Abstract: While the Supreme Court upheld some affirmative action programs asconstitutional in 2003, the wisdom of affirmative action as a policy decision remains hotlycontested. In the law school context, the challenge is to determine how affirmative action policiesaffect law schools, law students, and the legal profession. This paper takes up one strand of thischallenge, estimating how minority students would fare in a world with different affirmativeaction policies than those currently implemented.I posit a model of law school performance that controls for entering credentials andallows for a "mismatch" between student and school (where the student is outmatch by his fellowstudents). The model also allows for differences in the law school experience for students ofdifferent races, which may be the result of discrimination or other differences in the way that lawschool cultures affect students. The results indicate that, if anything, reverse mismatch boosts theperformance of students with low credentials. Using monte carlo simulations of graduation andbar passage with bootstrapped standard errors, I find that removing affirmative action policiesdecreases the number of new black lawyers each year by 13.4% ± 5.2%. This is in direct conflictwith a recent study by Richard Sander that estimates an increase in the number of new blacklawyers. Sander, however, assumes that there is no discriminatory effect on law studentperformance, and therefore confounds discriminatory effects with the mismatch effect in hisanalysis.Finally, recognizing that the data upon which I and others rely is imperfect and unable toprovide a definitive answer regarding whether the mismatch theory applies in the law schoolcontext, I suggest some experimental additions to the data to correct for these problems.
BAFF, and hoping for Miss P's sake that the racist trolls don't gobble up this thread.
Quote from: Memories of the OPC on February 11, 2007, 02:45:02 AMBAFF, and hoping for Miss P's sake that the racist trolls don't gobble up this thread.Oh, let them. I'm just putting this out there.
Um, no. Schools admit non-URM students with "below-average" numbers every year, who have other factors that may contribute to law school success in the eyes of the admissions office (unmeasured credentials). The meaning in the above sentence as seen later in the paper is of measured credentials. That's a major difference.URMs, on the contrary, are admitted with lower numbers solely due to a URM boost. And I daresay that URM-status is not a contributing factor to law school success (or failure).