Following up on Friday’s post, Baylor Law School Sends Mass Email With Personal Data on Each of its 442 Admitted Students:

• Point of Law, What Does the Baylor Law Data Leak Tell Us About Affirmative Action?, by Ted Frank: 

Checking the African-American box on your Baylor Law application is worth $9575/year, all else being equal; Hispanic heritage is worth $7023. In other words, if you were a white with your heart set on a scholarship to Baylor Law, and a magical genie offered you the choice of increasing your LSAT score by 4 points or changing your skin color, you’d be better off financially with the latter option. …

I don’t mean to single out Baylor; it’s undoubtably the case that virtually every other top-sixty school is engaging in the same shenanigans in competing for a limited pool of qualified African-Americans. (NB that I am not claiming that the pool is limited because African-Americans are not smart enough to go to law school; miserable urban public school systems and the disproportionate number of single-mother families surely do a lot to depress the number of African-Americans who get the education to do well at college and apply to law school.)

As Richard Sander has noted, Baylor’s plight is created by the better-ranked schools above it poaching the African-American students who would otherwise be at the top of the Baylor Law class; Baylor has to pony up extra scholarship money just to attract the handful of African-Americans it does have. But it really surprises me that a group as litigious as white law students hasn’t done more to ask for the law to be evenly applied; this is a much easier case for plaintiffs than complaining about alleged consumer fraud in employment statistics.

• Above the Law, The Baylor Law Data Dump, Now With Race and Scholarships, by Elie Mystal

Eyeballing the numbers (and I haven’t done a full statistical analysis on this data because I think it’s kind of missing the point), I see about a three to four point bump for African-American or Hispanic students. By “bump,” I mean to say that if you were a white student, you had a fighting chance to get into Baylor with a 161 or 162 LSAT score. If you were black or Latino, you were in the running with a 159 or 158. There are some outliers, of course — a black kid with a 156, a white kid with a 158 — but, in general, I’m eyeballing the mode for white students at 162, and the mode for blacks and Hispanics at 159 or 158.

• Above the Law, Another Perspective on the Baylor Law Admissions Data and Affirmative Action, by David Lat
• Forbes, Baylor Law Admissions Data Shows Tiny Affirmative Action Bump, by Victoria Pynchon