Further thoughts on affirmative action, or, what was JD Vance’s LSAT score?

Earlier today, I asserted that it was highly unlike that JD Vance would have gotten into Yale Law School based solely on his grades and test scores. One simple reason for this is that NOBODY gets into YLS based solely on their grades and test scores, because even limiting admits to people with the very highest grades and test scores would produce more admits than there are places in the class. But beyond this, YLS admits a lot of people whose combined GPA/LSAT numbers are below, and sometimes far below, those of a lot of people who are rejected. This, supposedly, is what white wing critics are deploring when they criticize “affirmative action.”

I happen to have in my hand a statistical breakdown of the names of State Department employees everybody who applied to YLS the year Vance was admitted (2010), although it’s anonymized. It’s pretty interesting if you’re into this kind of thing, so let’s take a look.

First, here are the test percentiles that various LSAT scores correlate with, roughly speaking:”

175-180: 99% to 99.9%

170-174: 95.7% to 98.7%

165-169: 87.8% to 94.5%

160-164: 74.6% to 85.6%

For you foreign prospective invaders in the audience, an undergraduate grade point average of 4.0 is more or less perfect marks in college. 3.0 was probably a little below average for college graduates when Vance was in college, because of the extreme grade inflation that has infiltrated colleges in recent decades, along with tattoos and so-called “rap” music.

In 2010, Yale got 214 applications from people with stratospheric LSAT scores (175+) AND very high college GPAs (3.75+). These were, by these supposedly objective merits, the best qualified of the school’s 3,280 applicants. Note that even if Vance had been in this cohort — his GPA was, but we know nothing about his LSAT score — his odds of admission would still have been under 50% (47.2% to be exact.) But if his LSAT was somewhere in the still extremely high 170-174 range, his odds of admission would crash all the way down to 21.3%, i.e., barely better than one in five for you OSU grads. If he had an LSAT in the 165-169 range — still better than nine out of ten law school applicants, roughly — his odds would fall to 8.1%. If his LSAT was below 165 (again, that’s still a really good score), his odds would fall to 1.9%. (And remember, this is all with basically perfect college grades).

But SOMEBODY — seven somebodies to be exact — got in with Vance’s GPA and an LSAT score that meant 98% of everyone else in your grade point cohort was going to be rejected. Could JD be among those lucky seven admits? Inquiring minds want to know!

There’s a further complication here of a very severe sort, which is that as far as YLS is concerned, not all summa cum laudes are created equal — not by a long shot. I got ahold of a list of all the undergraduate colleges that all the students at YLS in 2018 had graduated from, and what do you suppose the odds are that somebody who graduated from THE Ohio State University would be attending THE Yale Law School, compared to, say, the odds that graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, to pick four schools completely at random would be enrolled at the school? 30%? 10%? 3% . . . No, we’ve still got a long way to go here, as the odds that an OSU grad would be at YLS relative to those of an HYPS grad were, let’s see here . . . one in 400.

Maths: HYPS collectively graduate about 5,700 people per year from their colleges. tOSU graduates about exactly twice as many all by itself. In 2018, the undergraduate colleges of Yale Law School students:

Yale: 90

Harvard: 59

Princeton: 31

Stanford: 22

Ohio State: One.

Basically, it’s under ordinary circumstances almost impossible to get into YLS from tOSU, EVEN IF you have a stratospheric LSAT score to go along with your perfect grades, and of course we have no idea if JD Vance actually had anything like the former.

So why did he get in? I was pretty mean this morning to my fourth-least favorite fascist in America a the moment, but in fact I have no objection whatsoever in the abstract to YLS treating military veterans from distressed childhoods (assuming the can opener for the moment that Vance didn’t wildly embellish the facts in regard to the latter) very favorably, in comparison to the treatment given Emerson Cabot Lodge IV, graduate of St. Grottlesex, and Fly Final Club alum, whose daddy donated an international airport to New Haven etc etc. (Spoiler: Em, as he’s known to his friends and business associates, is also getting in).

In the concrete, JD Vance is, to go along with the fascist thing, a flaming hypocritical racist opportunist of the first order, willing to make up stories about Haitian refugees eating cats and dogs, in order to help get Donald Trump re-elected president. So yeah . . . What was your LSAT score, JD? I mean it would be really wrong for somebody at YLS to leak this information, and I certainly wouldn’t condone such a gross violation of student confidentiality.

But I would still treat it in the strictest confidence!

The larger point here is all about the phenomenon of elite overproduction, and how it gives the lie to the whole idea of a genuine meritocracy, to the extent that concept is even coherent, which is a very limited extent indeed under the best of circumstances, which these very much aren’t (Cf. I Like Beer). But that’s a subject for yet another post.