"A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools"

[rekopter]

Has anyone read Richard Sander's paper: "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools"

It's available here http://www.law.ucla.edu/sander/Systemic/final/SanderFINAL.pdf

Here's the introduction

For the past thirty-five years, American higher education has been engaged in a massive social experiment: to determine whether the use of racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions could speed the process of fully integrating American society. Since Bakke,1 universities have often tended to justify affirmative action for its contributions to diverse classrooms and campuses. But the overriding justification for affirmative action has always been its impact on minorities. Few of us would enthusiastically support preferential admission policies if we did not believe they played a powerful, irreplaceable role in giving nonwhites in America access to higher education, entrée to the national elite, and a chance of correcting historic underrepresentations in the leading professions.

I've read most of it and it is quite provocative. Any other thoughts?

[john jacob]

The biggest flaw I've seen in reports like this is the assumption that prestige = academic difficulty.

The fact that transfer students from low-ranked schools to high-ranked schools tend to stay at the top of the class at their new transfer schools is evidence that more selective schools are not any more rigorous than lower ranked ones.

[roygbiv]

Primarily because it's hard to refute statistically and it's not PC to agree with him.

Some more discussion here: http://www.lawschooldiscussion.org/students/index.php/topic,6574.msg52219.html#msg52219

Hello_world: If you put together a law school with half of the students scoring 155s and the other half scoring 175s, don't you think that the vast majority of the top of the class is going to come out of the 175 group? Of course there are exceptions (e.g., transfers), but let's get real here.

[philibusters]

The biggest flaw I've seen in reports like this is the assumption that prestige = academic difficulty.

The fact that transfer students from low-ranked schools to high-ranked schools tend to stay at the top of the class at their new transfer schools is evidence that more selective schools are not any more rigorous than lower ranked ones.

I haven't read the article, but from the blurb I am going to guess thats not what he is driving at is that AA doesn't increase the amount of URM in the legal field.

[Lindbergh]

The biggest flaw I've seen in reports like this is the assumption that prestige = academic difficulty.

Given that prestigious schools have higher academic standards, this appears more of a logical conclusion than an assumption, at least in terms of class-rank.

The fact that transfer students from low-ranked schools to high-ranked schools tend to stay at the top of the class at their new transfer schools is evidence that more selective schools are not any more rigorous than lower ranked ones.

Link?