blacklawboss wrote:Moxie wrote:tooswolle wrote:I thought I'd respond to this post for a few reasons. First, because it seems schools claim to want diversity yet reject urm students like crazy. Second, to notice what kind of trend there is in admissions; from the anecdotal evidence it seems like even being MA doesn't give you a boost at all...WTF is up with that???? My final reason because someone mentioned the implementation of diversity in the rankings system. Frankly I would be glad if they did it, not because I'd benefit but because others would and and we'd move that much close to equality because let's face it schools care about rankings and if urm's help them they'd recruit us like crazy.
Schools will accept URMs with lower numbers, but there are enough "high-achieving" URMs for these top schools to reject people with LSAT < 160 or GPA < 3.0. URMs do help them, by allowing them to claim their "diverse".
And reflecting on my cycle last year as an AA male, I did better than: a) my white counterparts, b) AA females with similar numbers on LSN, c) other URMs. I think the combination of race and gender is the best way to look at URM cycles.
EDIT: I agree with the post above that higher education does not include enough diversity, but law schools are clearly lowering standards for URMs, and I trust that they make their decisions to provide a well-rounded but also intelligent student body.
A lot of the problems lie in Undergraduate studies. So many URM's are 1st generation college students, so they are happy to go anywhere while the majority class of America goes to top tier universities. It becomes the natural progression to attend a top tier law school from there. Also the learning from top tier universities better prepares students for graduate schools, and graduate school test's like the lsat, gmat, mcat, and gre. To quote Malcolm Gladwell from his book Outliers from the study of diversity students in UMich law school, once they were in and graduated with a JD they did equally as good as their white counterparts. It's not race, but opportunity and exposure in education. These schools know that and are trying to right the wrongs for the most part, but there aren't a lot of URM's especially AA and PR men trying to attend graduate schools.
It's nice that we receive boost to bring up the number of URMs in the legal profession, but I still think that barring extreme circumstances, a URM going to a large public university can still find himself at a top law school.
that's a very sad thought.