. . . is bleak. According to the New York Times, two cases involving affirmative action will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall:
The Supreme Court is scheduled on Oct. 31 to hear the lawsuits brought by the anti-affirmative action organization Students for Fair Admissions that challenge the race-conscious methods that Harvard and the University of North Carolina use to pick freshman classes.
The organization says that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans and that North Carolina gives an admissions boost to underserved racial minorities. And the group argues in its own brief, filed this week, that ending affirmative action nationwide would help improve diversity at the University of California and the University of Michigan, “because they could better compete with universities who currently use race.”
With the Supreme Court’s recent shift to the right, the affirmative action cases could upset 40 years of precedent that says race can be considered as one factor in determining university admission.
Does anybody have any doubt that the Supreme Court will rule against affirmative action, overturning the Bakke decision of 1978? In that decision, the Court ruled that race could be taken into consideration in admissions decisions, but ruled against the use of quotas. Yet, as we saw with Dobbs, the Court has apparently lost all respect for precedent, and I’d be willing to bet a substantial sum that the Justices will overturn Bakke and completely ban the use of race in admissions decisions.
The reason that Students for Fair Admissions mentions California is that the main point of the article was that two other big and high-quality university systems—the University of California and the University of Michigan, have been unable to boost minority enrollment after those states outlawed affirmative action by local edict. (They’re among nine states that do this.) Lawyers for those schools are submitting briefs to the Supremes to try to forestall a foregone conclusion:
It has been more than 15 years since two of the country’s top public university systems, the University of Michigan and the University of California, were forced to stop using affirmative action in admissions.
Since then, both systems have tried to build racially diverse student bodies through extensive outreach and major financial investment, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those efforts have fallen abysmally short, the universities admitted in two amicus briefs filed this month at the Supreme Court, which is set to consider the future of affirmative action in college admissions this fall.
. . . The outreach programs are extremely costly. The University of California system says it has spent more than a half-billion dollars since 2004 to increase diversity among its students.
In the briefs, lawyers for the universities argue that, without affirmative action, achieving racial diversity is virtually impossible at highly selective universities.
I have to say, the argument for getting rid of affirmative action so that Michigan and California can compete with everyone else for racial diversity is both sleazy and unconvincing. Without affirmative action, what would increase diversity? That’s why the programs are there! Unless I don’t get it, the argument that competition with schools lacking affirmative action will increase diversity in elite schools that already have it—but won’t in the future—makes no sense.
At any rate, the failure of outreach and other efforts to increase diversity is depressing, for I still think we should have some form of affirmative action. While changing admissions standards has always troubled me, since I wouldn’t know how to do it, I still ponder how to do it in a palatable way. But I also thought that increased outreach to minority communities and finding other ways to single out promising but “minoritized” students was another possible way. (Others include mentoring and special pre-college classes.) But even standardized tests, which are one way to find minority students who are good bets but don’t have stellar academic grades, are on the way out. We’re left with the risible concept of “holistic” admissions, based on personal statements, grades, and (yuck) letters of recommendation.
This article from Inside Higher Ed (click on screenshot) tries to suggest ways around the upcoming Supreme Court ban:
Here’s one solution by Tichavakunda and Kolluri (henceforth, T&K):
. . . universities committed to the ideals of racial justice might push back by requiring their applicants to think and act on issues of racial justice. Could racial equity be expanded by requiring all applicants to have taken an ethnic studies class or by requiring students to include in their application a statement on their commitments to racial justice? Though universities may soon be denied the ability to consider race in admissions, they can consider a commitment to racial justice as part of a holistic admissions process.
This is the equivalent of requiring DEI statements for appliants, to which I’m opposed for reasons I’ve stated in earlier posts. And, no doubt, it will lead to massive duplicity on the part of college applicants. Can you imagine all the rich kids, both black and white, who would hire people to write their diversity statements? (You can already hire people to do that.) This would favor those from higher socioeconomic classes, not people of specific ethnic backgrounds. That, in turn, might lead colleges to admit those students with ideologically acceptable statements who are also minorities—but that would be forbidden as a form of affirmative action. Most important, no ideological commitments should be required for admission to college, or be considered for admission to college.
This solution doesn’t seem much better, though I like the outreach part:
In addition, universities might partner with school districts serving students of color to expand the resources of those communities. For example, schools like Yale University, located in New Haven, Conn., and Stanford University, situated in the Bay Area of California, often have scant reach into their local urban schools and neighborhoods. These elite institutions might collaborate with high school students on projects seeking justice in their communities. Meanwhile, these students might be connected to resources on these campuses and offered support with the application process. Racial justice requires community uplift, and elite universities can play a more active role with high schools and their neighborhoods in serving communities of color.
