good job!!

Oiyan,

You were great!!.  Fool didnt let you get your points across...he was interrupting you like crazy...Way to rep!!!  You had him setup perefectly to smakk him with a left hook--equality of opportunity was great framing.  The unequal schools/resources & Williams case..would have shot down his whole everyone has an equal chance at test BS...Best for him that he cut out early as you would have finsihed him off...you are my hero(ine) for the day!!!

Conrad,

The original subject of this page is the University of California changing its admission criteria by dropping certain SAT subject matter tests.  UC studied the effect of the change and concluded the number of Asian Americans admitted would drop while the number of whites would increase.  Arguing this would bring more “diversity” to UC campuses, the UC regents (Bigots for the Left) voted for the change.  We should oppose any and all discrimination against Asian Americans, no matter who perpetrates it, and I have named the UC regents to my website’s Hall of Shame.  http://www.asianam.org/regents_of_u__of_california.htm   All of the Asian Americans in the Calif legislature have opposed the change as discrimination against Asian Americans.

The evidence is overwhelming Bigots for the Left who run universities are discriminating against Asian Americans.  When certain states banned the use of race in university admissions, the number of Asian Americans admitted soared.  This means Bigots for the Left were discriminating against Asian Americans.  My website compiles the studies showing Bigots for the Left are discriminating against Asian Americans. http://www.asianam.org/statistics%20reverse.htm

You do not deny Bigots for the Left are discriminating against Asian Americans and do not offer any contrary evidence.  You merely order me to conduct a study showing that such discrimination helps Hmong, Laotian, Cambodian, Indian, and Hapa Americans.  There is no evidence that discrimination against Asian Americans helps these sub-groups.  These sub-groups comprise 23.5% of the Asian American population.  (The Census Department has no category for Hapa Americans.)  In any case, I fail to see the logic.  “We want to discriminate against 75% of Asian Americans in order to help 25% of them.” does not  make sense to me.  Using poverty instead of race to decide who receives preferences will help poor Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodian Asian Americans.  Indian Americans’ income levels are high and rival that of Chinese and Japanese Americans.

You argue a diverse student body will contribute to a student's success and say Obama had a Pakistani roommate.  This implies the roommate was from Pakistan and not an American with Pakistani parents.  There are 195 countries in the world.  Your argument implies colleges should admit more foreign students, but the primary purpose of American universities is to educate Americans.

As I have written previously, what does a “diverse environment” mean?  One system of admitting college students would be a random lottery.  That would result in a “diverse environment”.  Oh, but then a large number of those students would flunk out and be burdened with student loans.  One reason they started using SAT scores and grades is that they predicted pretty accurately the chances of graduating in 4 years.  I assume you mean you want a student body from different backgrounds.  So you could set minimum SAT scores and grades and then use a random lottery of those students.

One of the great things about my college education was the intellectual stimulation I received from my classmates, most of whom were as intelligent or more intelligent than I was.  One of my freshman roommates was a black student from Ohio who wanted to become a doctor.  He dropped out after receiving his first semester’s grades.  The last I heard from him, he called me to borrow some money.

You write: “I don't think grades and SAT scores are the best indicators of a students' success in college.  If that was the case, college app essays wouldn't need to exist! Experience matters.”  Once upon a time, there were no computers.  Students had to use pens to write essays or solve math problems in order to apply to college.  These essays were laboriously graded manually and assigned scores.  They found that the high scorers did well in college.  Mankind strives to find efficient ways of doing things.  Social scientists developed multiple choice tests which could be graded much faster by machines.  They refined the tests so that the high scorers on essays also scored high on the multiple choice tests and the low scorers on essays also scored low on the multiple choice tests.  They refined the tests so that a high score indicated a high probability the student would graduate in 4 years and do well.  They called it the Scholastic Aptitude Test.  Similarly, a high credit score predicts a person will repay his debts.  An algorithm predicts the first search result on Google is what we are looking for.  No guarantee but a prediction with 70% accuracy can beat Vegas.

