"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 12

Applying to College
1401

Notwithstanding anything people post on this thread, the reality is that black graduates of elite law schools do not fare well at elite law firms. All of the top firms will actively recruit black attorneys from the top law schools, but comparatively few of those attorneys will be around after 3 or 4 years as an associate. The typical path for one of these attorneys with elite credentials will be to then take a government position or an academic one.

There are a number of theories on why this is. The best discussion I have seen has is by Professor Sander at UCLA. Clearly many posters on here do not care to understand what is actually happening, but for those who do, I’d recommend reading Sander’s article in its entirety. If you do not have the time, the pages to concentrate on imho are pp. 1809-16: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=645078002070013013012004097029122064049002040059035036071127120006004094004069031091100000007125053063114115085111067027088039029017011037069111114025084092015041062038098065070071004017031078091084026090080080105089110088017085091119088127104017&EXT=pdf

(So sorry for the length of that link - forum rules prevent the use of a shortener.)

And not to bury the lede:

“While many questions are open, the author [Professor Sanders] concludes that aggressive racial preferences at the law school and law firm level tend to undermine in some ways the careers of young attorneys and may, in the end, contribute to the continuing white dominance of large-firm partnerships.”

In essence, large (elite) law firms are at the small end of a merciless funnel. The successful candidate will generally be towards the top end of her class at an elite law school, admission to which implied that she was at the elite level of a very competitive college. As I wrote upthread somewhere, places like Yale Law School regularly reject the large majority of applicants from even HYP.

At each level of that funnel - including at the law firm hiring level - blacks will receive enormous preferences. People who have not been through it or who are not intimately knowledgeable about the subject will find it hard to appreciate the actual size of the preferences.

Nevertheless, at some point the rubber meets the road, and the economics of a law firm - specifically how senior associates and partners advance and are compensated - are not based on political correctness, but rather on sheer ability to get the work done and to satisfy very demanding clients. The results are very predictable, actually inevitable for black attorneys as a group (obviously, any individual can be more than capable of succeeding - Eric Holder, for example, would be a prime example of that phenomenon). Keep in mind that the work expectations can be overwhelming even for the most academically and intellectually capable white attorneys - the large majority of them will “wash out” as well. It’s just that the black attorneys will wash out even faster and at much higher rates, which accounts for the observed paucity of black senior associates and partners at these firms as compared with their incoming recruit cohorts. Professor Sanders proposes that the differences observed in success rates will be proportionate to the size of the preferences initially granted at the law firm hiring level, and by extension at the law school, college, and sometimes even secondary school levels.

1402

"The entire top 25 list you linked has some kind of affirmative action, except maybe UT.

How do you interpret THAT?"

Political correctness. There’s really nothing more to it than that.

1403

I’m sorry, clearly you didn’t understand my question.

You are saying affirmative action in law schools adversely affects black law students during and after they graduate. Yet this list of the best 25 law schools for black students all - except one - practice affirmative action.

If AA was hurting blackstudents wouldn’t the best law schools for them be non-AA schools?

1404

@OhMomof2 - I understand now. Yes, a very cogent argument could be made that black students would do much better to choose less “elite” schools, rather than those to which they are admitted on the basis of preference. This is the often-bandied about “mismatch” theory.

There are certainly great black students who could be admitted without preferences. But the reality is that this number is very small at the elites. Linda Wightman has estimated that absent preferences, black enrollment at the most elite schools (first quintile) would fall by about 94%, a number which I believe is too high, but not outside of the realm of possibility. My guess is that enrollment would fall by about 80%. For a thoughtful critique of Wightman’s work, see Harvard’s Professor Thernstrom here: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/167638/15_01_Thernstrom.pdf

Look, whatever the number is, I can’t see the value of maintaining a preference system in which every student assumes - and not without justification - that 80% of your visible racial group at the school has traditional, time tested credentials that put them in the bottom 10% of all admitted students.

I was wrong above to say that political correctness is the only reason these schools champion AA. There is another, more nefarious one that many posters on here have hinted at but never really fleshed out. The deemphasis of GPA + LSAT - as with the deemphasis of objective stats generally as in college admissions - has a perverse but intended effect: it benefits certain privileged, white students. Certainly legacy and development types, though there may be others I would guess - the “right” type of student.

Those students reap all the benefits of the deemphasis - they can gain admission without presenting the type of profile that the unconnected or “wrong” student must - and yet they suffer none of the downsides of being visibly identified and stigmatized as an underperforming group. I am reading a book on this very subject now, Schmidt’s “Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College,” although i can’t say I recommend it just yet. Justice Thomas also hinted at this in his dissent in part and concurrence in part in Grutter. See footnote 10 and accompanying text for a thoughtful discussion (his whole opinion, which was joined by Scalia in part, is a tremendously good piece of work: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-241.ZX1.html#FN10SRC.

1405

Well except those Supreme Court justices I guess. Then again, Howard has at least one of those, and Harvard Law has a president…"

Well those are only two and SC justices are not going to be a good sample since they’re only 9 and they have lifetime appointments. We’d have to look more at federal benches, appellate judges etc. to really see if AA is working.out keep bringing up Clarence Thomas and now Thurgood Marshall, I don’t think anyone would deny that AA helped Thomas, but that’s one. Anyway the article says that many black Yale law grads don’t go into high paying private firrms but lower paying academia.

“The entire top 25 list you linked has some kind of affirmative action, except maybe UT.”

“How do you interpret THAT?”

They do and it’s only 5-7% so not even sure how often they need to base their admissions on race. It’s really in the margins.

