The Sad Irony of Affirmative Action

Gail Heriot

Winter 2013

In 2003, the Supreme Court held that the University of Michigan’s law school could substantially relax its admissions standards in order to admit a “critical mass” of African-American and Hispanic students. Many observers interpreted that decision — Grutter v. Bollinger — as an open-ended embrace of affirmative action.

The University of Texas was among the many universities emboldened to ramp up its use of race-preferential admissions policies. In 2003, the university already had in place an admissions policy designed to raise the number of under-represented minority students attending its flagship campus in Austin by admitting the “top 10%” of the graduates of each Texas high school without regard to SAT scores. Soon after the Grutter decision, however, the university announced that it was still dissatisfied with the diversity of the student body at Austin, 21% of which was composed of under-represented minorities (16.9% Hispanic and 4.5% African-American), and that the school would be implementing race preferences to boost that diversity. Under the new policy, the proportion of the student body composed of Hispanics and African-Americans rose to 25%.

The result was a lawsuit. The plaintiff — Abigail Fisher — is a young woman from Texas whose academic credentials were good, but not quite up to the standards that whites and Asians must meet in order to gain admission. They were, however, above those necessary for African-American and Hispanic students. Fisher, who is white, was rejected, and wound up attending the less prestigious and (for out-of-state students) more expensive Louisiana State University. Her case — Fisher v. University of Texas — was argued before the Supreme Court in October. It will be decided sometime in the coming months.

The Court may decide Fisher on narrow grounds. There are several dimensions along which the University of Texas’s race-preferential admissions policies are more aggressive than those in Grutter. For example, Grutter permitted Michigan to use racially preferential admissions policies to admit a “critical mass” of African-Americans and Hispanics to its overall student body. Texas, however, takes the position that it needs “critical mass” not just in its student body as a whole, but in each classroom, program, and major. Under the “top 10%” policy, Texas had likely already achieved a “critical mass” of minorities across its student body. Classroom-level “critical mass,” however, requires much more extensive preferences; it could conceivably justify racial discrimination in course registration and other more aggressive discriminatory practices.

Affirmative-action supporters worry, however, that the Court will take the opportunity to cut back severely on Grutter. They point to changes in the Court’s personnel — most notably Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement with Justice Samuel Alito — as cause for concern. Since Grutter was a 5-4 decision, it may not take much to swing the Court in the opposite direction.

The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good — even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF MISMATCH

How could such a miscalculation about the effects of affirmative action occur? As University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr., describe in their important, recently released book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, one consequence of widespread race-preferential policies is that minority students tend to enroll in colleges and universities where their entering academic credentials put them toward the bottom of the class. While academically gifted under-represented minority students are hardly rare, there are not enough to satisfy the demand of top schools. When the most prestigious schools relax their admissions policies in order to admit more minority students, they start a chain reaction, resulting in a substantial credentials gap at nearly all selective schools.

For example, according to data released by the University of Texas in connection with Fisher, the mean SAT scores (out of 2400) and mean high-school grade-point averages (on a 4.0 scale) varied widely by race for the entering class of 2009. For Asians, the numbers were 1991 and 3.07; whites were at 1914 and 3.04; Hispanics at 1794 and 2.83; and African-Americans at 1524 and 2.57. The SAT scores for the Asian students placed them in the 93rd percentile of 2009 SAT-takers nationwide; the African-American students, meanwhile, were at the 52nd percentile.

This has the predictable effect of lowering the college or professional-school grades the average minority student earns. And the reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students perform in the range that their entering credentials suggest.

No serious supporter of race-preferential admissions denies this. In their highly influential defense of affirmative action, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (discussed later in more detail), former Ivy League university presidents William Bowen and Derek Bok candidly admitted that low college grades for affirmative-action beneficiaries present a “sobering picture.” This is an understatement: The average African-American first-year law student has a grade-point average in the bottom 10% of his or her class. And while undergraduate GPAs for affirmative-action beneficiaries aren’t quite as disappointing, that is in part because, as explained below, affirmative-action beneficiaries tend to shy away from subjects like science and engineering, which are graded on a tougher curve than other subjects.

One example that helps illustrate the consequences of mismatch — how lower entering academic credentials depress both academic performance and grades, and how lower-than-average academic performance and grades in turn harm professional ambitions — is the field of academia. In 2003, too late to be cited to the Court in Grutter, Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber published Increasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students. The authors’ mission was to determine why more members of minority groups are not attracted to careers in the academy. The authors’ conclusions, reached after extensively questioning 7,612 high-achieving undergraduates at 34 colleges and universities, pointed to race-preferential admissions as the culprit.

“It is a fact,” Cole and Barber wrote, “that in virtually all selective schools…where racial preferences in admission is practiced, the majority of African American students end up in the lower quarter of their class.” Lower grades sap the academic self-confidence of African-American students at elite schools, according to the authors, which in turn causes them to abandon their freshman interests in academic careers. Their counterparts at non-elite schools, on the other hand, are more likely to persist and to ultimately succeed. These counterparts enjoy school, in part because they correctly perceive that they are good at it, and they want to stay on campus to pursue careers in academia…

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… | National Affairs

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