In my review of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, I noted that at elite colleges, affirmative action has a rather large impact:
After academic performance and demographic factors have been taken into account, black applicants are more than five times as likely as whites to be accepted at [elite] private schools, and 220 times as likely to be accepted at [elite] public schools. Asian applicants, meanwhile, are only about a third as likely as whites to get big envelopes from private institutions, and one-fifth as likely to gain admission to public ones.
Putting preferences in terms of test scores, at private schools, blacks get an advantage, compared to whites, worth 310 SAT points (out of 1600), Hispanics an advantage of 130, and Asians a disadvantage of 140. At public schools, the authors present the difference in ACT points: blacks 3.8 (out of 36), Hispanics 0.3, Asians –3.4.
It’s hard to generalize from these results, however. As I wrote:
Without affirmative action, the minority students who failed to get into [the elite schools featured in the study] would likely go to lower-tier schools rather than skipping college entirely. It’s hard to tell what would happen at those lower-tier schools. After California banned preferences, black enrollment at its elite schools dropped significantly, but black enrollment at other schools didn’t change much. (Of course, the caveat here is that California administrators didn’t fully comply with the law.)
Insider Higher Ed has the scoop on a new study confirming that affirmative action doesn’t much affect enrollment at lower-tier schools. Presumably, some students can’t get into these schools without affirmative action, but they’re replaced by students who couldn’t get into higher-tier schools without it:
The new study is consistent with past analyses in finding that the overall decline would be modest (a 2 percent drop at four-year colleges and universities), but that it would be more significant (a 10 percent drop) at the institutions with the most competitive admissions.