1406

@CollegeIsBad you have some delusion that all the geniuses are deli owner and gardeners sons.

1407

Where are you pulling your data on IQ by socio economic status? Considering we don’t have much of a proletariat class anymore —more of political victims as subjects of the bureaucrats class, I don’t see “a lot more geniuses” coming out of delis–maybe New Delhi

1408

Thank you. Please stop saying Proles. It is dated work and it demeans your message.

1409

@CollegeIsBad while I don’t agree with everything you said, you raise an excellent point (if I’m interpreting it correctly)

I think the longer everyone keeps dwelling on the “elite” schools on threads like these (and the “name of a college”), it only makes them seem more prestigious and adds to their reputation.

If you have Yale stats and end up at Tufts because you didn’t have a hook or a connection, don’t sweat it. Just celebrate that you are at Tufts and get the best education you can. There will be other Ivy rejects right there beside you. You have no reason to believe that you will be any worse off in the end because you didn’t graduate from a more elite school.

1410

@CollegeIsBad this: “Only a loser places his value in the name of his alma mater.” Nonetheless, I have to wonder how you ended up on this forum. You seem angry and bitter-- as well as pretty proud of your accomplishments-and rightfully so.

1411

@CollegeIsBad Okay gotcha -well I dont agree with you on everything but I like your profound and absolute cynicism! I too despise the arrogance of the ruling class and their faux liberalism which is just designed to pay off the hordes to keep them from over running their estates in Greenwich but thats another conversation. :))

1412

@CollegeisBad - I don’t agree with everything you write, but I like your style. (How could someone not like a poster who uses terms like “homoskedasticity”? I’m going to use “kurtosis” I promise!)

To bring the conversation round to the thread topic, you are definitely on to something with your observation that affirmative action and race preferences generally are (partially) a smokescreen to protect certain privileges and “elites” (who have traditionally been white but are starting to add black, Hispanic and - yes - even a very few Asians).

You are a little uncharitable with your prototypical 108 IQ trust fund baby, though. 108 is not getting you into HYP, unless you have a very recognizable last name (Clinton and Obama offspring, e.g.). But, under holistic admissions, a reasonably wealthy and privileged 120 IQ kid can be groomed to look like a 145 IQ outlier. Compress the SAT a bit (does anyone remember when 1500 was a great score? I literally know about a dozen 12 year olds who have scored above 1500 from the SET program in the last few years). Raise everyone’s high school GPA over the decades in a relentless inflation. Add in a little emphasis on ECs and “service opportunities” (what, your parents couldn’t afford to pay $7,500 so you could pretend to build houses for the poor in Nicaragua last summer? On to the reject pile, we have no room for selfish students who don’t care about our more unfortunate brethren). Last, spend about $20,000 to have a consultant write your essay for you (yes, folks, this happens a lot and the colleges know it and don’t care). Voila! You’ve made the holistic admissions stew.

Welcome to the forum - stick around!

1413

Minority students make easier targets though, as the resilience and popularity of this thread shows. Elite colleges admit more legacies and development cases than they do black/Hispanic students, and preference for recruit-able athletes dwarfs all three at most elites.

Yet we have this big brouhaha about AA in the form of a permanent, years-long thread.

1414

Agree, reading a book on higher ed and the author quotes someone as saying lacrosse is AA for rich white students.

1415

If you can let in 10% of a student population with lower stats for one holistic goal you can do it for anyone.

1416

“Elite colleges admit more legacies and development cases than they do black/Hispanic students, and preference for recruit-able athletes dwarfs all three at most elites.”

Agreed, once you add in the athletes, although many athletes will receive large race-based preferences as well.

To some degree, private colleges have a right to let in whom they want. However, the Constitution and federal and state statutory law limit race-based discrimination, but are silent on other preferences that are not subject to scrutiny.

What the law shouldn’t allow is the deliberate setting of the SAT + GPA bar higher for most whites and Asians, an impermissible race-based application of differential standards, which is de facto what is happening. “Holistic” admissions allows the colleges to maintain plausible deniability, and in the process the privileged non-minorities “slip” through. This has been true since the beginning of the last century.

The elite schools want their cake and they want to eat it too. If SAT + HGPA (or LSAT + UGPA) wasn’t so critical to maintaining their academic standards, they could abandon them for all applicants. Race-based preference and discrimination are the tools through which privilege and the status quo are in fact maintained.

1417

Can you avoid using your legal name on applications to avoid admissions bias?

Let’s say there’s a real chance of bias against you due to your racial/religious/sexual background. can you do this, and why isn’t this normal?

1418

^I’m interested in the answer to this one as well. Grades from a teacher I once had changed dramatically - in terms of the “demographics” of the grade recipients - as soon as he hid the names of the students on their assignments.

1419

SatSF it is good to see someone knowledgeable making these well supported arguments. The statement about recruitable athletes made earlier in the thread shows that many posters have very little understanding of the standards required to be recruited to the elite major colleges. A successful athletic recruit at Stanford, Duke, NU, or ND is going to be nationally ranked and of course this opportunity is available to anyone regardless of race. Moreover this is a true form of merit. Most recruits are very talented and have spent thousands of hours practicing their sports. Now it is true that the sports standards are far lower for the LAC colleges but then while still competitive admission to LAC’s doesn’t remotely approach the selectivity of HPYS or a few other national universities.

1420

Any affirmative action policy that also doesn’t limit the Jewish American representation, to me, isn’t a good policy. It speaks to political corectness