Unqualified Minorities?

As most of you know by now, the Supreme Court supported the use of race in law school admissions in June, 2003.  In 2002, the 6th Circuit had reversed the lower court in the U. of Michigan case.  The two most important points in the extensive decision of the 6th Circuit (82 pages, according to my printer), are:

• Bakke is still the law of the land: and
• Diversity is a valid goal in selecting participants in educational programs.  

I asked a Michigan-based client what the local scoop was, and the answer was twofold:  

1. We don't want unqualified professionals; and

2. White males are being disadvantaged.  

In response, I decided to engage in my favorite reality-testing exercise: I number-crunched.  After much  internal debate, I decided not to put the numbers themselves up here -- too much chance of inviting the animosity of certain schools.  But I learned quite a lot:

• I started by looking at who actually fills the seats at all the law schools in the ABA book.  I took the reports of race and gender for 182 ABA-approved law schools, threw them into an Excel spreadsheet, and this is what I saw:
  • Overall, 51% of all law students are male, 42% are white males, and 78% are white.  At the top 25 and the top 50 (I did two separate calculations), 41% are white males, 52% are male.
  • At 40 schools, more than half of all students are white males.  
  • At 133 schools, more than half the students are male.  
• Next, I did a rough sort by region of the country.  Here's what I saw:
  • In the Northeast (DC and points north, no more than 100 or so miles inland), only 40% of all students are white male, 50% male.  76% are white.
  • In both the midwest (which I defined as everything from Pittsburgh and Buffalo through to the Rockies, excluding the "south" as defined by Civil War and Civil Rights days) and the Rockies (a north-south strip roughly west of Texas and east of California), 46% of all students are white males, and 53% are male.  83% are white.
  • In the south, 44% are white males, 53% are male, but only 78% are white.  This must mean that women of color either apply in greater percentages than white women or outperform them on the standard indicators that law schools consider.  (Both anecdotal evidence and statistical data support both claims as regards college students, but I know of no studies of law school applicants that give breakdowns by both race and gender.)
  • Only on the west coast are white males enrolled in noticeably low proportions.  Only 35% of all law students on the strip of land from Seattle to San Diego are white males; only 49% are male; and only 69% are white.  One should note, of course, that the majority of west coast minorities are Asian, who in fact are discriminated against nonetheless (see below).  
• In deciding whether these results are "reasonable," I looked at applicant pool data published by Law Services.  This data shows applicants to all law schools collectively, not data about individual schools.  Here's what I learned:
  • Whites are taken in overwhelmingly high numbers; 74% of all white applicants are accepted at some law school.  
  • Only 68% of Asians are accepted, even though their median gpa and LSAT are higher than those for Caucasians.  Comparing individual grid boxes (e.g., 3.25-3.49, 160-164), Asians are accepted in lower percentages than their white peers in virtually every box at or above the national medians.  
  • The "traditional" minorities (Black, Chicano and Puerto Rican) are taken at rates lower than 50%; lower than 45% for two of those three groups).  
  • Women are also slightly disadvantaged.  Although 51% of all applicants are women, 51% of all those accepted and enrolled are men.  

Now, as to the "we don't want unqualified minorities" line, I would assume we don't want unqualified white folk, either.  Yet a number of admissions officers have told me that the rock bottom lowest numbers they took are not for minorities, but for children of wealthy alumni donors.  I guess rich counts as qualified, huh?

And my absolute last point on the subject (for now) is that those people with outrageously low numbers at Michigan or some other top school are not "unqualified."  They have higher numbers than the white students at schools lower down the line.  In fact, I would wager that the minorities at Michigan have higher average GPAs and LSATs than the white kids at Wayne State, the second-ranked Michigan school.  There are schools -- ABA approved law schools, whose students graduate and pass the bar exam -- whose 75th percentile GPA and LSAT are lower than the bottom of the class at top tier schools.  "Qualified" is an incredibly malleable word.  

I hope that you have found this actual data as illuminating as I have.  It's always interesting to see where the perceptions and the reality diverge.