Selling Sloppy Statistics
The Affirmative Action
Debate
by Tim Wise
Dissident Voice
December 18,
2002
So the Supreme
Court has announced it will hear the long-simmering affirmative action case
from the University of Michigan law school, in which white plaintiffs sued,
claiming to have been denied admission even though they had grades and test
scores that were comparable to those of students of color who were admitted.
The case in
question--which the Circuit Court decided in favor of the law school and their
affirmative action program--will now fall into the lap of a high court that has
been increasingly hostile to such policies and tends to consider race-conscious
affirmative action efforts little more than illegitimate “racial preferences.”
But in truth,
the plaintiff’s claims of reverse discrimination (pieced together by the
right-wing Center for Individual Rights) are so flimsy they would be almost
laughable were they not so dangerous. Understanding how the right manipulates
data to make their case is important for those who hope to stanch the movement
to roll back key civil rights gains. Indeed, the data is not only flawed but
also dangerous, for its acceptance as legitimate social science--as will be
seen below--could set a precedent for essentially blocking the admission of
blacks, Latinos and American Indians to selective schools of higher education.
By utilizing
questionable statistical techniques, the plaintiffs claim that black, Latino
and American Indian applicants to the U of M law school received preference
over whites because they were often accepted with GPA’s and LSAT scores that
for whites were met with rejection.
According to the
plaintiffs, the odds of one of these “underrepresented minority” students
(URM’s) being admitted were often hundreds of times better than the odds of a
white applicant with similar scores and grades. Although the plaintiffs have
never presented evidence that the URM’s admitted were unqualified--indeed they
conceded that all had been fully qualified--they insist that when URM’s and
whites had equal qualifications, minority students were more likely to be
accepted, thereby indicating preference.
To make their
case at trial, the plaintiff’s attorneys presented grid displays that broke
down those who applied and were admitted to the law school by “qualification
cells,” separating students into groups by GPA and LSAT (i.e., 3.5-3.75 GPA and
156-158 on the LSAT, on a 120-180 scale).
Within each cell,
statistician Kinley Larntz calculated the odds of admission for each student,
concluding that URM’s in many cells had greater chances of admission than
whites with the same grades and test scores. He then calculated the odds ratios
for each cell, so that if URM’s in a cell had a 50% chance of admission and
whites had a 25% chance, the odds ratio would be 2:1. The larger the odds
ratio, the greater the degree of presumed preference.
But such an
analysis is flawed. First, the data used to calculate admissions odds ratios
was limited. Whenever URM’s and whites in a given cell were treated the
same--either all accepted or all rejected--Larntz simply threw out their data
and refused to consider it.
In other words,
by only examining cells where there was a differential outcome, Larntz
automatically inflated the size of that difference. Overall, 40% of minority
students who applied to the law school were in cells that exhibited no racial
differences in admission odds ratios, meaning that claims of massive preference
for URM’s depend on ignoring 40% of all applicants of color to the law school.
Secondly,
differential odds ratios for white and minority acceptance could just as easily
result from a system involving zero preference for URM’s, as from a system with
large preference, largely due to the small sample sizes of applicants of color.
For example, in
1996, among the most qualified applicants (students with a 3.75 GPA or better
and a 170 or higher on the LSAT), only one black with these numbers applied to
the U of M. This applicant was accepted. 151 whites applied with these numbers
and 143 were accepted. While most everyone at this level was admitted, since
there was only one black who applied and got in, the “odds ratio” in favor of
blacks at that level appears infinite--a guarantee for blacks and a less than
certain probability for whites. But surely one cannot infer from one accepted
black out of one black applicant at that level that there is some pattern of
preference operating.
As proof that one
could produce odds ratios favoring blacks even in the absence of racial
preference for any individual URM, consider the implications of a study by the
Mellon Foundation and the Urban Institute, which found that blacks tend to have
faced greater educational obstacles than whites with comparable scores on
standardized tests. When compared to whites with scores comparable to their
own, blacks in a particular range are far more likely to have come from
low-income families and families with less educational background.
These black
students are also more likely to have attended resource-poor inner city schools
where course offerings are more limited than in the mostly suburban schools
attended by whites. Thus, black students can be said to have overcome more and
even be more “qualified” than whites who score in the same range or even a bit
higher on standardized tests.
As such, it
becomes easy to see how differential admissions odds ratios could obtain even
without “racial preferences.” Simply put, if whites tend to be better off and
face fewer obstacles to their educational success than blacks, and if blacks
tend to be worse off and face more obstacles, then any black applicant to a
college, law school or graduate school will likely have a greater claim for their
merit at a given test score level than a white who scored the same.
To visualize the
point, imagine a four-leg relay race. If whites tend to start out two laps
ahead of blacks and the runners finish the race tied, is it fair to say they
were equally good as runners; or would we instead say that the black runner was
superior, having made up so much ground?
Since even the
plaintiffs have agreed there is nothing wrong with considering the obstacles
faced by applicants, including the effects of racism, it is quite possible that
admissions officers could look at applicant files, see whites and blacks with
comparable scores, and then on an individual basis make the determination that
the black applicants were more qualified, having overcome obstacles faced by
far fewer whites. But if individual analyses were completed with such a result,
they would produce the same odds ratios as discovered by Larntz. In other
words, differential odds ratios themselves prove nothing.