In addition, grades and test scores have practical significance.  If an engineer does not design the structure correctly, the bridge or building collapses.  If the pharmacist and doctor do not know their biochemistry precisely, the multiple drugs the patient takes will interact and kill him.  If the chemist does not know his science well, he can’t invent that lightweight plastic with the strength of steel.  If the biologist does not know his science well, he can’t invent the new seed which will feed millions of poor people.  If the computer scientist does not know his software code, the videogames will suck and the mobile phones won’t work.  If business people don’t know how to calculate risk, they make subprime loans to borrowers who can’t afford them (many blacks and Hispanics) and their businesses and the borrowers go bankrupt.

You object to the term "Bigot for the Left".  I first heard it in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”.  I believe he dismissed some fact or source and referred to himself as a "Bigot for the Left".

As I wrote previously, liberals run universities and favor affirmative action which reduces the number of Asian Americans in order to increase the number of blacks and hispanics.  Why don't they reduce the number of white liberals or Jews in order to increase the number of blacks and hispanics?  Because they are Bigots for the Left!

Liberals run universities.  How many Asian Americans are deans of engineering schools or medical schools?  Very, very few compared to the number of Asian American engineering and medical students.  Why?  Because liberals are Bigots for the Left!

Liberals run Hollywood.  How many Asian American men have ever played doctors on television?  None?  You can count them on one hand?  They cast an Asian American man as a nurse on “E.R.”  Why?  Because they are Bigots for the Left!

Bill Clinton and Bill Richardson are liberals.  They locked up Wen Ho Lee in shackles and in solitary confinement to coerce a confession from him.  Why?  Because they are Bigots for the Left!  The judge who apologized to Dr. Lee is a Republican.

In light of the above, I submit Bigot for the Left is an accurate term.

Don W. Joe
Asian American Politics
www.asianam.org

hey don... keeping the SAT II would only have benefited 86 Asian Americans. Dropping the SAT II benefits almost 4,000 Asian Americans.

Doing my own data crunching, I found that some folks were wiggin out for nothing. When it comes down to it, 4,000 MORE Asian Americans can apply to the UC when the SAT II requirement is dropped.

The new policy has ZILCH to do with actual admissions.  It's called the "Entitled to REview" policy for one main reason... because it's about WHO CAN HAVE THEIR APPLICATION REVIEWED.  that's it. it has nothing to do with who will actually be admitted, because the policies for actual admissions at each of the 9 campuses remain untouched by the new policy.

Sorry to tell you, but this is not the policy you think it is.

By the way, ALL RESEARCH shows that SAT I and SAT II are very unrealiable at telling us how well a student will do in college. Everyone from the left to the right can agree on that. So it's NOT a fair, unbiased test. If anything, they're USELESS tests. Why keep a useless test around?

spamfriedrice,

Re: the stats you provided, where can I find the study which produced the stats?

I looked for the study with the stats you cited, but did not readily find it.  I did find this 2001 University of California paper which concluded high school GPA plus SAT II was the best predictor of freshman college grades.  It also provides a brief history of the SAT which Conrad should read before dismissing my description of the development of the SAT as a "fantasy".

www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/committees/boars/admissiontests.pdf

Don W. Joe
Asian American Politics
www.asianam.org

Thanks

True, in 2001, the SATII was more reliable. However, since 2005, the SAT I has changed considerably by adding a writing portion, thus making the SAT II irrelevant and redundant to the SAT I. Also... a writing test is just more valid in predicting college success, as few exams and learning in college involves skills in taking multiple choice tests. Rather, in college, students are expected to articulate and write essays, research papers, etc.

Take a look at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=330

and even Atkinson and Geiser admit in: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=335 that any standardized test only explains about 5% of the variation and that GPA is the most reliable and best predictor of college success.

I won't even go into the research that shows how racially and class biased the SAT is.

You can't find the study on the impacts of the new UC policy, because my report hasn't been published yet. you can email me at spamfriedrice@apaforprogress.org and I'll send you my analyses, which started with the assumption that the new policy might harm Asian Americans. Based on the empirical data, I had to conclude that the policy would benefit Asian Americans and all other students.

Do I believe some private institutions are practicing racial quotas on Asian Americans? Maybe. However, Proposition 209 precludes the UC from doing so. And as a former UC admissions reader, even if I wanted to give a boost to certain students over others, there was no way I could.

Bottom line: the new UC policy is called "Entitled to Review" because it's about who can get their applications read. It does not change how students are admitted to different UC campuses.