As a whole, though, this program turns the university into enacting a specific ideological program and getting involved in things the government should be doing.
The solution that seems best to me, and liable to create more equal opportunity and achievement for minorities, is the last one suggested by T&K: renewed support for MSIs (minority serving institutions) and HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities). If affirmative action is overturned, there will suddenly be a lot of qualified and available minority students who were in elite institutions because of affirmative action. If MSIs and HBCUs were funded much more intensively, they could be highly attractive alternatives to elite schools, and would have the advantage that fewer minority students would drop out or feel they were admitted because of their race. This is not affirmative action, but it’s a way of affording reparations—if, like me, you see reparations as a rationale for affirmative action.
When the Supreme Court overrules Bakke, people like T&K, and colleges themselves, will begin thinking of ways to effect the same results, but in a less obvious manner. Some of those ways are more efficacious than others. But in the end, I simply don’t want to see elite colleges that comprise only white and Asian students. We must find ways—and they will be hard and expensive—to prevent that from happening.
I’ve said before here it’s a fait accompli. The vote will be 6-3. You can guess the rest.
I’m afraid I’m not overly optimistic on this one. As long as African Americans, who make up ca. 13% of the US population, have only ca. 1-2% of the nations wealth; and as long as public school funding is (in most areas) more or less directly tied to property taxes, which results in wealthier neighborhoods better funding their schools, then I don’t see the situation changing all that much.
It’s an almost desperate endeavor to try to use affirmative action programs at the college/university and/or professional stage — which I nevertheless see as a laudable effort –, when the whole pipeline up to that point is producing significantly diverging results.
In short, we need to invest massively in education from the ground up among the disadvantaged and poor.
Obviously, this is only one aspect of a very complex issue, but it could be a starting point.
> which results in wealthier neighborhoods better funding their schools
People say this but is it actually true? My understanding when last I checked is that most states top up local funding (from property taxes) to make it pretty close to flat.
Link from 5 mins of googling (no idea if the source is reputable, but matches prior impressions from academic sources): https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/where-nys-school-money-goes/
Wealthier areas do have more desirable schools, of course, but it’s mostly about the peer group. And nice kids attract good teachers, even if you pay them *less* than they’d get on the poor side of town.
In response to this comment, I spent some time looking at the amount spent per student in different districts, and whether that corresponds with literacy rates or other metrics.
It does not appear to me that per student spending is much of a factor in successful outcomes. Besides which , most public school funding comes from federal and state level sources, with federal programs in place to better fund districts with high poverty rates.
I suspect the issue is not that too little money is being spent, but that it is not being spent in effective ways.
“In short, we need to invest massively in education from the ground up among the disadvantaged and poor.”
Absolutely YES to this. Add to that support for parents, not just day care, but assistance at the home level. People who are working two or three jobs to support their families don’t have the time or energy to read to their kids, or even talk to them much. Early intervention may be expensive upfront, but it pays dividends in the long run, both financial and social.
I have seen this personally in programs that I have been involved in. The long-term success rate is higher than later intervention programs.
In addition, we need to pay daycare and pre-K faculty a living wage (not to mention faculty in general) so that we get the best people in those positions. It takes an enormous amount of energy to keep up with little kids. Plus, basic skills knowledge and good pedagogy, and all that should be paid for commensurately. Telling teachers that they have a “calling” so they don’t have to be well-paid is a load of nonsense. Ditto making them pay for materials out of their own pockets.
L
hear hear
Biggest bang for your buck comes from spending on pre-school programs. And that is especially true for disadvantaged kids. Do that now and in twenty years you will have made a dent in the stats about college entrants.
Not true, not true. As much as you, I, and many others commenting here would like to believe “education is the answer” – it is not. Believing this pleasant fiction will only do harm. Head Start and other early interventions show some academic benefit in the following year or two, but the improvements fade away soon after that.
“Education is the answer” is an attractive idea to so many because they think improving education can be done. Spend enough money and put in enough effort and things will be fine. This thinking is exactly like looking for your lost keys under the streetlight, because that’s where it’s easiest to look – but the keys are not there.
According to Paul Begala, the amount just spent on forgiving student debt would have funded pre-K for every 3- and 4-year-old for 10 years.
“Without affirmative action, what would increase diversity?”
Good elementary, middle and high schools. A large scale social project to give the opportunity to poor children to be more than their parents. Generally it is better to target the young, you are already too late to solve the problem at college age. If there are just not enough prepared and motivated applicants from certain groups, then pulling them into colleges by lowering the standards for them will harm either the college or the unprepared students or both.
