Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative Passes Overwhelmingly

CEO StaffPress Releases

(Lincoln, Nebraska) A new study released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity documents evidence of severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in law school admissions at the University of Nebraska. African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos are admitted with significantly lower undergraduate grade-point averages and LSAT scores than whites and, again to a lesser extent, Asians.The study is based on data supplied by the University itself. The study was prepared by Dr. Althea Nagai, a resident fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on the organization’s website, www.ceousa.org. The executive summary of the study is attached.CEO president Roger Clegg will answer questions about the study when it is formally released at a press conference today at 10:30 a.m. in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska (Nebraska City Campus Union, Pewter Room). CEO chairman Linda Chavez noted that the odds ratio favoring African Americans over whites was 442 to 1. She pointed out, “During the two years studied (the entering classes of 2006 and 2007), 389 whites were rejected by the law school despite higher LSATs and undergraduate GPAs than the average black admittee. Racial discrimination in university admissions is always appalling. But the extremely heavy weight given to race by the University of Nebraska College of Law is off the charts.”Roger Clegg stressed that not only was race weighed, but it was weighed much more heavily than residency status: “For instance, a white resident of Nebraska in 2007 was more than twenty times less likely to be admitted than an African American applicant from out of state.” CEO also analyzed undergraduate admissions, but did not find statistical evidence of discrimination there, based on the data provided by the University. The University’s medical school refused to supply similar data jointly requested by CEO and the Nebraska Association of Scholars.