Conrad,

The Limits of Growth was a book published in 1972.  Events have discredited it.  Due to advances in seed technology and the adoption of the free market, India and China are able to feed their populations.  Even though world population has increased since 1972, the world has not run out of oil or other energy sources.

Women are already empowered.  Many countries have had women leaders: Israel, India, Ireland, Germany, Argentina, etc.  Many states have had women governors: Michigan, Alaska, etc.  Many companies have had women chief executive officers: Hewlett Packard, eBay, Pepsico, Xerox, etc.

Sorry, discriminating against Asian Americans to benefit blacks and hispanics is wrong, just as discriminating against blacks and hispanics to benefit Asian Americans is wrong.  We need to use race-neutral selection criteria.

Don W. Joe
Asian American Politics
www.asianam.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20douthat.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

July 20, 2009

Race in 2028

By ROSS DOUTHAT

During last week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Republican senators kept bringing the conversation back to 2001 — the year when Sonia Sotomayor delivered the most famous version of her line about how a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences” might outshine a white male judge.

It was left to a Democratic senator, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, to ask about the much more interesting year of 2028.

By then, according to recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, some kinds of affirmative action may no longer be permissible. In 2003, writing for the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, Sandra Day O’Connor upheld race-based discrimination in college admissions ... but only for the current generation. Such policies “must be limited in time,” she wrote, adding that “the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

It was a characteristic O’Connor move: unmoored from any high constitutional principle but not without a certain political shrewdness. In a nation that aspires to colorblindness, her opinion acknowledged, affirmative action can only be justified if it comes with a statute of limitations. Allowing reverse discrimination in the wake of segregation is one thing. Discriminating in the name of diversity indefinitely is quite another.

It’s doubtful, though, that Sonia Sotomayor shares this view.

“It is firmly my hope, as it was expressed by Justice O’Connor,” she told Senator Kohl, “that in 25 years, race in our society won’t be needed to be considered in any situation.”

But O’Connor didn’t hope; she expected. And Sotomayor’s record suggests that there’s a considerable difference between these postures — that for the nominee, as for most liberal jurists, as long as racial disparities persist, so too must racial preferences.

This is the big question underlying both the “wise Latina” contretemps and the controversy surrounding Sotomayor’s role in Ricci v. DeStefano. Whither affirmative action in an age of America’s first black president? Will it be gradually phased out, as the Supreme Court’s conservatives seem to prefer? Or will it endure well into this century and beyond?

To affirmative action’s defenders, Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings have been an advertisement for the latter course. Here you have a Hispanic woman being grilled by a collection of senators who embody, quite literally, the white male power structure. Her chief Republican interlocutor, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, even has a history of racially charged remarks.

But the senators are yesterday’s men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama.

The nation’s largest states, Texas and California, already have “minority” majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, “every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.”

As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go. The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action; the de facto racial preferences required of employers by anti-discrimination law should disappear.

A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority. If affirmative action exists in the America of 2028, it will be as a spoils system for the already-successful, a patronage machine for politicians — and a source of permanent grievance among America’s shrinking white population.

You can see this landscape taking shape in academia, where the quest for diversity is already as likely to benefit the children of high-achieving recent immigrants as the descendants of slaves. You can see it in the backroom dealing revealed by Ricci v. DeStefano, where the original decision to deny promotions to white firefighters was heavily influenced by a local African-American “kingmaker” with a direct line to New Haven’s mayor. You can hear it in the resentments gathering on the rightward reaches of the talk-radio dial.

And you can see the outlines of a different, better future in the closing passages of Barack Obama’s recent address to the N.A.A.C.P., in which the president presented an insistent vision of black America as the master of its own fate.

Affirmative action has always been understandable, but never ideal. It congratulates its practitioners on their virtue, condescends to its beneficiaries, and corrodes the racial attitudes of its victims.

All of this could be defended as a temporary experiment. But if affirmative action persists far into the American future, that experiment will have failed — and we will all have been corrupted by it.

Paul Krugman is off today.

Don, with all respect, I'm not sure what are you trying to do here.

You're citing a column written by a conservative writer on the NY Times. Were you under the assumption (like all devotees of Rush Limbaugh) that the NY Times is strictly liberal?

