Answers to a few questions I've gotten regarding this 'investigative' series.

Why do you care about this? Not to get too soap-boxy, but I think anyone who cares about equalizing access to legal education and the diversity of the legal profession should care about this issue.

Why is it significant that one racial group has a lower bar passage rate? Won't any group you pick have a bar passage rate that's either above or below the average? Sure, law review editors as a group might have a higher pass rate. People who watch professional wrestling 5 hrs a day might have a lower pass rate.

The difference is that neither of these groups historically receives admissions preferences. While admissions preferences have benefits, they also have costs. To date, schools – law schools especially – have not been particularly curious about understanding these costs and making adjustments.

Much has changed in 30 years, but admissions preferences basically still work the same way. If students receiving preferences aren't passing the bar as often, isn't that a problem worth fixing? I share Bill Clinton's view: mend it, don't end it.

Are you saying that there is some conspiracy at UCLA to harm minority students? No, not at all. Fundamentally this isn't a race issue. It's an issue about people who received admissions preferences (for any reason) vs. people who didn't. A law school like UCLA is not intentionally stacking the deck against any group of students.

But I also think they shouldn't be promoting a bar passage rate that doesn't apply equally to everyone. Aside from the ethical issues, I'm quite convinced that some law schools are breaking consumer protection laws by inadequately informing students. Maybe not UCLA, because preferences are (in theory) already illegal, but somewhere like USC (who definitely uses preferences) or Southwestern (who flunks out 1/3 of their law class each year, which disproportionately hurts minority enrollment)

Why do you only care about black vs. white comparisons? It's a proxy for prefs vs. no prefs, but not a perfect one. There are black students who didn't receive admissions preferences; there are white students who did. Also, a lot of the existing data is broken out by race, not by other attributes, so it's a matter of data availability. If I could make other comparisons reliably, I would.

A student getting an admissions preference knows what their numbers are like going in. Aren't they aware they're at greater risk of failing the bar? Perhaps they should know, but I can assure you they don't. This semester, I've been working on a project interviewing minority students who failed the bar at least once. (I plan to post a summary of that project in January.)

For now, I can tell you that none of the people I've talked to really considered the meaning of the bar passage rates until it was time to take the bar. Maybe they'd heard things here & there but they never really connected it to themselves. But after they failed, they sure knew.

27 Nov 06