Massive New Study Of Affirmative Action Underway

Long-time readers will know that I have referred often to the work of UCLA law professor Richard Sander on the effect of “diversity” in law school admissions, especially his “mismatch” theory that racial preferences have actually tended to reduce the number of black lawyers by placing black law students in institutions where they cluster at the bottom of their classes, fail to finish law school, and fail the bar exam in highly disproportionate numbers. My most recent discussion is here, dealing with the outrageous refusal of the California Bar Association to allow Sander and a team of scholars access to its data. Some earlier discussions can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Despite efforts of groups like the California Bar Association, however, in the long run it is difficult to prevent scholars from doing research. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports today, Sander has organized a national consortium of about 30 professors and graduate students from various disciplines to study the effects of affirmative action.

…. In an interview last week, Mr. Sander said most of the researchers involved with the new consortium “are advocates of affirmative action” but “think we need to avoid doing things that are harmful.”

The research consortium is known as Project Seaphe, with the acronym standing for Scale and Effect of Admissions Preferences in Higher Education. Its members, who include sociologists, economists, and law professors, intend to undertake at least 18 different studies using the information they obtain from higher-education institutions, with the tentative goal of discussing their findings at a conference sometime in 2009, Mr. Sander said.

The group has submitted freedom-of-information requests to nearly all of the nation’s more than 80 public law schools. About 20 promptly gave the consortium the student data it sought, and most seem willing to fulfill the consortium’s information request, Mr. Sander said.

Some, however, are more willing than others.

Charles E. Daye, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has harshly criticized Mr. Sander’s past research as biased against affirmative action, expressed suspicion that Project Seaphe had some sort of agenda. “I am not going to characterize the study,” he said, but “I can tell you they have a project that is on a mission.”

I wonder what he would have said if he had characterized it. “Despite his misgivings about Project Seaphe,” however,

Mr. Daye has agreed to provide the consortium with the findings of his own pending study on diversity on law-school campuses. Although he is not yet ready to release his results, he said, he is obliged to share such information under the terms of the Law School Admission Council grant financing his research.

Much obliged.

In what may be a preview of what the data collected by Project Seaphe will show, in a pending lawsuit challenging Michigan’s Prop. 2 the University of Michigan has released data for three of the 11 years requested — 2004, 2005, and 2006.

In a written statement submitted to the court in October, Mr. Sander said the data show “very large disparities in bar passage rates across racial lines,” with black graduates of the law school being about eight times as likely as white graduates of the law school to fail state bar examinations on their first attempt.

Prof. Sander’s work argues that many of those black Michigan law graduates who failed the bar exam would have passed if they had attended less selective law schools where their grades would have been better and their background and abilities were more closely aligned with those other students. But that question aside, I also wonder how many more black lawyers Michigan produced than it would have produced without the preferences extended to black applicants.

Consider the following data from Judge Bernard Friedman’s district court opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, which I quoted and discussed here. Judge Friedman in the passage below is referring to the effect of racial preferences presented by the University of Michigan’s own expert witness, Dr. Stephen Raudenbush:

In Dr. Raudenbush’s view, a “race-blind” admissions system would have a “very dramatic,” negative effect on minority admissions but only a slight effect on non-minority admissions, due to the vastly greater number of non-minority applicants. In the year 2000, 35% of underrepresented minority applicants and 40% of non-minority applicants were admitted. See Exhibit 187. Dr. Raudenbush predicted that if race were not considered, then only 10% of underrepresented minority applicants and 44% of non-minority applicants would be admitted. If correct, this would mean that in the year 2000 only 46 underrepresented minority applicants would have been admitted (instead of 170 who actually were admitted), of whom only 16 would enroll (instead of 58 who actually enrolled). Under this scenario, underrepresented minority students would have constituted 4% of the entering class in 2000, instead of 14.5% as actually occurred. See Exhibit 189.

In other, fewer, words, according to Dr. Raudenbush, for the class admitted in 2000:

• 170 “underrepresented minorities” were preferentially offered admission.

• 58 of them enrolled, making up 14.5% of the total entering class of 400 students.
• Under “race-blind” admissions, 46 minorities would have been offered admission and 16 of them, 4% of the entering class, would have enrolled.

Thus, the above class contained 42 students (about 10% of the entering class of around 400) who Michigan acknowledges would not have been admitted but for their race (the 58 who actually enrolled minus the 16 who would would have enrolled even without the preferences). Applying the results Prof. Sander found in the Michigan data for 2004–2006 to the above numbers, those 42 preferentially admitted students failed the bar exam at a rate 8 times higher than their peers who were admitted without preferences.

I haven’t seen the actual numbers, but it would be useful to know how many of the 42 did pass. That number — 5, 10, 15, whatever it is — is the measure of what Michigan accomplished with its preferences. And the cost of those few numbers? As I noted in my post linked above:

Thus, according to Michigan, 124 white, Asian, or unpreferred minority applicants were prevented from attending the UM law school in one year because of their race or ethnicity. The 2000 entering class of 400 students contained 42 students, or a bit over 10% of the class, who in Michigan’s estimation would not have been there if their race or ethnicity had not been taken into account. 27% of the “underrepresented minorities” who applied would have been accepted under a non-discriminatory, colorblind admissions system; 73% of those who were offered admission would not have been admitted without the racial preference they were given. Thus, 124 whites, Asians, etc., who would have been admitted under a race-blind admissions system were denied admission in order to produce a yield of 42 more “underrepresented minority” admits than a race-blind system would have produced, or about three race-based denials for every one of the preferentially admitted entering students. [Emphasis added]

Whatever else they may be, racial preferences are a pretty expensive proposition, however one calculates the cost of depriving 124 applicants of an opportunity they sought because of their race.