Reuters, If Affirmative Action Is Struck Down, These Law Schools May Point to the Future:
The experience of two highly selective public U.S. law schools offers a guide for other schools to admitting diverse students should the U.S. Supreme Court ban colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in their admissions decisions, as it is expected to do before the term ends this month.
Enrollment at the University of Michigan Law School and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law among Black, Hispanic and Native American first-year students plummeted after both states banned affirmative action in public university admissions.
But over time each school found new ways to boost their percentages of those diverse groups beyond pre-ban levels by adopting strategies that other institutions likely will mirror if the Supreme Court prohibits public and private colleges and universities from considering race when admitting students, as plaintiffs in a pair of cases before the court have asked it to do. Those range from participating in pipeline programs that introduce college students to legal careers to looking at applicants’ family income and whether they are the first in their families to attend college.
The total percentage of Black, Hispanic and Native American first-year students at Berkeley Law fell from 19% in 1996 to less than 6% in 1997—the year after the state banned affirmative action—American Bar Association data show. Enrollment of those groups among Michigan Law’s first-year classes declined from 17% in 2005 to 9% by 2008, when the school felt the full impact of the state’s 2006 prohibition on considering race in admissions, according to the ABA. Those percentages have since rebounded. …
The stakes are high for the legal profession, which remains significantly less diverse than the U.S. population. ABA data shows that 19% of the country’s lawyers are people of color, compared with 40% of the overall population. By contrast, 36% of physicians are minorities, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, and 30% of dentists are minorities, according to the American Dental Association. …
Recovering from California’s affirmative action ban took Berkeley Law years as the school slowly learned to draw a diverse pool of applicants, admit diverse students without considering their race, and convince them to enroll at Berkeley Law, Chemerinsky said. The school, which has an acceptance rate of under 13%, collects detailed financial data from accepted students through need-based scholarship applications in order to direct financial aid to them in hopes they will enroll. But bolstering economic diversity does not yield the same level of racial diversity as considering race directly, Chemerinsky said.
Like Michigan, Berkeley Law prioritizes pipeline programs that encourage minority students to consider legal careers early on. And it has students, alumni and faculty with similar backgrounds reach out to accepted students during the admissions process, Chemerinsky said.
