Opinion
FACE OFF: Is affirmative action beneficial to college communities and their students? NO: Under policy, minority students will only suffer
By Jeremy Adelman '13
September 27, 2012
Arguments for and against affirmative action are relatively predictable; supporters cite the spectre of America’s dark racial past and the merits of classroom diversity, while opponents decry the twisted morality of penalizing today’s privileged for the sins of their ancestors, all in the name of fairness. Lost in the debate is any critique of an assumption both sides seem to take for granted; namely, that affirmative action benefits minority applicants.
But, particularly as the Supreme Court stand ready to reconsider the precedent set by Grutter v. Bollinger in this coming term’s Fisher v. Texas, this assumption demands a strict scrutiny, particularly in light of recent studies detailing the negative of such programs on minority students.
In essence, the entire argument in favor of race-based affirmative action is based on a flawed pretense; empirical evidence suggests affirmative action is actually harming minority students. In their amicus brief in Fisher, Stuart Taylor and Richard Sanders rigorously detail the overwhelming sociological data supporting the hypothesis that racial preference lead to an “academic mismatch” between the minority candidates and the colleges they attend.
Essentially, by lowering admissions criteria for minority applicants, colleges ensure that the minorities they accept are disproportionately located towards the bottom of the class; for example, post Grutter, 60 percent of African Americans attending the University of Michigan law school were in the bottom 10 percent of the class. This leads directly to lower self-esteem and academic disengagement by minority students, and also to high attrition rates for minorities in rigorous subjects like science and engineering.
Recent studies of these students at Duke University and the University of California system confirm this “science effect,” while additional evidence suggests that schools without racial preference admissions have significantly higher minority persistence rates in STEM fields.
The real damning evidence, however, against affirmative action and in favor of Taylor and Sanders’s theory, comes from studies of minority students in the University of California system. Thanks to Proposition 209, which banned racial admissions preferences system-wide, UC represents an ideal laboratory for gauging the effects of ending affirmative action; at least as far as minority students are concerned, the results are overwhelmingly positive.
Since the passage of Proposition 209, black and Hispanic academic performance rose dramatically system-wide, with improvements as high as 50 percent in four year graduation rates for minority scholars. Furthermore, minority persistence rates in engineering and science rose dramatically. Moreover, though Hispanic and black enrollment initially plunged, today the percentages of both demographics in the UC system have rebounded to pre-Proposition 209 levels.
Indeed, diversity has actually increased; prior to Proposition 209, admissions preferences to such candidates led to the clustering of underrepresented minorities at the flagship schools (Berkeley and UCLA), leaving few left over to attend the remaining institutions; today, however, the percentages at each university in the system are roughly equivalent. These results strongly underscore the primary conclusion of the mismatch theory vis-à-vis policy; the end of affirmative action will benefit, rather than hinder, minority scholars.
Even if the Supreme Court decides to uphold Grutter, this evidence is sufficient to justify colleges like Hamilton unilaterally moving to eliminate racial preference in their admissions processes. Simply put, the admission of minority candidates who lack the requisite academic preparations for the rigorous coursework of top-tier colleges fails to help those students succeed.
As any admissions counselor knows, the most important facet of a student’s college search is “finding a good fit.” It is therefore a sad reflection on the elite college view of minorities when, all too often, their lust for minority students leads them to ignore this essential criterion.