Frustrated non-URM

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>This is not a racist rant by any means. I am just frustrated and do not understand why someone with a similar background as me but a different race can try half as hard to get into law school.</p>

<p>For example, my roommate, who is a good friend of mine, can go to a 1st tier school with a 3.6/150. If I apply with those stats, they will laugh in my face. We come from almost identical financial backgrounds, and the only thing I can see different between us is that she gets to check URM and I do not. I KNOW life isn't fair. But that is not the answer to my question. I am wondering why I have to work my ass off to get somewhere my roommate can sleep her way to.</p>

<p>I am not saying all URMs have lower GPAs and lower LSAT scores. Repeat: I am not saying that, and will never say that. But my roommate has those stats, which is why I mentioned those specific numbers. Is it not obvious that people of all races can achieve high GPAs and high LSAT scores? Shouldn't it be more of a social background issue rather than a race issue?</p>

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<p>I am not seeing the part where your “friend” “tried half as hard”.</p>

3

<p>My roommate is kicking back and relaxing. I have lived with her for 3 years.</p>

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<p>well she definitely won’t be able to kick back and relax if she is going to be successful in law school.</p>

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<p>Affirmative action is completely unfair. Anyone who says otherwise is deluded.</p>

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<p>These type of posts are so lame. </p>

<p>Look at it this way: Say there were no URM designation. Then all law school admissions would be strictly on merit. A 3.6 with a 150 on the LSAT still won’t sniff T1.</p>

<p>So URM does not bring you down, it simply lifts up others. If your argument is she does not deserve to go to T1 with her numbers, to argue you deserve to does not make sense if your numbers are still below what is generally accepted. </p>

<p>Having all top law schools be 95%+ caucasian/asian non-URMs would further enhance the reputation of the legal profession as non-inclusive and elitist.</p>

<p>Employers are not quite as generous as law schools, so if your roommate does not pull her weight in law school, then the law school did her no favors by admitting her.</p>

<p>My friends, both white and especially URM worked 10X harder than me throughout undergrad and got worse grades. I was fortunate enough to have gone to excellent public schools that equipped me well and I chose a major that suited my strengths. Life is inherently unfair.</p>

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<p>^ That’s an idiotic argument.</p>

<p>The fact that banning affirmative action won’t help many of its critics says nothing about whether affirmative action is a just policy that should be continued.</p>

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<p>Quit your whining and start studying.</p>

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<p>I agree that it’s frustrating. Regardless of the good intentions, affirmative action should be judged on its results - which are mixed, at best.</p>

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<p>OP’s detractors can chide him all they want, but he has a valid point. Affirmative action helps blacks and (most) hispanics of all income levels, while ignoring asians and whites who may have come from equally disadvantaged households. </p>

<p>As for the argument that affirmative action merely “lifts” other people up without harming those who cannot partake of it… seriously? Cut the crap. Law schools may not have a concretely defined number of seats that they will fill for each incoming class, but they have pretty consistent benchmarks. What affirmative action is designed to do is set aside a decent portion of those seats for URM applicants. This ensures that the student population is not ethnically homogeneous, but it also puts non-URMs at a disadvantage. </p>

<p>That is why a white applicant whose GPA and LSAT fall in the bottom 25% of a law school’s median must fight a steep uphill battle to gain admission; seats in that portion of the distribution generally go to URMs or (much more rarely) legacies/people with special connections.</p>

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<p>The only people who really complain about affirmative action are those who are too stupid to succeed themselves. </p>

