And for everyone else too.
And for everyone else too.
A ffirmative action — the decades-old practice of assigning a positive weight to some candidates’ race during application processes — is over, at least for college admissions. I’ve yapped about this in a few different forums, but will give a somewhat unique take here: The practice’s end is a good thing for minority kids.
For at least the past three or four decades, as all experts but surprisingly few laymen know, affirmative action has almost never actually meant directing technical aid to STEM programs in struggling “POC” schools, or even assigning some slight weight to race among well-qualified and otherwise roughly equal competitors. Instead, the standard practice in higher education has been to give extraordinarily large race-based bonuses to almost every black or Hispanic applicant to a selective college. The basic reason for this is simple and obvious, if awkward to discuss: There are currently substantial and fairly stable performance gaps between different racial groups on board tests like the old SAT, and any college that wants to “look like America” is going to have to take these into account.
During the very representative year of 2017, College Board data reveal that mean scores on the SAT exam were 941 for blacks (479 verbal, 462 math), 963 for native Americans (486, 477), 986 for native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (498, 488), and 987 for Latinos of all races (500, 487). Whites turned in a fairly solid 1118 (565, 553), and the average for East and South Asians was almost 1200 (569, 612). A great deal can be said about these scores, and about the gaps between them.
First, notably, none of the averages are all that terrible in any global context, or for that matter when compared with the averages when velociraptors roamed the land and yours truly was a high-school student. And they vary a bit year over year: Native Americans have since dropped behind blacks, while Asians have continued to surge forward, posting a mean of 1239 in 2022. But one stark reality remains constant: The typical reasonably selective college essentially confronts three distinct groups of applicants every year — the various black, Hispanic, and native populations scoring at around 950, whites scoring at around 1100, and Asians scoring at nearly 1250.
Admitting students from these groups in anything close to proportional numbers, logically, would require — and did require until this year — affirmative-action advantages that are roughly the size of the gaps between the different populations. This has led to a remarkable and measurable level of “mismatch.” For example, per 2013–16 data, a black medical-school applicant with a lower-end MCAT score of 24–26 and a college grade-point average between 3.2 and 3.39 has long had about the same chance of acceptance — within the same set of schools — as an Asian applicant with a 30–32 MCAT and a GPA between 3.6 and 3.8.
To provide a bit more context: During the same period, an Asian college graduate with a 24–26 MCAT had just a 6 percent chance of entering medical school, while an equivalent white student had an 8 percent chance. In contrast, a black scholar with a 30–32 MCAT and respectable GPA was 94 percent likely to secure admission. Nor were the nation’s medical schools unique in this regard: The SAT subject-test averages for 2018 applicants and admittees to Harvard were, respectively, 622 and 703 for blacks, and 726 and 767 for Asian Americans.
To state the obvious: While no doubt infuriating for rejected white and Asian contenders, mismatching at this level was also terrible for admitted blacks and Hispanics. It is difficult to imagine a less friendly and welcoming introduction to the collegiate experience than being tossed into the mix at some hyper-competitive grist-mill school like Harvard or the University of Chicago, 200 SAT points behind the ability curve, while surrounded by potentially hostile peers skeptical of your right to be there. Almost certainly, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor point out in their 2012 book Mismatch, this reality explains much of the relative lack of black and Hispanic success at many top U.S. universities.
While these gaps may be closing somewhat, the black graduation rate is currently seven points lower than the white graduation rate at Yale (96 percent versus 89 percent), ten points lower at Cornell (93 percent–83 percent), 14 points lower at the University of North Carolina (83 percent–69 percent), 15 points lower at UCLA (88 percent–73 percent), 16 points lower at California-Berkeley (86 percent–70 percent), and an astonishing 21 points lower at my own alma mater’s Big 10 rival, the University of Michigan (88 percent–67 percent).
Absent any mismatch effect, a great many bright minority kids currently slogging their way through Michigan or an Ivy institution — and recall that a Harvard applicant with a 622 on each section of a tough test is objectively no fool — would simply have gone on to success as STEM majors at Southern Illinois or Kentucky State. Presumably, following the decision in the Fair Admissions affirmative-action case, exactly this will happen.
It is also worth noting a point so unbelievably obvious that it feels a bit bizarre to make it: Terms like “diversity” are not in fact just code words for “(liberal) black people.” Absent affirmative action, the student bodies at major U.S. universities will not be made up entirely of blonde white folks. As was noted above, essentially all large East Asian groups do better on the board tests than whites do.
South Asians like Indian Americans do as well — and Nigerians and Jews very probably do as well, although their data is harder to break out from that for larger ethnic populations. Especially if our country’s elite ivory towers are forced to abandon legacy admissions alongside affirmative action, many will be almost as multi-colored after merit admissions as before. Those who don’t make it in will still be well positioned for success at solid institutions one level down. In any sane sense of these words, it is hard to see this as a bad thing for “integration” or “minority success.”
A great deal about the future of race relations on campus frankly remains to be seen: Are legacies next? Will colleges simply duck the Fair Admissions decision for the next 15 years by using BS alternative metrics for race, such as “racial-adversity scores”? However, for now, it is worth remembering that a legal ruling that prohibits automatically advantaging the son of a Cuban dentist over the daughter of a Filipino shopkeeper does not brutalize the Brown Team or “promote white supremacy.” Across all races and eras, there has never really been a fairer system than “May the best man win.”