More Evidence Against Affirmative Action

Fox News reports:

"Currently only about one in three African-Americans who goes to an American law school passes the bar on the first attempt and a majority never become lawyers at all," says UCLA law professor Richard Sander.

In an article published in the Stanford Law Review, Sander and his research team concluded several thousand would-be black lawyers either dropped out of law school or failed to pass the bar because of affirmative action.

Known as the "mismatch" effect, Sander claims students who are unprepared and whose academic credentials are below the median are admitted to law schools they are unqualified to attend. If those same students instead were to go to less elite or competitive schools, more would graduate, pass the bar and become lawyers.

There are challengers of Sander's findings, but it seems to me that his findings should be intuitively obvious. By definition, the recipients of AA admissions to the law schools don't start out evenly with the other students. If they were approaching law school with knowledge, skills and abilities on par with the other students they wouldn't need AA help.

It is reasonable to expect that some of the AA students will possess the determination to succeed despite starting with a disadvantage. It is also reasonable to expect that many of them won't.

Making the grade at Harvard or some other prestigious university is great but there is nothing wrong with graduating with a good record at your local State U. In fact, most of the people that keep this nation running come from the "lesser" schools. I graduated from a very small state college and had a successful career as a mathematician for the United States Air Force. I'm not rich and famous but I'm happy with who I am and what I achieved.

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