Classism In Academia II: Your Improbable Path From Lower Socioeconomic Status (SES) To Professor At A Top 10 Law School

If you're still throwing anecdotal evidence at LPB, then you're never going to let go of privilege.

Why are 94 percent of all Faculty members at top 10 schools graduated from top 10 schools? Why are nearly all of the 2017 top 10 law review authors from those schools as well? Why are only 30 percent of those academics at top 10 law schools women? Why don’t we care about the most cited legal writing professors, clinical professors, or law librarians? Why can’t they seem to get published in top 10 law reviews?   

I sought to answer some of those questions, or at least conjecture about some of the potential problems. I hoped the answer wasn’t elitism. I thought maybe given that race and gender issues play a role, perhaps class did as well. And into the rabbit hole I went. I posted last week’s blog, and watched what I knew would happen. Would I get blasted for providing insufficient data, or would people be angry that there isn’t much data to get at an important issue? You already know the answer to this question. As did I before I wrote the post.

You see, my last blog post produced some serious defensiveness, push back, and reaction. Professor Carissa Hessick took the charge to respond to my post. Professor Hessick opposed the notion that the people who went to the top 10 law schools would be significantly more likely to be from top income brackets than those who went to lower-ranked law schools. Some of the initial reaction from others involved anecdotes from people who attended those schools. Oddly enough, some of those stories involved trying to relate to most of their colleagues at those schools. No one sought more data.  

So let’s talk about my proxy of top 10 law schools for class and how I got there. Keep in mind I’m doing this for fun. I don’t expect anything to change in academia, because powerful forces entrench hierarchies. I don’t expect minds to be changed at all. Honestly, I suspect most people in academia are uncomfortable I ever started bringing out our dirty laundry. But mostly, I just expect denial.

Let’s start with applying to college. That’s why I mentioned the Brookings discussion. Without compulsory SAT and ACT testing, many people from lower SES won’t even know they are college ready, let alone go to a top 10 undergraduate school. This was mostly ignored by comments to my last blog post.

Once we get to undergraduate institutions, the notion that SES plays a role is fairly uncontroversial, except perhaps among some law professors. You can look at your chances of escaping your economic class here. This link was mostly ignored in the blog posts and tweets challenging my arguments.  

From there, academics that care about hierarchies have worked on the issue of SES. Allow me to highlight a few of the ones I find most interesting. Ann Mullen’s article, linked here, a qualitative study of 50 Yale students, suggests that, according to her abstract so you don’t have to go behind the paywall, “For students from wealthy and highly educated families, the choice of an Ivy League institution becomes normalized through the inculcated expectations of families, the explicit positioning of schools, and the peer culture. Without these advantages, less‐privileged students more often place elite institutions outside the realm of the possible — in part because of concerns of elitism. These findings suggest that even low‐socioeconomic status students with exceptional academic credentials must overcome substantial hurdles to arrive at an Ivy League.”

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Marybeth Walpole’s article recounts the literature about lower SES and undergraduate and graduate institutions. She summarizes, “Low SES students are similarly underrepresented, and comparable equity issues exist for this group of students. Researchers have found that this group of students is less likely to attend college, is more likely to attend less selective institutions when they do enroll, and has unique college choice processes. Furthermore, they are less likely to persist or to attend graduate school.”   

I could go on summarizing the literature related to SES and undergraduate institutions. But, if you don’t accept these claims up to this point, I don’t think you’re going to change your mind on it no matter how many studies I cite. Ever.  

Now, let’s look at Sisk et. al’s top-ranked law schools for scholarly impact, and the faculty they list in Table 2. 48 percent of these faculty members went to a top-ranked undergraduate institution, and the vast bulk of those came from Harvard or Yale undergrad. I did not include schools like Swarthmore or MIT in that list, by the way. If I did, obviously the number would be even higher. My apologies if those two schools are your alma maters. I wanted to be conservative.

The next step in our journey to what I shall now call “LPB’s Ivy Proxy,” is the LSAT, a test that determines whether or not you end up on an Ivy League campus. Recall from my last blog post that 94 percent of faculty at top law schools graduated from top law schools. That means the next step is pretty damned important to determining whether Legal Academia is classist.

However, it’s really hard to find some data on LSAT and class, although plenty of data exists regarding race and gender. If I could get it, I might be inclined to track LSAT scores by undergraduate institution. Any speculation as to what I find? If you take the mean LSAT score from LSAC data for 2017, guess which two schools come up first? If you guessed Yale and Harvard, you are correct! If you do the same for median GPA, guess which two schools appear in the top 5? Anyone? If you guessed Harvard and Yale, why, you are CORRECT!

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Were I taking the LSAT, I might sign up with an LSAT prep course. I hear Kaplan is good (Kaplan — consider paying me advertising dollars for that statement, I still have student loans for some reason). That’s $1399 for the basic and $1799 for the plus. If you don’t think that is a large amount of money, you might have an answer as to your own Socioeconomics status. If your answer is one could get a job to pay for it, then I suspect you didn’t work 40–50 hours a week in undergrad, trying to make ends meet while trying to keep your GPA up.  

