Minorities In Law Schools: Integrating A Burning House?

One of the common refrains from angry or frustrated black activists — like James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and on at least one occasion even Martin Luther King, Jr. — has been to question the wisdom of “integrating a burning house.”

I thought of that old concern in reading the following passage in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the increasing minorities presence in law schools:

Legal education has been ground zero for practically all of the major challenges facing higher education: rising tuition, rising student debt, a contracted job market, and resulting questions about the utility and value of the degree. Unsurprisingly, there has been a steady drumbeat of bad publicity that has exposed the sausage-making side of law schools to unprecedented scrutiny.

As a result, applications are down more than a third in just three years. First-year enrollments are at their lowest levels in almost 40 years and down 24 percent since the rec­ord high just three years ago. Moreover, declining Law School Admission Test registrations, a proverbial canary, suggest those enrollment trends have yet to bottom out.

That has led colleges to lay off faculty and staff members and to revisit pricing strategies; a few have even gone as far as lowering tuition to attract more students—an unthinkable move during the boom. But lost in the din of negativity is a milestone that deserves cautious celebration: Law schools, as a whole, are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever.

Today, students of color account for 26 percent of all law students. Ten years ago, the proportion was 21 percent; 40 years ago, it was 10 percent….

Now that minorities are appearing in force, no doubt due in no small part to aggressive “diversity” admissions, jobs for law school graduates are drying up:

Today’s legal job market is fairly grim. Depending on which set of statistics you believe, the number of available jobs for those will law degrees will meet or exceed the number of law school graduates by 2016, 2017 or 2021.

Worry about the degree of minority presence in law schools these days is beginning to sound like undue concern over whether the Titanic‘s passengers and crew were sufficiently diverse.