<p>But, since so many here seem to miss the point, i’ll break it down for the kiddies. Affirmative action is just another example of the free market we live in. It’s the same reason firms do minority hiring and it is easier to make partner as a minority. We’ll start at the top, law firms are businesses that need clients. Clients, some who are white, some who are not, will be turned off from using said firm if that firm doesn’t seem to have fair minority hiring practices. So, these firms have to make sure to at least show some diversity. Same is said for the schools, these schools will come under a lot of heat and lose enrollment and prestige if they don’t fill a decent size of the class with minority applicants. But, because the white applicants WAY outnumber the minority applicants, the schools have to dip farther down in the statistical categories. It’s not that minorities are less capable, it’s just that there are a lot less of them in high learning. If said school were to do it strictly on numbers, that school would not be able to fill it’s class size with enough minorities just because of the disparity between application numbers. That means firms would be less likely to go there because they need diversity and people would be less likely to go to the school because of this. You can’t fault affirmative action when all it does is benefit all parties involved. It’s not discriminatory because it doesn’t affect you, if scored a 150 on your LSAT you are an idiot anyways and should be happy that you aren’t going to law school because you’ll spend 150k on a degree that won’t get you a job. If you want AA to stop, try to get more people to apply, or tell businesses to stop caring about fair hiring practices. Now kiddies, stop whining, and actually do something. Your success and achievement is based on nothing else besides what you do.</p>

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<p>Patriot, I don’t think you understand what it is we’re discussing here. But, somehow, you’ve managed to translate your confusion into a confidently executed wall of text, full of poorly constructed arguments, and at least a few statements that contradict your original point. Bravo?</p>

<p>Nobody said that we’d like to get in with a 150 LSAT, dude. All we’re saying, and pretty clearly, is that there’s a painful incongruity in someone being offered admission with a 150 LSAT when, presumably, we did better but were rejected.</p>

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<p>^^^ there are no contradictions in my post and it isn’t an argument, it’s a factual statement. And, you of course offered nothing in response and instead restated your position when I just told why it isn’t “incongruent”. HTH</p>

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<p>Patriot1208,</p>

<p>Even if affirmative action and racial preferences due to the functioning of free market, they aren’t necessarily just. For example, about 100 years ago, discrimination against blacks was “another example of the free market we live in.” </p>

<p>Do you think in that situation the government shouldn’t have stepped in and interfered with the free market?</p>

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<p>3.6 is a rather good gpa, a 150 lsat is still kind of low and the best school they could get in is either twin cities or illinois. Mind you urm still have to compete against all the other urms which there nearly 100 million of. It does law schools no good to only be representative of only one race or culture in a diverse nation of 300 million people. Schools are suppose to provide legal education but they should also attempt to provide future employees to the community. If schools only take in chinese students with 3.8 gpas and 170 lsats many communities would have trouble finding lawyers eventually including even white people. It was actually shown that Affirmative action “harms” or is at the detriment of asian students not white ones. Because Asian students are generally over represented in universities so in the interest of diversity asian students are denied spots so that others including whites can be let in.</p>

<p>Part of the urm category came about because universities found they were only pumping out certain kinds of students (upper middle class and rich sub-urban white/asian kids who only care about themselves and making lots of money for themselves and no care about others—George Bush types). Now there is nothing wrong with those people, but universities benefit from pumping out diverse types of students particularly ones who come from historically disadvantage backgrounds who can also make large differences in their communties (like obama). </p>

<p>I don’t know what race your friend is but minority people have faced a lot more systemic issues than white people (well no surprising revelation there). Sure there are poor white people, however the plight of a poor white person does not even come close to the plight of a poor black person, a poor mexican or native american.` A person who is poor and mexican has to deal with lots of bull, whether it is the racism of white folks trying to deport their parents or a native american who has the land stolen or a black person who had themself denied jobs because of the color of their skin. No poor white person will ever face the racil discrimination and hatred that a black or mexican would ever face</p>

<p>I don’t see how urm category is any worse than the international student category. I mean how few international students are black, theya re all either white or asian, might as well call it the caucasian/asian category. And yes they do have quotas on the amount of intl students they will take too.</p>

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<p>Maybe instead of crying on an internet message board, you should study a little harder instead of blaming others for your shortcomings like a spoiled child.</p>

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<p>Transfers, are you comparing affirmative action in law school admissions to segragation? LOL</p>

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<p>Let me summarize the best arguments offered here FOR affirmative action:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>URM admissions are themselves quite competitive. We know this because there are 100 million URMs.</p></li>
<li><p>If you scored a 150 on your LSAT, you’re an idiot. You shouldn’t go to law school. Of course, the exception is exercised if you are URM because the free market works that way.</p></li>
<li><p>If law schools only took Chinese people, non-Chinese communities would eventually run out of lawyers.</p></li>
<li><p>Blacks, Mexicans, and Natives have a lot of BS to deal with. So, it’s only fair that white people applying to law school should deal with some, too.</p></li>
<li><p>Universities started affirmative action policies because, historically, they’d produce white graduates who only cared about themselves.</p></li>
<li><p>Let’s say a URM is admitted to your first choice school. He or she has a lower GPA than you as well as a lower LSAT. You are rejected. This means you didn’t work hard enough.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>etc.</p>