So, absent better data (assuming that after this blog post, this will still be a thing), let’s talk graduate school more broadly. According to Walpole, “Nine years after entering college, students from low SES backgrounds have lower levels of income, graduate school attendance, and educational attainment than their peers from high SES backgrounds.” Moreover, as Bettina Spencer points out, Educational Testing Service (ETS), the organization that administers standardized tests such as the GRE and SAT, “first generation college students generally do not perform as well on standardized tests as students whose parents completed college. They explain this gap by stating that, ‘parents with college degrees may be more inclined to motivate their children,’ ‘parents with college degrees may have a higher standard of living which enables their children to attend better quality schools,’ and, ‘parents with college degrees may provide extra educational resources in their home or in their recreational activities’” Imagine the ETS saying something like that.

Is the LSAT different? I’m skeptical, because it isn’t like standardized tests don’t have a long racist and classist history here. THAT is why I cited Stephen Jay Gould last week. This was also ignored. But let’s not take my word (or Gould’s) for it, Dan Markovitz, in a graduation speech in 2015, noted the disproportionate acceptance into Yale by “familiar schools.” “[M]ost of you (although not all) came to the Law School from highly selective colleges.Acceptance rates at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale colleges — to pick some familiar examples — have also averaged around 8 percent in recent years. And not all of you, but again most, came to college from 3 highly competitive high schools, and indeed in many cases from highly selective elementary schools, and even pre-schools.”    

It would seem at least that Markovitz is admitting that the LSAT does have some degree of class bias, unless we want to discredit the peer-reviewed literature on socioeconomic status at undergraduate institutions. In defensiveness, some might.

Thus, socioeconomic status is a barrier to entry into undergraduate performance, success and college placement. It also appears to be a barrier to success on standardized tests. So, how does one get into a prestigious law school again? Prestigious pre schools, GPA, and LSAT score? Okay, I’m kidding about one of those. Then again, maybe I’m not.  

We could then look at the “diverse schools” from which schools like Harvard Law pick their students. Notice anything in common about them as a general rule? There are a LOT of undergraduate institutions. There isn’t any data posted here about how many from particular schools. Diverse, indeed.  

So, even if you completely ignore Sander’s study, if you ignore all of the anecdotal data, and even if you decide that one data point (say, a tweet or searching your own school’s bio pages) is gospel despite greater and time series data, you are still left with it being not terribly much a leap of logic to suggest that J.D. alma mater is not as unreasonable as one might think at first glance as a proxy. Don’t agree? Let’s talk undergrad institution? Don’t agree? Sorry, I’ll never convince you. Ever.

Of course, I would like better data. Socioeconomic class is not observed, thus is a latent variable. One of those might be exposure to elite schooling. The question is how confident we can be that alma mater covers all of those other things that create a socioeconomic status index? No, I’m not that confident. It’s a weak proxy. Which makes me think that if we had better data and had stronger proxies, the smoke I see would become fire. Didn’t see anyone ask for that. Le sigh.

But, we will never GET better data. Not enough to satisfy those with an interest in the hierarchy. And the top 10 schools have a very big interest in perpetuating that hierarchy. So, I’m not shocked at all when people demand more proof without being irate that there is not more data.  

You can’t prove discrimination without data. And it’s convenient to claim there isn’t enough data to satisfy your own personal judgment for that very reason.  

And I’m not saying people who went there didn’t deserve to go there. I’m not saying that there weren’t people from lower SES at those schools. We disagree on number. It is the degree over time that determines whether it is a viable proxy. The law schools will never give me enough data to build a satisfactory SES index. Ever.

And around we go. And around academia has gone, in discussions of race, class and gender. It’s almost as if… people are invested in the system and don’t want to let go of privilege.

All of this discussion of class is all very interesting, but is really a deflection from the real point that I was leading up to in my blog post. Classism isn’t JUST about SES.  

So, I repeat my questions:  

Why are 94 percent of all faculty members at top 10 schools graduated from top 10 schools?  

Compare those numbers with a 2015 law review article suggesting that Yale and Harvard law schools account for 40 percent of current law professors, while 85 percent attended one of 12 elite schools. Of course, it is possible your own law school might produce a result that diverts from the aggregate data.

Why are nearly all of the 2017 top 10 law review authors from those schools as well?  

Why are only 30 percent of those academics at top 10 law schools women? Why are women less likely to be cited than men?   

Why don’t we care about the most cited legal writing professors, clinical professors, or law librarians? Why can’t they seem to get published in top 10 law reviews?   

Or should we just continue to ignore all of this. Maybe you can continue to pretend academia is a meritocracy. I, for one, refuse. I gave hierarchies up at 8th grade lunch table. 

Let us seek to answer these important questions. Or we can continue the dance of denial and claim we lack information to claim classism exists. I’m not the first person to ever raise this issue. I won’t be the last. Denial runs deep.


LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.