  Even so, the select schools Bowen and Bok studied may be quite unrepresentative of the full range of schools that resort to racial preferences and the cost-benefit picture that holds for these schools may not hold for the rest. Indeed, the picture drawn by Richard Sander in a lengthy review of affirmative action in law schools, published in the November 2004 Stanford Law Review, lends credence to the Thernstrom’s academic mismatch thesis. Ranking law schools from best to worst, Sander found that affirmative action boosts African-American students 20 or more steps up the ladder, putting them in schools with white classmates who possess considerably better LSAT scores and undergraduate college grades.  The upshot: “close to half of black students end up in the bottom tenth of their classes.” This bad performance yields three bad consequences.  First, African-American students suffer high attrition rates.  Second, they fail the bar exam at a high rate (the principal predictor of a student’s passing or failing is her grades, not the quality of her school).  Third, they suffer a significant employment penalty for low grades “in all schools outside the top ten.” Sander estimates that under a race-blind admissions system, American law schools would actually create more African-American lawyers than they do under affirmative action (Sander 2004, 449, 460, 478, 479).