Are Racial Preferences Harmful? Over the past few years, researchers have begun

Question

Are Racial Preferences Harmful?

Over the past few years, researchers have begun to produce large datasets that make it possible to compare the fortunes of minority students who attend universities that use varying levels of admissions preferences. In many contexts, scholars find that students perform better, both in the short-term and the longterm when students’ credentials are closer to those of their classmates. When students are surrounded by peers who have much higher credentials, they often have more trouble persisting in a difficult major, graduating from college or getting a good job.

This phenomenon is known as the “mismatch effect,” and last month I published a study in the Stanford Law Review, trying to determine whether the mismatch effect operates in law schools… My study focused on black law students and compared black and white outcomes.

I found that law schools almost universally use very large preferences for blacks to achieve something very close to racial proportionality. The credentials gap between white and black students is about 30 times larger than it would be in a race-blind regime.

Starting a highly competitive curriculum with a large academic disadvantage, blacks wind up clustered in the bottom tenth of the class at nearly all law schools. I estimate the mismatch effect increases the number of black dropouts from law school by 40%  and increases the number of blacks failing their first bar exam by 80%.

The mismatch effect appears to operate in the job market as well. Law firms—once thought to be single-minded in their determination to recruit lawyers from the most elite schools possible—turn out to weigh law school grades more heavily than school prestige. The typical black law graduate, I estimate, loses about $10,000 in annual earnings because large preferences induce her to make a bad trade-off between law school prestige and law school grades.

This study is controversial, but suppose it shows what the researcher says it does. Would you then favor dismantling preferences for black law students? Would you favor maintaining law school preference systems if they helped black students rather than harmed them? Why or why not? Some people advocate using preferences in higher education to redress the wrongs of past discrimination. To be logically consistent, should they disregard evidence suggesting that preferences hurt blacks? Based the answers on Virtue Ethics theorist view

Explanation / Answer

The black preferences is a kind of two side sword, if we do not use it properly it could be harmful for the user, I used this example because I think, the black preference in law colleges and other educational institutions are not necessary these days and we should not walk with useless traditions so that according to me, the preferences is good for some students but harmful for college environment and students communities. Today we do not need this kind of preferences because blacks and whites both are the part of American society and we cannot allow any of them to create a line between black and white students.

I would like to add one more thing when we support such kind of preferences we help the antisocial behaviour and disputes.

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