On Election Day, Nebraska voters will have a chance to outlaw racial preferences, thanks to Initiative 424, a.k.a. the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative. In a study released this week, the Center for Equal Opportunity has revealed the extent to which preferences are used at the University of Nebraska’s law school:

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. …
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.

Here’s a news story in the local media. Here’s another, via AP. Here’s Inside Higher Ed on the big picture (last week, I criticized IHE for ignoring CEO’s report on preferences in Arizona).