CONBUSTING 1: While I admit that Grutter v. Bollinger does mandate an expectation that AA policies will no longer be in use by 2028, the author fails to paint an accurate accounting of history. As conservative written columns often do when citing a "liberal," Douthat cherry picks Republican appointee O'Conner's Opinion to fit his own political purpose. If you actually read O'Conner's Opinion she also writes that "we endorse Justice Powellí's view that student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify the use of race in university admissions." Nowhere in the Opinion does she say "in a nation that aspires to colorblindness;" rather, it is her OPINION that "government" use of race must have a logical end point because of her interpretation of the 14th Amendment. This opinion is only shared mildly by Ginsburg and Breyer who disagree with the sunset provision (From today's vantage point, one may hope, but not firmly forecast, that over the next generation's span, progress toward nondiscrimination and genuinely equal opportunity will make it safe to sunset affirmative action.) The author doesn't even bother to quote Scalia, et al. I assume it's because their opinions are so out of the norm.

CONBUSTING 2: The author makes it seem that an "activist" Sotomayor enacted racial discrimination against Ricci et al. The author's just reciting RNC talking points here and ignoring the facts of the case. Sotomayor's 3-member panel on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals decided to issue an "unsigned" opinion. It means the ruling was "per curiam." There was no dissent amongst the 3 judge panel because there was no dispute that the promotion tests in Ricci had a prima facie disparate impact. If the city had finished through with their contract with IOS, the Supreme Court would have undoubtedly not reversed the decision of the 2nd Circuit.

CONBUSTING 3: Conservatives think that Affirmative Action is simply a ploy to advance minorities into territories already trenched by old, white men. Untrue. The Number 1 benefactor for Affirmative Action policies is white women. True story. Affirmative Action is a tool designed to address systemic racism. Why don't you check this Youtube video out? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3ZL3O2NNus

CONBUSTING 4: Even if blacks, latinos, and asian americans gain to constitute a majority population in certain areas of the USA, systemic racism will still exist. Most likely for more than 25 years. This will continue to exist until we get better, free public education that doesn't lead to disparities in achievement for lower-income, minority students.

Don, I agree with you that Affirmative Action is not an ideal policy. But, it's not even 2028 yet. To call it a form of "discrimination" only serves to prove to me how entitled and priviledged you feel. Quite frankly, it's elitist. It's also very clear to me that you're okay with that. But, I'm not. Respect this whole thing as a difference in opinion and let it go.

However, if you go out and start spewing out BS like you have, then I feel compelled to step in. FINALLY, IS IT NOT CLEAR TO YOU YET THAT THE NEW UC ADMISSION POLICY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION?

EVEN IF the UCs re-implemented Affirmative Action, by the California Master Plan for Higher Education, every minority candidate will qualify for the strict eligibility requirements set for the UCs (eg. top X% of the high school graduating class). Thus, no minority admitted into the UC will be so underqualified as you so insist. The only logical way to come up to your conclusions is to just straight up ignore the important facts and lie your way through it. It's irrational and close to the elements of faith than reality.

Nice try, come again.

Only 57% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar.  43% do not become lawyers.  All are saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt.

