September 2012
With the U.S. Supreme Court about
to hear arguments in a case that could decide the fate of affirmative action in
admissions, a research war has broken out. Defenders and critics of the
consideration of race are releasing new studies (some of which were submitted in
briefs to the court) on the impact of affirmative action.
Several studies presented Friday
at the Brookings Institution suggested that eliminating the consideration of
race would not have as dramatic an effect on minority students as some believe,
and that the beneficiaries of affirmative action may in fact achieve less
academic success than they would otherwise. The studies were criticized by some
present for being one-sided.
One of the studies explored the
impact on the yield rate – the proportion of admitted students who enroll – of
black, Latino and Native American students to the University of California after
the state barred the consideration of race in admissions. Minority enrollments
fell after voters adopted the ban, in part because greater proportions of white
and Asian applicants, on average, have the academic and other credentials
required for admission.
But the paper focused on a subset
of minority students: those who gained admission after the ban on affirmative
action. Many observers at the time predicted that these students would be less
likely to enroll, as they would perceive the system to be hostile, and news
articles quoted minority students to this effect.
But a paper by Kate Antonovics, an
economist at the University of California at San Diego, and Richard Sander, a
law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, found that the ban
on affirmative action didn’t produce "chilling effects," but actually produced
"warming effects" on the likelihood of minority students’ accepting offers of
admission.
The paper examined the yield rates
by students in the three years after Proposition 209 (the ban) took effect.
Across the system, the yield rate increased by about 10 percent. The increase
was the greatest at Berkeley and UCLA. At Berkeley, the pre-Proposition 209
yield rate for underrepresented minority groups was 37.9 percent, and that
increased by 5.7 percentage points after affirmative action considerations were
barred from the admissions process. At UCLA, a 38.8 percent yield rate increased
by 3.9 percentage points.
Antonovics, who presented the
paper, said that the findings were important. She said that critics of
affirmative action might expect (and accept) that the end of the consideration
of race would lead to an overall decline in minority enrollment rates, but that
there would be "a layer of concern" if some of that drop could be attributed to
students who met race-neutral admissions standards opting not to enroll. She
said that she and Sander expected to find this "chilling effect," and were
surprised to find "no evidence for it" and instead see evidence showing the
opposite impact.
The fear Antonovics expressed is
that minority students might not be enrolling at highly competitive institutions
at which they would be a good academic match. Another kind of "mismatch" has
also been the focus of much research on affirmative action in recent years —
and that idea (hotly debated) is that minority students who are admitted to
better institutions because of affirmative action may end up with lower academic
achievement as a result. (Sander, who helped organize the Brookings program, has
been a leading proponent of the idea.)
On Friday, Doug Williams, chair of
economics at the University of the South, presented a paper arguing that law
schools provide solid evidence for the existence of mismatch. He said that
because of the requirement that lawyers pass a bar exam, there is an independent
measure of successful learning in law school. Because some minority students
with similar academic credentials (judged by undergraduate grads and LSAT
scores) enroll at more or less competitive law schools, he said it is possible
to see whether there is a mismatch.
There has long been a gap between
black and white law graduates on bar passage rates, he noted. Currently, about
97 percent of white law school graduates pass the bar, with 92 percent passing
on the first try. For black law graduates, the figures are 78 and 61 percent,
respectively. But Williams said that these gaps are partly explained by the
differing academic credentials of black and white law students, and so by
themselves don’t back mismatch theory.
But in comparing minority law
graduates of comparable academic preparation who enroll in more or less
competitive law schools, Williams said that those (from among those with
comparable academic credentials) who enroll in the bottom two tiers of law
schools pass the bar at a rate that is 14 percentage points higher than that of
those who enroll at the top law schools. And he said that suggested a
statistically significant mismatch.
Williams said that he would like
more detailed information about law students – including the law schools that
they apply to and are admitted to – but based on the information he does have,
he said that he had "strong evidence" to back mismatch.
In the question period after those
two presentations, Richard O. Lempert, an emeritus professor of law and
sociology at the University of Michigan, criticized not only those papers, but
the entire way the program at Brooking was organized. "All of the papers are on
one side of the debate," Lempert said. He questioned why "first rate" scholars
who support affirmative action were not presenting work, and said that the
papers presented had "serious methodological" issues. He also said that the
papers were not peer-reviewed. Antonovics responded by saying that she had mixed
feelings about affirmative action and did not do this research with any outcome
in mind. Further, she said that the paper she presented has just been accepted
for publication by a peer-reviewed economics journal.
In terms of the substance of the
papers, Lempert said that a greater chilling effect would be seen on
applications than in yield. (Antonovics said that application volume did not
change much after Proposition 209.) And Lempert said that the analysis by
Williams ignored the way most black law students cluster in the middle tiers of
law schools, not the top or bottom tiers, and he said that one key factor in the
bottom tiers was that they included historically black colleges.
Williams acknowledged that the
success of black students at historically black law schools could be attributed
to a number of factors. But he said it would be wrong to exclude those
institutions from the study.
Sander said that panelists at the
program were "ideologically diverse" and that there was no attempt to include
only scholars of one point of view.
The debate will likely continue
Thursday when a coalition of social science groups — the American Educational
Research Association, the American Sociological Association, the American
Statistical Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the
Law and Society Association and the Linguistic Society of America — hold a
briefing on research those organizations cited in their brief to the Supreme
Court encouraging the justices to uphold the legality of the consideration of
race and ethnicity in admissions.
Inside Higher Ed, September 24, 2012.
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