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<p>^^^ lulz, you don’t use straw man quite as well as you think you do.</p>

<p>The only argument for AA is that companies want it, firms want, students want it, parents want it, so schools want it. End of story, if you can’t understand a simple free market structure you should get out of your history classes and take a business class. </p>

<p>I worked my ass off and will be attending a top 10 school, you can do it too, stop complaining and do it.</p>

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<p>I’d explain it a bit differently than Patriot. </p>

<p>I grew up --a LONG time ago–as a military brat. The armed forces desegregated in 1948. This meant that some very, very talented African-Americans went into the military because they felt that they were more likely to advance in the military. Ironically, the make up of the military tended to be dominated by Southern white Protestants. It didn’t matter what your personal feelings were though. If a white man got an order from a black man who outranked him, he’d better follow it. </p>

<p>There were a lot of other effects.If you were assigned quarters next to someone “colored,” which was the polite term when I was growing up, you had to take them. That was that. So, some people had to live next door to people who would never have been their neighbors in civilian life. If base housing wasn’t available, you’d get a housing “allowance” to live off base. If a housing complex wouldn’t rent to a colored/black/African-American member of the armed forces and he filed an internal complaint and the military found that the landlord was discriminating, then everybody on base was informed that you could live in X,Y,Z housing complex if you chose to do so…but you would not get a housing allowance. Believe me when I say that a LOT of housing complexes in the South near military bases integrated because of that rule. </p>

<p>The end result was that, especially in the all volunteer military forces, African-Americans are WAY overrepresented, especially at the enlisted and NCO level. So, the military has practiced a form of affirmative action in the officer corps. </p>

<p>At some point, this was questioned–especially for the service academies. The military leadership went beserk. Now, most of these men are politically conservative–but they believe in affirmative action. Why? Because they realized that you can’t have a military in which enlisted men and NCOs are largely African-American which has a lily white officer corps and expect the military to work. It won’t. The officer corps HAS to have a lot of African-Americans for the system to be perceived as “fair.” When the officers are yelling at people to follow them into truly awful conditions where death is likely…some of those officers NEED to have the same color skin as the troops they are leading. </p>

<p>The rest of our society works like that too. If 98% of the judges are white and 95% of the attorneys are white and 90% of the jurors are white, do you really think African-Americans are going to perceive the judicial system as “fair?” Do a flip. If you are white, imagine that you were accused of assaulting an African-American. You looked at the judge. He was African-American. You looked at your attorney; he was African-American. You looked at the prosecutor. He was African-American. You looked at the jury. It was African-American. You looked at the prosecution’s witnesses; they were African-American. You looked at your witnesses. They were white. </p>

<p>Would you think you were going to get a fair trial? If not, would you feel comfortable raising your issues with your African-American legal aid lawyer? </p>

<p>If our country is going to work, people from all backgrounds have to think the “system” is fair. And that means in the aggregate, the judges and the lawyers in our legal system have to reflect the population of the US. </p>

<p>When Barack Obama was elected president, it said something about America. Lots of young African-Americans got the message that the system was NOT rigged against them. I can’t stomach Clarence Thomas, but if I were African -American and saw an all-white Supreme Court, I think I’d view its decisions a bit differently. If I were Hispanic, I’d see Sonia Sotomayer on the Supreme Court and think…maybe the kid from the housing project in the Bronx has a chance. </p>

<p>I’m sorry if this is rambling, but I hope this makes a point. Race is the “elephant” in the room in the US. We are a multicultural society. We can only succeed as a society if each major group within the society thinks that the system, including the legal system, is “fair.” Especially in criminal justice, that’ s just not going to happen if a high percentage of defendants are African-Americans and very, very few lawyers and judges are. That’s the REAL reason we need affirmative action.</p>