During their heyday, affirmative action programs produced some lasting good. It would have been immoral in the civil rights era to have an archipelago of white colleges and universities dotting the land. Affirmative action plans prevented that. As William Bowen and
But affirmative action programs also perpetrated some noteworthy wrongs. They reinforced crude racial categorizations, which repelled many Americans. They discriminated against Asian-Americans. Thomas Espenshade of
The evidence on this is hotly disputed, but Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. make a compelling case in their book “Mismatch.” Because some minority applicants get drafted into schools where they wouldn’t otherwise be accepted, they are more likely to be stuck in the bottom of their classes and more likely to flee from difficult science and engineering majors. Black law school students are four times more likely to fail bar exams, with mismatch, according to Sander and Taylor, explaining half this gap.
So affirmative action gave us some wildly good and unfortunately negative outcomes, and it stirred up fierce debates. But that’s not why these racial preferences are going away. They are going away because underlying realities have changed.Continue reading the main story
First, economic inequality now trumps racial inequality as the chief source of disadvantage. Sean Reardon of Stanford has looked at a range of studies over 50 years and found whereas the black/white test score gap used to be nearly twice as large as the rich/poor gap, now the income gap is nearly twice as large as the race gap. Given this, explicitly race-based affirmative action just doesn’t respond to the needs of the moment.
Second, the ethnic makeup of the country has become more complex. At the dawn of the affirmative action era, it was easy to see the chief racial divide as between whites and blacks, but the ethnic mosaic is much more complicated now, with an explosion of different groups from all over the world, at various levels of disadvantage.
Third, we’re living in an age of data. Once, it may have seemed reasonable to measure a person by a few crude metrics: S.A.T., G.P.A., race. But now colleges and universities, especially with financial aid forms, have access to a wide array of data on all applicants and can potentially get a much more personalized look at the disadvantages each individual has overcome.
The result is that race-based affirmative action, while not being rejected, is being subsumed within class-based affirmative action. It’s being subsumed within more detailed measures of exactly which challenges each applicant faced.
In his Century Foundation report, “A Better Affirmative Action,” Richard Kahlenberg shows how state university systems in places like
What often happens is this: Voters or courts in a state will strike down race-based affirmative action. Minority enrollments initially plummet. Then administrations devise class-based systems that look at the specific obstacles that applicants have overcome: growing up in a neighborhood with concentrated poverty, with a single parent or in a home with few financial assets. Minority enrollments recover, at least to a significant degree, and the new system is fairer than the old.
What are we looking for when we admit a student into a university? We’re looking for speed of ascent, not academic attainment at one moment in time. A student who’s risen from an economic catastrophe to achieve a B-plus average has more speed of ascent than the child of law professors who has an A average. The first student may be more expensive to teach. She may not write as many big alumni checks. But she’ll reflect more
We now have the means to measure speed of ascent in a fairer and better way. Explicit, raced-based affirmative action programs weren’t wrong for their time, but they are being replaced.Continue reading the main story