8/24/07 Wall Street Journal: Affirmative Action Backfires,
by Gail Heriot
    Ms. Heriot is professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
    Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action -- and indeed, among those who were not.  
    Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions -- about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.  
    No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander's study, "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the "mismatch thesis" can be definitively accepted or rejected.  
    Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you -- or anyone else -- to know.  
    Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.  
    Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for this data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens -- university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders -- have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.  
    If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know.  
    The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hopes that it can persuade the State Bar to reconsider. Its soon-to-be released report on affirmative action in law schools specifically calls for state bar authorities to cooperate with qualified scholars studying the mismatch issue. The recommendation is modest. The commission doesn't claim that Mr. Sander is right or his critics wrong. It simply seeks to encourage and facilitate important research.  
    The Commission's deeper purpose is to remind those who support and administer affirmative action polices that good intentions are not enough. Consequences also matter. And conscious, deliberately chosen ignorance is not a good-faith option.  
    Mr. Sander's original article noted that when elite law schools lower their academic standards in order to admit a more racially diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel they must do the same. As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.  
    Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.  
    The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.  
    Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be true -- that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.  
    Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.  
    Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials. Something is wrong.  
    The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.  
    Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.  
    Mr. Sander has his critics -- some thoughtful, some just strident -- but so far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn't need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.  
    Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a wash -- neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.  
    Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?  
    The most important other recommendation of the Civil Rights Commission is a call for transparency. As a matter of consumer fairness, law school applicants -- regardless of race -- need to know the statistical likelihood that someone with their academic credentials will successfully graduate and pass the bar. Once informed, they can better decide whether to undertake the risk of attending that particular school, or any law school at all. If law schools are unwilling to undertake this simple reform, it should be mandated by law.  
    Under current practices, law school applicants are at the mercy of admissions officers for that information; it is almost never provided except on a class-wide basis where success rates are positively misleading. Minority students whose academic credentials are substantially below their average classmates are lulled into believing that they are just as likely to graduate and pass the bar. When they don't, they may be stuck with the bills, not to mention the loss of several years of their lives.  
    The problem is that the admissions officer's job is to enroll students, not to draw the risks of failure to their attention. Indeed, in some cases, the officer may be frantic to enroll minority students in order to comply with the stringent new diversity standards of the American Bar Association Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. As the federal government's accrediting agency for law schools, the ABA Council determines whether a law school will be eligible for the federal student-loan program. The law school that fails to satisfy its diversity requirements does so at its peril -- as a number of law school deans can amply attest.  
    Decades of law students have relied upon the good faith of law school officials to tell them what they needed to know. For the 43% of black law students who never became lawyers, maybe that reliance was misplaced.

Sanding Down Sander

The debunker of affirmative action gets debunked.

By Emily Bazelon

Posted Friday, April 29, 2005, at 11:25 AM ET

Last winter, UCLA law professor Richard Sander was in demand as the debunker of affirmative action after publishing a Stanford Law Review article that said race-based preferences in law-school admissions reduce the number of black law students who pass the bar and become lawyers. Sander's more-harm-than-good claim landed him lots of press coverage and guest spots on NPR's Morning Edition and Fox's Hannity & Colmes. At that point, few statisticians had scrutinized Sander's results—like most law reviews, Stanford's isn't peer-reviewed—and his critics were pretty easy to stuff. "Several people have replicated my study," Sander said on Hannity & Colmes. "And I think it holds up very well."

Except that it doesn't. In May, the law reviews of Stanford and Yale will publish a batch of responses to Sander that destroy his key conclusion that pushing African-Americans into better and tougher schools causes them to fail the bar in droves.

On average, black law students get poorer grades than white law students—in their first year, half of them are in the bottom tenth of their classes. They also drop out of law school more often and pass the bar at lower rates. A database of about 27,500 law students from 160 schools collected by the Law School Admissions Council in 1991 shows that 83 percent of whites graduated and passed the bar within five years of entering law school, while only about 58 percent of blacks did. 

Everyone in the current fight agrees that those numbers are very bad news. The dispute is over the reasons behind them. Sander argues that, thanks to affirmative action, black students are overmatched by their classmates, who on average enter with better undergraduate grades and higher LSAT scores. Low grades in turn make them less likely to rise to the challenge of passing the bar—and even to become good lawyers. As Sanders put it on Morning Edition, "If you're in the very bottom of your class, you're not getting as good an education as you would if you'd be at the middle of the class in another school."

There's something to be said for this point. Many of us unfondly remember the torment of a too-challenging class. If it happened repeatedly, it could be confidence-shredding. The problem with Sander's analysis, the "mismatch effect," as he calls it, is that it accounts for all the difference in performance between black and white law students. He doesn't account for the roles played by differences in family income or quality of undergraduate education, or for stereotype threat, the negative effect on black performance caused by being viewed through a racial lens, demonstrated by the Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele. In Sander's reductionist account, the struggle of many black students to do well in law school and pass the bar is entirely due to affirmative action for hoisting them into schools they can't hack. Sander even claims to precisely quantify the results. Race-based preferences pull about 14 percent more black students into law school than otherwise would be admitted. But affirmative action causes so many of those students to fail the bar, Sander asserts, that the net gain of eliminating it would be an increase in the number of black lawyers of 7.9 percent.

