My Keloland colleague, Todd Epp has a piece on his primary web site calling for more minority lawyers. It is a serious argument, and I sympathize with the premise: that more minority lawyers (doctors, computer technicians, etc.,) would be in general a good thing. Based on that premise, Epp opposes efforts to roll back affirmative action.
For the civil rights movement to advance and for those who have not always shared in the American dream to get their chance, we need to make sure there are spots for those smart kids with lower LSATs who will make perfectly good—even great—attorneys. Then, someday, can the full effect of Dr. King’s dream be realized.
But there are a lot of problems with this argument. First, if the LSAT is effectively blocking smart kids who would make perfectly good lawyers, shouldn't Epp be pushing for the abolition of that test? Second, we have been practicing affirmative action in almost all public institutions of higher learning for decades. The racial disproportion among the professions has hardly gone away. Why expect that you will get different results in the future?
More importantly, affirmative action has serious social costs. Affirmative action is clearly correlated with low graduation rates for minority students. See Thomas Sowell:
At the flagship University of Colorado at Boulder, test score differences between black and white students have been more than 200 points -- and only 39 percent of the black students graduated, compared to 72 percent of white students. Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado at Denver, where the SAT score difference was a negligible 30 points, there was also a negligible difference in graduation rates -- 50 percent for blacks and 48 percent for whites.
In other words, affirmative action adjustments such as Todd advocates are either 1) too small to have a big impact; or 2) they have pernicious effects on the very groups they are supposed to benefit.
You are not doing anybody a favor by sending them where they are more likely to fail, rather than where they are more likely to succeed. Critics of racial preferences and quotas have been saying that for more than 30 years, and now the data back them up -- which may be why you don't hear much about those data.
A significant portion of Black and Hispanic students are less well-prepared academically than their White and Asian counterparts when they leave high school and contemplate college. Until we figure out how to fix that, the problem won't go away. Affirmative action may make White liberals like Todd feel better about themselves, but it is snake oil as a remedy. It is also at least a little bit toxic.
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