Mismatch & Affirmative Action

Mismatch & Affirmative Action

I've mentioned before that affirmative action in education doesn't just injure whites and Asians--it also damages the supposed beneficiaries of it as well, because it encourages minorities to attend colleges where they will be in over their heads. A high school senior with a B- average and 60th percentile SAT scores gets recruited into UC Berkeley--and fails, where he might have gone to San Jose State and graduated. A high school senior with a B+ average and 90th percentile SATs gets lured into Harvard--and drops out during the first year--who might have graduated from UC Berkeley. But as long as the liberals that run the universities feel good about themselves for being so open-minded--who cares what happens to the dropouts?

Back in 2004, there was apparently a study of this issue with respect to law schools--and the conclusion was similar--that the elite law schools were using affirmative action programs to get minority students in the door who were simply not adequately prepared to compete with other students (including other minorities) who were admitted under the standard admissions criteria.

There's a new study out discussed in the September 3, 2008 Inside Higher Education that somewhat confirms the mismatch hypothesis--but also argues that without affirmative action, only the very bottom tier of law schools would have as many black students as they do now:

But the new research — using simulations of admissions without affirmative action — finds that race-neutral policies wouldn’t send black students to law schools where they would do better. Rather there would be a huge falloff in black law enrollments — far more than might be counteracted by some black students doing better on bar exams. The elimination of race-based admissions policies, the authors write, would lead to a 63 percent decline in black matriculants at all law schools and a 90 percent decline at elite law schools, the paper says. Even if some positive impact took place in the experience of black students who did enroll, there would be at least a 50 percent reduction in the production of black lawyers, they write.

Why is this? Because even the bottom tier of law schools are actually very difficult to get into--and the number of blacks who can meet the very demanding standards of the LSAT is, relative to the number of blacks entering law school--quite small. A rational person would, at this point, start to ask, "Uh, maybe we need to fix this problem a little farther back then admission to law school? Is there something hopelessly broken in either the schools that American blacks are attending, or in the culture in which American blacks are growing up?" But hey: why bother? It is so much easier to just keep admitting underqualified applicants who can then drop out of law school, or fail to pass the bar exam.

When the goal isn't to fix the problem--but to make liberals feel better about themselves--results don't much matter.