law or Boalt Hall.
You call 140 on the LSAT "ridiculously low." Well, I only got 46!
Of course, that was in '89.
RE: The Cooley rankings--I had not idea that Chicago s*cks so badly. Glad I dodged that bullet!
I clicked in to make the same comment. How unfortunate that one of our would make this remark.
I've been at two law schools where it has become clear that undergrad GPA (relative to undergrad school mean) is a better predictor than LSAT, although not by much. In any event, LSAT is not the clear winner, which isn't surprising. The LSAT is basically a multiple choice exam. The writing component is small, and unbelievably simplistic. All pretty much contrary to law school exams. Plus it has the general standardized exam taint.
I think the LSAT is a tool, but not quite what it is cracked up to be. (I say this having gone to law school on the strength of a high LSAT score and fairly average undergrad performance...a situation in which the LSAT was the better predictor).
blog
A student with a working-class background and marginal LSATs might gain much more from a three-year stint at Suffolk Universty or Cooley Law School than he would from an affirmative action experience at Harvard Law or Boalt Hall
AppSocRes, can you elaborate?
I tend to disagree. At the end of the day, you still have a degree from Harvard. That's a meal ticket that will always be with you, long after you've forgotten how useful your actual law-school experience was.
I believe his point is that you will not, in fact, end up with a degree from Harvard. You will end up with a lot of student loans and a letter explaining why you are not being invited back for the next semester. If LSATs predict performance well and (by assumption) you have LSATs so low you would not have gotten into the college without affirmative action, your chances of completing the program are relatively low.
Or maybe Harvard Law is no harder than Cooley Law. I believe there are some differences between the programs.
You'd have to be really trying, whatever your intellect/work ethic, to flunk out of one of the top law schools once you're admitted.
You could actually make the Cooley is much more difficult than Harvard (once you're in school). You'd have a place where a number of people know they're going to get kicked out if they don't do well enough and (even if they do) most jobs you'd get at the top of the class aren't going to match the jobs someone at Harvard gets with mediocre grades. The pressure to do well versus coast could be a lot tougher.
In reference to your comment:
"i can deal with that, i'm dating a black girl."
A few years back, in a heated barroom debate, I was accused of making a racist comment.
Another participant (black), came to my defense: "You know he's married to a black woman?"
To which the accuser (a black woman) replied, "I know plenty of sexist men who are married to women, so I don't see why being married to a black women would mean he can't be racist."
In my many years of getting into heated and often pointless arguments in a vain attempt to solve the world's problems over several pitchers of beer, this strikes me as the best comeback I've ever heard. (And I told her so at the time, and she and I have become very good friends, although we still disagree vehemently and vociferously on many topics....)
I would generally agree with that, except I am an example that counters your argument. I am in the last throes of my legal education at a Tier 1 school. My UGPA and LSAT project me to the bottom 20% of the class (based on my school's formula). Instead, I am in the top 10% of the class, on the executive board of the law review and have a published note. Oh, and I have a good job awaiting me.
I see your argument and I raise you mine:
I graduated from a Tier 4 law school, Top 1% in my class, Law Review Editor, published a Comment, have very little student loan debt because of scholarships, interned for a judge of a U.S. Court of Appeals, interned for a Justice at the States's Supreme Court, after graduating I served as a clerk for a Judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals (different circuit than internship), and have a fantastic job.
So, good things do come from some Tier 3 and Tier 4 law schools.
Sexist men are married to women because (at least for straight people) marriage is inherently sex-specific and the fact that the guy prefers women over men as spouses far overwhelms any other factor which may lead him to prefer men to women in other situations. Marriage isn't inherently race-specific, and it's unlikely that the guy who marries a black woman has some reason to marry a black person specifically, so marrying a black woman is much more likely to be evidence that he isn't biased against blacks.
The question of whether it's appropriate to balance race in a situation where you're admitting students with 160 scores into a class with an average of 170 is very different from the question of whether it's appropriate to admit students scoring 140 into a class with an average score of 150, because the 160 student, while not as highly scoring as his peers at that school, is certainly competitive based on the general yardstick for measuring who is likely to be capable of becoming an attorney. The students scoring 140, by contrast, are probably unlikely to be able to pass a bar exam.
I think that the law schools are correct that affirmative action can't get them all the way to 13% black enrollment. To do that would require them to increase the qualification disparities between black students and their classmates at all law schools, and to jeopardize the bar passage rates, and, thus, the accredation of lower ranked law schools.
Campaigns to encourage more qualified minority students to apply to and enroll in law schools is an idea that I don't think anyone can object to.
Just because you marry someone, doens't provide evidence that you respect anything about them. Abusive men marry women and enjoy the domination that that gives them. I have met men who literally treat their wives as slaves, and if that wife happened to be black, it wouldn't say anything about the husband's racism or lack thereof. I have known men who appeared to choose their wife specifically in order to demean and/or denigrate the individual, and have suspected in several cases where a person had a partner of a different race, that it was for precisely the reason that he/she wished to put down the race, as well as the individual (in one case, a black man with a white woman; in another case a white woman with a black woman; in another case, a white man with an Asian woman -- abusive racist jerks come in all flavors.) I wish marriage or relationships were proof of mutual respect, or at least love, but they aren't.
So, if someone wants to hide behind their choice of wife or girlfriend to protect themselves from "racism" charges, I have to agree with my friend, who said (of me), "that ain't nearly enough."
(And, by the way, I'm not making any judgement about the orignal comment -- didn't sound like racism, just a frustrated observation.)