US Commission on Civil Rights: Affirmative Action Does More Harm Than Good

From the NY Post:

THE U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which turns 50 this week, remains an important vehicle for public debate on civil-rights issues - as evidenced by its controversial new report questioning whether affirmative action may actually do more harm than good to its intended beneficiaries.

The report, "Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," found that admitting minority students "into law schools for which they might not academically be prepared could harm their academic performance and hinder their ability to obtain secure and gainful employment."

The arguments about the unintended consequences of affirmative action aren't new. What is new is a growing body of empirical evidence to back up the claim that affirmative action in higher education harms not only whites and Asians but also blacks and Hispanics.

But this body of evidence may never see light - which is why the report is so important. The commission has no civil-rights-enforcement authority, but it has always served as the nation's conscience on civil rights, making findings and recommendations to the president and Congress. Its recommendation is to end the conspiracy of secrecy surrounding the effects of affirmative action on the performance of black students in law schools.

The first solid evidence that affirmative action was harming black law-school students came in 2004, when UCLA law prof Richard Sander published a study that showed that more than half of black students at elite law schools had first-year grades that put them in the bottom 10 percent of their classes. This led to a far greater chance that the students wouldn't finish law school and made them six times more likely never to pass the bar exam.

But Sander also found that black students did far better if they attended law schools with students whose undergraduate grades and law-school-admission-test scores were similar to theirs. Black students who didn't rely on affirmative action to get into law school had similar first-year grades with their white counterparts and passed the bar at similar rates as all students from the same tier law school.

The affirmative-action establishment denounced Sander's study. More perniciously, it conspired to deny access to a body of evidence, a 25-year archive of California state-bar results, that could definitively prove Sander's thesis that mismatching black students with law schools where they were less likely to succeed resulted in fewer black lawyers than there would be without affirmative action.