Agree with Jerry, Ken, Jared, and Linda. (And scepticalhippo who posted while I was writing this) I have advocated before on t his site for a preK-2 reading emphasis for all students with a particular emphasis on economically impoverished. Many schools treat all students who come to their doors at ages 4-6 pretty much the same. Assessing their readiness t o read, while a known technique, appears to be rarely applied, let alone matched with customized reading curriculum. In these college level cases, we are no where near the most meaningful target.
Good riddance. Affirmative action was always supposed to be a stop-gap remedy to correct for the established societal norm that was biased against black people. But nowadays, the script has flipped, and every corporation and academic institution is biased *in favor* of black people so much that they’re willing to openly put their thumbs on the scales to make room for them.
At this point, it has gone beyond fairness and leveling the playing field, and is doing more damage than good, causing standards to fall and perpetuating stereotypes about black people not being able to keep up with everyone else. It should be eliminated. And plenty of black people agree with this.
See this recent Pew survey that shows a majority of all demographics surveyed, even a majority of black people, say that race should NOT be a factor in college admissions.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/26/u-s-public-continues-to-view-grades-test-scores-as-top-factors-in-college-admissions/
The Pew survey results are interesting. But you don’t describe them accurately by saying that “a majority of all demographics surveyed, even a majority of black people, say that race should NOT be a factor in college admissions.”
Respondents were given 3 answer options: race/ethnicity should be a major, a minor, not a factor in admission. In no demographic group surveyed was there a majority of respondents who said that race/ethnicity should not be a factor in admission.
Peter, look again. The table I saw shows flogus is correct.
Completely agreed.
That’s a rather creative use of statistics. For this question at hand, this particular PEW research is ambiguous, because it makes no mention of Affirmative Action, and could equally be understood in the classical sense, that people should not be excluded or discrimminated against because of the colour of their skin — meaning discrimmination against minorities! This other report by PEW shows that Americans say more, not less, needs to be done for “racial equality”, and view Affirmative Action more positively.
I commented before reading the end of Jerry’s post. Lots of head-shaking on twitter over the T&K proposal.
But it could have some upsides similar to the Varsity Blues story, where a cottage industry springs up to supply diversity statements to hundreds of thousands of 12th graders.
Look at the photo of the American team tying with China in an international maths competition. We can rest the case.
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/july/us-first-in-math-competiton.html
These appear to be fine young gentlemen, no doubt refulgent with intellectual curiosity and regard for academic excellence and achievement. All the very best to them.
I wonder if any of them applied to Harvard and had to run the gauntlet of a “personality” interview by some Harvard alumnus?
Has any DEI type by now gotten around to claiming that one or more groups are under-represented on this team (and the Chinese team for that matter)?
I don’t like title IX for the reasons our host incisively points out.
But why only on campuses, why not implement them in, say, US prisons?
I recently finished The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer. Freddie is a self proclaimed Marxist Communist who rubs me the wrong way with most of what he says. However, he gets one very big thing right: people are not all the same, some people are smarter than others. Maybe he encountered Judith Rich Harris or Stephen Pinker, but even as a lefty he recognizes the Blank Slate fallacy for the harmful deceit that it is.
DeBoer challenges the commonly held belief (see other comments here) that the quality of schools is important. He claims very meager academic improvement can be expected from vast effort and expense on schools. Academic talent is pretty much baked in by pre-school, and many people have little of it. The quality of a school is mostly due to the abilities of the students – not the teachers.
Affirmative action can go. Treat people as individuals when possible, not as avatars of a group.
I commented to this effect above, but to make it clear, when you say ‘baked in by pre-school’ there is lots of evidence that good pre-school makes the most of what can be changed by environment, and is not genetic. No lasting effect comes from the quality of schools after that, and final IQ scores relate mostly to genetics. The most we can do for changing adult outcomes is to ensure kids have adequate nutrition, sleep and parental and peer-group encouragement, and we help kids get to the best expression of their genetics.
But, frankly, can we have some clarity about what affirmative action is supposed to do? Given the above, we know it will not succeed as a work of social engineering (spend your money on pre-schoolers if that’s what you want to achieve). I’m not an American, so I may have this all wrong, but my strong impression is that affirmative action is supposed to be a reparation, an apology, and a fix for all the evils left by slavery, and the idea that it will wipe away that stain is pure fantasy. Again, I may be quite wrong, but my feeling is that the pain left behind by slavery is something to be borne, like grief. You can’t make grief go away faster: you have to go through it in order to come out the other side. The only thing that will cleanse this one is the passage of a very long period of time, and a good deal of dilution by people who have no part of that history. The Roman empire was 60% slaves, but it’s not an issue any more. The British held slaves, but at least they were early to abolish it (and borrow enough money to buy the freedom of every slave in the British empire, a debt so large it was only finally paid off in 2015!) and Britain today has its problems, but a resentful black underclass isn’t one of them. Does anyone really believe that affirmative action will work and solve America’s racial problems? And if it won’t, why keep doing it when you might try something else?