Indeed, the
implications of accepting differential odds ratios as evidence of “reverse
discrimination” are chilling, and would require the rejection of almost all
applicants of color to selective schools, simply because there are so few URM
applicants.
For example,
imagine an applicant pool at a hypothetical school where there is only one URM
applicant for each “qualification cell,” perhaps because the school is in a
very white location and doesn’t typically attract minority applicants. Under an
odds ratio analysis that assumed URM’s couldn’t have more favorable odds of
admission without this proving reverse discrimination, most URM’s no matter how
competent would have to be rejected simply because to accept one-out-of-one
would represent “infinite odds” and require the acceptance of every white in
the same cell, merely to keep the odds ratios the same.
So although we
could expect the whites and students of color at the lowest level of scores to
all be rejected and those at the top to all be accepted, in the middle such a
situation would create chaos. If one black student applied with scores and
grades that were good but not a sure thing for admission, and 200 whites
applied with those same numbers, the school would have to accept every white in
that cell if they accepted the one black, or else face a lawsuit for reverse
discrimination on the basis of an unacceptably pro-black admissions odds ratio.
Beyond mere
hypotheticals, there is real evidence of how reliance on odds ratios would work
in practice. In 1996, there were only two black students in the country who
received LSAT’s over 170 and had GPA’s of 3.75 or better. If one of these
applied to a given law school, that person would have to be rejected under an
odds ratio analysis unless the law school was ready to accept every white applicant
with that same score and GPA, irrespective of other aspects of their
application file.
Now imagine that
the same year, 100 whites with those numbers applied to the same school, and 80
of them were admitted, or 90, or 95; and imagine that both of the blacks with
those grades and scores applied. Since admitting both of the blacks would yield
odds ratios unacceptably in favor of blacks, the school would have to reject
one of the clearly qualified blacks with those numbers (thereby producing a
large odds ratio in favor of whites) just to avoid being sued for reverse
discrimination!
Even the
strongest evidence of URM racial preference at U of M indicates the problem
with utilizing odds ratio analyses. Larntz notes, for example, that among
applicants in 1999 with a 3.5-3.7 GPA and LSAT’s of 156-158, six of seven URM’s
were admitted, while only one of seventy-three whites at that level were
accepted. This yields an odds ratio of 432:1 in favor of URM’s at that level: a
seemingly huge racial preference. But there are two problems.
First, with only
seven black, Latino or Indian applicants to the U of M School of Law in that
particular “qualification cell,” it is entirely possible that the admissions
officers who decided to accept six of those seven merely examined the files and
found that those six had overcome extraordinary obstacles (including racism and
perhaps economic hardship), unlike the white applicants. Thus, the ratio
itself, absent other evidence about the particular decision-making of
admissions officers, cannot prove a preference for URM’s, as the pool is simply
too small.
Secondly, to
balance the odds ratios for this cell would have been impossible. If seven of
eighty applicants with that combination of test scores and grades was worthy of
acceptance--essentially what the University said that year--this yields an
acceptance probability at that level of 8.75%. Applying that probability to
each group yields six whites out of 73 who should be accepted and 0.6 URM’s out
of seven who should be. In other words, because of the small pool of URM’s in
that group, it wouldn’t be possible to admit even one, let alone one black, one
Latino and one American Indian, without giving a much higher probability of
admission to URM’s as a group.
But for the sake
of argument, let’s say the school rounded up the six-tenths of a person to one
full person and admitted one URM with these numbers. Thus, instead of 6 URM’s
and 1 white admitted (the actual numbers for 1999), we would get the opposite:
6 whites and 1 URM. The problem is, even with that “correction,” the
probability of acceptance for URM’s would be 14.3%, while for whites it would
be 8.2%, meaning there would still be an unacceptable odds ratio favoring
people of color simply as a function of sample size. So even under a
“race-blind” process that sought to avoid different probabilities for different
groups, it would be impossible to eliminate favorable odds ratios for people of
color, without basically rejecting the vast majority of URM applicants
outright.
The fact is, the
current attack on affirmative action is based on a lie; the lie of reverse
discrimination. The statistics used by groups like the CIR and their clients in
court to demonstrate supposed “racial preference” for people of color are bogus
and prove nothing, except the old adage that you can make numbers say just
about whatever you wish. It is incumbent upon those of us who support
affirmative action to confront these lies and flawed data head-first; to
demonstrate conclusively on which side of the bread one continues to find the
butter in this society (hint: it ain’t the rye side), and to show beyond any
doubt that the right-wing crusade against racial equity is supported by smoke and
mirrors, not hard facts.
The facts are plain. There is no racial
preference for minority students at the University of Michigan Law School. In
1997, for example (one of the years covered by the lawsuit), 34% of black
applicants were admitted to the Law School while 39% of white applicants were
admitted. More recently, in 2000, 36% of black applicants were admitted, while
41% of white applicants were. If that’s reverse discrimination, I’m having a
hard time making out the victims.
Tim Wise is an antiracist writer, lecturer and activist. He can be
reached at (and footnotes can be obtained from), timjwise@msn.com