Center for Equal Opportunity - CEO Releases New Study Documenting Racial and Ethnic Preferences at U of Nebraska Law School

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CEO Releases New Study Documenting Racial and Ethnic Preferences at U of Nebraska Law School

Tuesday, 07 October 2008

(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.

	University of Nebraska College of Law

The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit research and educational organization that studies issues related to civil rights, bilingual education, and immigration and assimilation nationwide.

L-R: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan D.A. Robert Morganthau , Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, New Haven Firefighters Frank Ricci and Lt. Ben Vargas, attorney Peter N. Kirsanow, and Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity are sworn in before testifying on July 16, 2009 on the fourth day of confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

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