Amy Wax, the embattled Penn Law professor, who wondered aloud whether affirmative action translated into academic success, actually may have been onto something. African-American libertarian economist Walter Williams notes that, “One study suggests that Wax is absolutely right about academic mismatch.”
“In the early 1990s, the Law School Admission Council collected 27,000 law student records, representing nearly 90 percent of accredited law schools. The study found that after the first year, 51 percent of black law students ranked in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 5 percent of white students. Two-thirds of black students were in the bottom fifth of their class. Only 10 percent of blacks were in the top half of their class. Twenty-two percent of black students in the LSAC database hadn’t passed the bar exam after five attempts, compared with 3 percent of white test takers.”
