It’s one thing to say that a biased group is using a study to further anti-AA agenda. That seems a like a fair argument if it’s true. It’s quite another to attack a study based on what group is using it to support an agenda, or make specious claims like Sander is “blaming blacks” in his study or that his research into the effectiveness of AA WRT blacks is “unconscionable.” ISTM, you’re calling Sander, in not so many words, a racist not only for his conclusion but for temerity to even study it.

In short, resorting to such arguments only makes any valid, fact-based arguments appear weaker.

If you are, in fact, THE Shirley Wilcher, then you certainly have more experience in AA than probably anyone here, though you are an avowed advocate. Personally, I support affirmative action, though I would prefer that it be based on social and economic background and not one’s skill color.

But I also think Shirley provided a reasonably good summary of the arguments against Sander. Maybe it’s a shame she had to wrap it up with a little of that gratuitous Bush-bashing that so annoys the conservative commenters.

I think it’s hard to deny that affirmative action opened up the legal profession to black people. But maybe it’s effectiveness on that score is essentially over. That’s a valid topic for research by social scientists, I think.

And Austin Roth is right about all those Yalie’s grades. Bush’s C average was the best of the bunch. Though of course, having less-than-outstanding grades didn’t hurt their career prospects. Maybe that’s because they all, you know, went to Yale. I think everyone knows there are advantages to going to elite schools that go beyond the GPA.

If there was no AA, blacks who would otherwise attend “elite” law schools would instead attend so-called “lower tier” law schools. He argues that with no AA, blacks would be more successful at those lower-tier law schools and therefore would be more likely to graduate and go on to successful law careers. Instead, he indicates that a significant percentage of AA admissions are not successful or are less successful than they would have been had they attended a school commensurate with their academic record. In short, without AA blacks would have a better chance to become lawyers and therefore we’d have more black lawyers. I hope that’s clear – I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.

All I know is I’m unqualified to pass judgment on this thesis, but I definitely agree with Sander’s call for more research in this area and that we do need metrics to determine the effectiveness of AA programs – but for people like Shirley, this is “blaming the victim” a ludicrous and reactionary charge.

I suspect that affirmative action actually has an almost vanishingly small impact on people, in terms of actual numbers. But I don’t know, because I can’t find too many facts. It’s possible the facts are out there and I just can’t find them (My inadequacies as a researcher are on full display earlier in this thread.) But I can’t help feeling that I can’t find facts because both sides have every reason to exaggerate the effects of affirmative action.

So I think it’s a kind of bogus issue. I’m generally in favor it, because I don’t think that many people are negatively affected by it. But I’m willing to have my dogmatic slumbers disturbed by empirical data. Especially if the data show it’s hurting the people I think we ought to help. If there is some empirical data. And if there isn’t any, or isn’t enough, somebody should go get it.

But I also realize that social science isn’t physics, where the empirical standards are rigorous. It isn’t even biiology. And as for “open discussion” on biology in our culture, I’m sure you know we have politicians who get votes by denying established biology.

I don’t have any reason to thank the Opinion Journal for flinging obvious bs around.

Right Shirley

I was just coming here to comment on the relatively high-minded posting in this thread (for once).

You have saved me from that, I guess, with your thin-skinned reaction to Stevesturm (offensive? it is to laugh), plus your gall at the nerve of those of us that didn’t fall to our knees at your sage citing of Bowen, Bok and Liu and beg forgiveness for breaking orthodoxy and questioning the Priests (and Priestesses) of Temple of Political Correctness.

You also keep throwing out the ABA, whom not at all coincidently have just been called out today on this very subject by, of all organizations, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: Affirmative Action in American
Law Schools
They don’t really agree with you, either. I am betting they are not ’scholarly’ enough for you as well, though.

As to the difference in election results (glad to know your political biases aren’t coloring YOUR ’scholarly’ conclusions, BTW), it amusing me no end to see that canard thrown around, when Bush’s academic record is better than Gore’s or Kerry’s at Yale, and he has a Harvard MBA to boot.

An inconvenient truth, that!

I have not slogged through the whole thing (I had just found it when I posted the link, and indulged in a little tweaking when I said it was an easy read. It most certainly is not.)