Most of your first paragraph is accurate, and people with a rational and scientific mind set should get on board. However, the “no lasting effect” applies even to excellent pre-school. That doesn’t mean pre-school is not a beneficial and good idea, only that expecting it to have any influence on college outcomes is cargo cult thinking.
“… people like T&K, and colleges themselves, will begin thinking of ways to effect the same results, but in a less obvious manner.” Colleges are already thinking of ways to try to effect the same results in a more evasive manner—the very label “affirmative action”, an evasive disguise for a back door to quotas, is an example. Harvard’s concocted “holistic” admissions procedure is a perfect example of this mentality in action. We can be certain that a gimmick like Diversity Statements will come next. Of course this “will lead to massive duplicity on the part of college applicants.” What goes around, as the saying goes, comes around. At the same time, serious proposals for educational reform—like John McWhorter’s proposal that reading really be taught by phonics—will be ignored. Gimmicks are so much snappier.
We need WAY more attention to the pre-college time in kids’ lives. In other countries school funding is done at the state level and more equal. Here in the US if you live in a poor district your schools will be crap. And they ARE.
This causes the pipeline problem which if not fixed, makes college admissions almost irrelevant. Or worse b/c under-prepared minority kids drop out of uni. collecting only debt and disappointment.
D.A.,
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Affirmative Action was a laudable idea, but without a clear finish line. And it was soon hijacked by race-baiters and the consulting class, so I’d hazard a guess that it has been both hurtful and helpful over the last couple of decades. I’ve got my money on simple inter-marriage. It’s the long game, but hey, we’ve had affirmative action for three generations now…
Final comment before our host wheels out Da Roolz. You are quite right that racial mixing is the best long term solution. But it’s rather sad that Blue Mink’s 1969 hit “Melting Pot” has now been widely banned for offering the wrong kind of answer. “Assimilationist” they say.
Affirmative action has been around for a long time. Presumably there are good studies that have determined its real-world effects. Is anyone familiar with this literature and its conclusions? Does AA actually accomplish its goal?
“Without affirmative action, what would increase diversity?”
I disagree that diversity just for diversity’s sake should be a goal. In my experience, growing up poor was a sufficient motivator to get me through my undergrad and eventually law school. If others are unable to see the forest for the trees then I’ll accept that as the way the cards fall.
When we start asking why whites and Asians are generally more qualified for admission, we start peeling an infinite onion. On PBS, I watched Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks. Turns out Capehart (black) has been stopped by the police while driving “more times than he can count” and Brooks (white) has never once been stopped. Yet both are careful cautious drivers. I’ve seen statistics saying that black drivers are pulled over far more often than whites in the daytime, but there’s no significant difference at night. To me, these are a small window into a problem so pervasive college admissions are simply one small facet. The tilted playing field seems to begin at birth, and influence all aspects of life. And its influence on culture means positive feedback – when society makes the efforts of some minorities futile, it undermines the desire to make an effort, which in turn tilts the field even more. Getting good grades in public education in some places subjects black children to ridicule from their peers for “acting white”. For being suckered into thinking that good grades actually matter if you’re black.
I don’t know where it’s most cost effective to use laws and bureaucracies to impose some sort of “counterbias” to artificially jack up the low end of the field. Sometimes I think such efforts are swimming upstream against the current of human nature.
Affirmative Action is a very unique policy: where the purpose of the AA policy is to have more Blacks admitted to certain programs, but if you point out any Black individual is admitted because of the AA policy, you are a racist. Strange, isn’t it?
In the UK, as the Telegraph reminds us: ‘Positive discrimination when a person is promoted solely because of a specific protected characteristic is illegal.’ Just as it is for negative discrimination because of the same. It’s called equality, and believe me, I appreciate the irony of the UK teaching that to America!
When the Supreme Court overrules Bakke, people like T&K, and colleges themselves, will begin thinking of ways to effect the same results, but in a less obvious manner.
Hence the dropping of the SAT/ACT requirement when applying for admission to colleges.
Perhaps the solution can be replace racial affirmativa action by quotas for schools? (I think is the Texas model)
No, quotas for minorities are strictly banned by the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision.
I am not talking about quotas explicitly for racial minorities, but quotas for “students of school X”
[There was recently a discussion about that in Portugal – some people are proposing quotas for Afro-Portugueses and Romani, but the government decided instead a system of quotas for students from schools in socially depressed neighborhoods, saying that the result will be similar]