Simkovic, in Leiter’s Law School Report, Defending the LSAT from those who abolished it to improve law school “diversity” (see the original text for hyperlinks to the various assertions supported):
Law schools might spend less money on merit scholarships if standardized test scores were removed from the rankings, or their weight lowered. But there is no guarantee that the money will be used to help students from poor families. In fact, as practiced at elite law schools, affirmative action often involves admitting students from high-income families who benefit from a high-quality K-12 and college education and can afford to pay full tuition. Many students who are diverse because they are Hispanic are also white and no wealthier than their non-Hispanic white peers.
Affirmative action, as practiced at many universities, does not screen for personal circumstances, family histories of suffering, or moral guilt for the suffering of others, or anything closely related to moral desert. These programs were initially ostensibly intended to remedy the enslavement of African Americans and the forced expropriation of Native Americans. But in practice, the individual benefits and costs depend only on whether people are willing to tick a self-report form or write an elaborate “diversity statement” because they know that claiming “diversity” has great benefits and There’s little risk’ of gaining admissions officers’ favor in a special way. Economists have found that many people change their self-reported racial and ethnic identities in response to the incentives created by affirmative action. Numerous studies have found that rich people exhibit more entitlement behavior and dishonest behavior than the average person, so this self-reported diversity regime may favor the rich, the powerful, and the dishonest at the expense of real Efficiency and deserving of the underprivileged and elite.
There was no mechanism to prevent diversification programs from benefiting the direct heirs to the wealth of wealthy Spanish conquistadors, slave traders, plantation owners, inquisitors, and war criminals. Nor is there any mechanism for exempting families who suffered from serfdom, slavery, genocide, or famine overseas or were subsequently discriminated against in the United States: serfs, concentration camp survivors, Jews, Mormons, Huguenots, Armenians , Poles, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans, Copts, Irish, Boers, Kosovars, Bosnians, Italians, Middle Easterners, etc.
Instead of screening for moral deserving based on the source of family wealth or documented persecution of immediate ancestors, colleges allow heirs to hide wealth through endowments into our classes and our boards of trustees. At the same time, we promote a self-righteous, self-serving ideology and treat those who challenge it with hostility. This ideology held that the moral responsibility of slavery, regardless of one’s economic status, was not based on inheritance of wealth appropriated from slave labor, but on racial and ethnic identity. Universities with large endowments do so at the expense of innocent applicants we use as scapegoats for the sins of aristocratic donors. *
I bet that if the rankings placed less emphasis on standardized test scores, most law schools would shift more toward serving students from affluent backgrounds, and would also raise their net and shadow prices of expected donations from students’ families. In other words, law schools – like the unreformed, inefficient and corrupt British Navy of the past – will sell their seats to the highest bidder.
Specially defined diversity may continue as a rationalization for profit-maximizing practices. For decades, educators, public officials, and media organizations have argued that diversity justifies departures from identity-neutral, elite standards. Still, most people still view college admissions policies on race, ethnicity, and heritage as immoral. They prefer test scores, grades, and community service.
FWIW, when I was at Yale Law, the first semester was pass/fail, so employers had no objective way of determining how well a person did in law school. The result was a clear pattern: well-connected students who went to the most elite private universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) summer job. My friends who went to Berkeley, Trinity, or SUNY Binghamton as good but not quite Harvard undergrads had parents who weren’t famous lawyers, politicians, etc. So agree or disagree with Simkovic in general, it strikes me that the lack of objective achievement metrics is not leveling the playing field, and I think the same will happen with law school admissions.