I think ANY paper of this sort by either side can be criticized, simply because the soft sciences do not lend them themselves to binary answers.

As to whether the the WSJ Opinion Journal was or was not the right place for a commentary, it must be noted he initially published this, what, three years ago, and it is only now due to that article that a major discussion on the underlying topic is starting to form.

That is a good thing, regardless of what anyone’s beliefs on the cause/effect of this issue are. Open discussion about affirmative action and both the positive and negative empirical data that can be gleaned is critical.

No one is disputing that the white-black gap exists, but I am still troubled by the sweeping assumtions Sander makes when he calcualtes ‘what would have been’ if the AA students had attended lower-tier law schools There are two many sweeping assumptions, throughout the study, it seems to me.
Sander has measured something, but one can’t be sure what exactly the measurement represents, as far as I can tell.
I admit I haven’t read every word on the subjet, so better understanding might come in time. Nothing I’ve read so far, however, has changed my opinion that this sudy has only highlighted a problem. It will take a lot more knowledge before any definitive conculsions can be drawn, .

The crux of his rebuttal seems to be that no one has offered a different theory, one that could do a better job of explaining his basic findings. That’s a certainly a valid observatioon. Others should take up the challenge. Some of the crtiques lay a pretty good groundwork for alternate (or adjusted) methodology already involving a more sophisicated analysis of the basic variables.

Not everyone agrees the reason is affirmative action, though. One of the critics, Wilkins, argues that affirmative action has opened up the legal profession in useful ways that aren’t accounted for by Sander. He also says that black students benefit from their educations, especially if they attend elite schools, in ways that Sander doesn’t account for. Sander seems willing to concede some validity to Wilkins’ bigger-picture view.

Brooks and Ayers replicated Sander’s statistical data, but read it considerably differently, saying affirmative action has produced more black lawyers, not fewer. Sander says they didn’t read the data right. He gets the last word, though I imagine that if given an opportunity, they would have said they did, too, read the data right.

The critique by the group of authors presents what I gather is the standard liberal defense of affirmative action: before affirmative action there were 4,000 black lawyers, now there’s ten times that many. They think Sander missed the point in his narrow focus. Sander, in turn, thinks they’re the ones who’ve missed the point he was trying to make.

While I think the Opinion Journal op-ed was blinkered axe-grinding dressed up with a few abused statistics, I believe Sander is earnest. I think he thinks the numbers back him up. The problem is they all seem earnest. And they can all manipulate the numbers to support themselves.

I was slightly taken aback by the fact that participants in this study were self-selected. But 27,000 participants–I think that was the number–seems like a more-that-adequate sample. And nobody seemed to dispute the numbers. They just interpreted the numbers differently.

And while I think I got the gist, maybe I missed something. All that social-science language is not my thing. It would be kind of easy to make fun of social scientists, but I’m not going to. They speak a private code that I’m not really privy to, even though the words are in English. (I actually kind of enjoyed the bluntness of Wilkins article.) Physicists might speak in numbers, philosophers in Greek or German. Then, if it’s important enough to the non-specialist world, the results can be translated into something useful.

But I have to say, I didn’t really see anything conclusive.

Everyone seems to agree with something Sander says in the introduction:

we must face the fact that the legal education system is currently doing something that seriously harms blacks. Criticism and debate are important, but they must not obscure the overriding need to diagnose what we are doing wrong, and to implement solutions.

But is he alone in thinking the problem is affirmative action? And even if he is alone, is the conventional wisdom wrong? Or is he so wrong that committing resources toward his diagnosis would be a waste?

And is the op-ed page of the Opinion Journal a wise place to look for answers to these questions?

The David Wilkins critique has to be downloaded as a PDF, which is available at the bottom of that abstract page.

I haven’t been able to find the critique by Michele Dauber online. If it’s right there under my nose, feel free to rub it in!

But, based on the quotation from his paper that Entropy provided, I get a completely different impression of his findings. Quoting:

The overall lower average test scores and undergraduate grades of blacks obviously contribute to this gap – but no one disputes my finding that the black-white gap in graduation and bar passage is more than twice as large as can be explained by controlling for LSAT and undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) differences. None of these contributors offers any alternative explanation of this staggering black-white gap in graduation and bar passage, let alone a strategy for addressing it.

