Diversity Meets Data at George Mason Law

InsideHigherEd
June 26, 2008

The American Bar Association considers, as part of its accreditation requirements, a law school’s commitment to a diverse student population. For top-ranking institutions, that usually means some combination of aggressive outreach, race-conscious affirmative action and on-campus support services to help recruit and retain underrepresented minorities.
But what if the ABA’s diversity standard led some students on the path to failure?
Since 2005, when The Stanford Law Review published a controversial and highly publicized study concluding that there would be more black lawyers if law schools did not use affirmative action in admissions, opponents of such policies have argued that race-based preferences actually harm those whom it is intended to help. Yet there is also evidence that concerted outreach and support efforts can, if applied properly, prevent the potential negative effects of race-conscious admissions practices.
The “mismatch” theory, as it’s been called, posits that some African-American students have struggled and at times dropped out of highly competitive law schools even though they might have thrived at lower-ranked or less rigorous institutions, and gone on to pass the bar exam. The article concluded that without affirmative action, black students would be better “matched” with institutions that meet their qualifications, and that disparities in failure rates would disappear.
Now, an organization that opposes race-conscious admissions policies asserts that it has found data from one particular institution illustrating the sort of dynamic the study would predict. According to data obtained through a public records request, from 2003 to 2005 some 45 percent of African-American students at George Mason University School of Law, outside of Washington, had grade-point averages below 2.15, defined as “academic failure.” For the rest of the student body, however, the figure was 4 percent.
While the law school confirmed the numbers, it also provided details showing that since those years, the number of admitted African-American students increased while instances of “involuntary academic attrition” — in which students are no longer permitted to continue the program unless they reapply and show improvement to achieve good standing — dropped to zero. Moreover, officials attributed the gains to an expanded outreach program that pairs each incoming minority student with both a student and an alumni mentor.
In 2004, the law school enrolled seven black students, four of whom were placed on involuntary academic attrition. In 2005, an equal number of black students enrolled, but five of them could no longer continue for the same reason. The next year, the law school began to see improvements: In 2006, one black student out of eight admitted suffered academic failure; in 2007, the enrollment of first-year African-American students climbed to 13, and none of them failed out.
“We feel that we’ve made significant progress, although you can always do better,” said Christine LaPaille, George Mason’s vice president for university relations. “The numbers speak for themselves. In the early 2000s, we had an attrition rate of more than 60 percent of our first-year African-American students. This year we admitted more African-American students than in any of the last four years, and this year we had an attrition rate of zero.” [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/26/gmu ]