The forthcoming responses to Sander pounce on several of his moves (which they call causal inferences). To begin with, there is the problem of "post-treatment bias," which means that it's a bad idea to control for a factor that is itself a consequence of the cause you're studying. That no-no is explained by Daniel Ho, a Yale law student with a Harvard Ph.D., in a forthcoming issue of the Yale Law Journal. (Here's Ho's piece; here's my brief summary.) When Ho ran his own tests, he found that attending a more elite school has "no detectable effect" on the rate at which similarly qualified black students pass the bar.

A different attack comes from Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, who, like Sander, hold Ph.D.s in economics and who are professors at Yale Law School (where I taught a course this spring and last). Ayres and Brooks manipulate the data to eliminate the admissions boost that affirmative action gives black students. They find that eliminating affirmative action reduces the number of black lawyers by close to 12.7 percent, rather than increasing it by Sander's 7.9 percent. Then they throw a second punch. Ideally, the way to test whether affirmative action does more harm than good, using Sander's measures, would be to compare the law-school grades and bar-passage rates of students who went to Harvard and Fordham with students who were admitted to the same schools but chose to attend lower-ranked ones. There are no such data. But Ayres and Brooks do the next best thing—they compare black students who went to their first-choice school, which is presumably more elite, to those who attended a lower-choice school. The entering credentials of the first-choice and lower-choice groups turn out to be quite similar. And so do their bar-passage rates. The wrinkle in the story is that the black students who do the best on the bar exam, relatively speaking, are the ones who attend the top schools and historically black schools like Howard law school in Washington, D.C. Which is ironic, since Howard has long gotten slammed for the problems its students have with the bar, and another reason why this comparison is a useful one.

Sander is vulnerable on other fronts. He assumes that in a world without law-school affirmative action, lots of black students would still choose to study law, even though they'd be reduced on many campuses from 8 percent of the student population to 1 or maybe 2 percent. Assuming that other professional schools continued to admit higher numbers of black students, it's hard to see why many wouldn't begin choosing medicine or business over law, as this paper points out. In a different critique, Harvard law professor David Wilkins worries about thinning the ranks of black students at the most elite schools. They're the ones most likely to become part of well-connected networks, and they are the pool from which the big law firms overwhelmingly draw their black partners. Wilkins also takes a longer view and argues that Sander's concern about the fate of black law students turns out to be misplaced: Five years to 15 years after graduation, they earn significantly more on average than other black college graduates. And Wilkins points out that Sander never questions the utility and value of the bar exam itself—which probably puts him in the minority of those who have taken it, assuming he has. One way to increase the number of black lawyers might be to write a test that relies less on trick multiple-choice questions, or to convince the state bar associations that administer the exam to quit failing more and more would-be lawyers each year, as several have taken to doing. (Fewer new lawyers means less competition.)

What does Sander have to say for himself, once the bloodletting is done? Not much that helps him. In a rebuttal that Stanford also will publish, he wags a finger at Ayres and Brooks, chiding that "this is not their best work or their finest hour." He also compares his work to Galileo's. That's not really the comparison that springs to mind. Instead, I finished reading and felt relieved that Sander came along after the Supreme Court had decided to uphold some forms of affirmative action, in a 2003 suit against the University of Michigan's law school. Maybe affirmative action isn't a great long-term solution to the problem of black underperformance. Improving the kindergarten-on education of black students seems a lot better. But if affirmative action gets cut down, it shouldn't be by the sword of Richard Sander.

And to add salt to injury, from a WSJ Article:

Critics Assail Study of Race, Law Students

Friday, November 5, 2004

Prof. Sander, who describes himself as a lifelong Democrat sympathetic to the goals of affirmative action, claims that abolishing preferences wouldn't reduce the number of black lawyers. In fact, he estimates it would likely increase the cohort of black attorneys emerging from the Class of 2004 by 8% and the number of those passing the bar the first time by 22%.

You first endorse Sandra Day O'Connor and now you endorse the views of a lifelong Democrat?  I realize that desperate times require desperate measures... but, check your sources, Don.

Nice try, come again.

But consider all the positive benefits: The longer it takes for the no-hopers to fail and drop out, the longer they'll be off the unemployment figures. Plus, the universities who support 

and sign-up for the scheme will receive the extra funding anyway, since they'll be blame-free when they fail to retain the lost causes.

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