And the money quote on which he finishes:

Since there is no debate that blacks’ outcomes in graduation and bar passage are worse than could be possibly explained by blacks’ entering credentials, we must face the fact that the legal education system is currently doing something that seriously harms blacks. Criticism and debate are important, but they must not obscure the overriding need to diagnose what we are doing wrong, and to implement solutions.

Isn’t this completely the opposite of an admissions problem of letting underqualified people in? He states that the race-blind admitting credentials (LSAT and GPA) are not explaining what’s going on. And so the logical conclusion is that something wrong is going on at the law school itself. This problem should be diagnosed and fixed. The problem is one of failure rate, not admissions rate.

From this alone, and I have NOT yet read all the links people have provided, either his paper has been sorely misrepresented or there is a logical problem. If you had admissions based on nothing but LSAT, his findings suggest that you’d still have higher drop out rates among blacks than whites. Academic credentials is not the (whole) problem. And so, how could sending more students to a lower-tiered law school actually help unless those law schools aren’t ’seriously harming blacks.’

I know I am missing something basic.

I’m only disappointed in myself for overlooking the obvious.

So…what did you think of it?

Also–

Richard Sander teaches at UCLA, not Stanford, where I was looking.

Richard Sander homepage.

His Reply to Critics, which Entropy referred to is available as a PDF.

Sander was a guest-blogger on this subject at Volokh, which has an archive of his and related posts.

One of the criticisms, by Richard Brooks and Ian Ayres, is also available as PDF.

Ian Ayres sometimes blogs at Balkinization. I can’t find an archive, but he did at least this one post on the topic.

I hope all that HTML works.

10 seconds to find it.

Later tonight I’ll try to find some conclusions layman like me will understand and post some relevant quotes. For now, this is what jumped out at me from the introduction to Sander’s response to the 4 critiques:

Although the public and academic reaction to A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools (hereinafter Systemic Analysis) n3 has been predominantly favorable, many of my most sympathetic readers predicted a fierce reaction from what they often called “the affirmative action establishment.” And although the four responses published in this issue are not the first outpourings of critical reaction, they are certainly the most concerted. When the Stanford Law Review editors sifted through the stack of prospective contributions to this issue, they specifically tried to select those that would offer the strongest critiques, bypassing several more sympathetic proposals. The distinguished authors whose responses have been selected have each focused on a different part of my article, and each suggests that he or she has found its Achilles heel, to be chewed upon over a combined 153 pages. Thinking about these critiques and trying to address them as thoroughly as possible has been both stimulating and consuming.

At the end of the day, however, the critiques in this volume are surprisingly toothless. Most of these contributors concede (and none dispute) the basic facts that frame Systemic Analysis: blacks are nearly two-and-a-half times more likely than whites not to graduate from law school, are four times more likely [*1965] to fail the bar on their first attempt, and are six times more likely to fail after multiple attempts. n4 The overall lower average test scores and undergraduate grades of blacks obviously contribute to this gap – but no one disputes my finding that the black-white gap in graduation and bar passage is more than twice as large as can be explained by controlling for LSAT and undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) differences. None of these contributors offers any alternative explanation of this staggering black-white gap in graduation and bar passage, let alone a strategy for addressing it. If Stigler is right that it takes a theory to beat a theory, no one has even entered the arena. Since there is no debate that blacks’ outcomes in graduation and bar passage are worse than could be possibly explained by blacks’ entering credentials, we must face the fact that the legal education system is currently doing something that seriously harms blacks. Criticism and debate are important, but they must not obscure the overriding need to diagnose what we are doing wrong, and to implement solutions.

My hat is off to you!

I think I’m good at finding stuff on the internet. But apparently not!! Please tell me it was at least difficult for you. And if you found it through some bit of wizardry, please let me in on the secret. I’d like to find the rebuttals. Or did you already find those, too?

I stand by my complaints about the Opinion Journal op-ed. It uses those statistics without context of explaination to bolster its argument.