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The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action
Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. Oct 2 2012, 10:30 AM ET
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Why racial preferences in college admissions hurt minority students -- and
shroud the education system in dishonesty.
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michaeljung/Shutterstock
Affirmative action in university admissions started in the late 1960s as a
noble effort to jump-start racial integration and foster equal opportunity.
But somewhere along the decades, it has lost its way.
Over time, it has become a political lightning rod and one of our most
divisive social policies. It has evolved into a regime of racial preferences
at almost all selective schools -- preferences so strikingly large and
politically unpopular that administrators work hard to conceal them. The
largest, most aggressive preferences are usually reserved for upper-middle-
class minorities on whom they often inflict significant academic harm,
whereas more modest policies that could help working-class and poor people
of all races are given short shrift. Academic leaders often find themselves
flouting the law and acting in ways that aggravate the worst consequences of
large preferences. They have become prisoners of a system that many
privately deplore for its often-perverse unintended effects but feel they
cannot escape.
The single biggest problem in this system -- a problem documented by a vast
and growing array of research -- is the tendency of large preferences to
boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often
place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete
effectively -- even though these same students would thrive had they gone to
less competitive but still quite good schools.
We refer to this problem as "mismatch," a word that largely explains why,
even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with
similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward
the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch,
racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious
stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather
than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college
campus brochures.
The mismatch effect happens when a school extends to a student such a large
admissions preference -- sometimes because of a student's athletic prowess
or legacy connection to the school, but usually because of the student's
race -- that the student finds himself in a class where he has weaker
academic preparation than nearly all of his classmates. The student who
would flourish at, say, Wake Forest or the University of Richmond, instead
finds himself at Duke, where the professors are not teaching at a pace
designed for him -- they are teaching to the "middle" of the class,
introducing terms and concepts at a speed that is unnerving even to the best
-prepared student.
The student who is underprepared relative to others in that class falls
behind from the start and becomes increasingly lost as the professor and his
classmates race ahead. His grades on his first exams or papers put him at
the bottom of the class. Worse, the experience may well induce panic and
self-doubt, making learning even harder.
When explaining to friends how academic mismatch works, we sometimes say:
Think back to high school and recall a subject at which you did fine but did
not excel. Suppose you had suddenly been transferred into an advanced class
in that subject with a friend who was about at your level and 18 other
students who excelled in the subject and had already taken the intermediate
course you just skipped. You would, in all likelihood, soon be struggling to
keep up. The teacher might give you some extra attention but, in class,
would be focusing on the median student, not you and your friend, and would
probably be covering the material at what, to you, was a bewildering pace.
Wouldn't you have quickly fallen behind and then continued to fall farther
and farther behind as the school year progressed? Now assume that you and
the friend who joined you at the bottom of that class were both black and
everyone else was Asian or white. How would that have felt? Might you have
imagined that this could reinforce in the minds of your classmates the
stereotype that blacks are weak students?
So we have a terrible confluence of forces putting students in classes for
which they aren't prepared, causing them to lose confidence and underperform
even more while, at the same time, consolidating the stereotype that they
are inherently poor students. And you can see how at each level there are
feedback effects that reinforce the self-doubts of all the students who are
struggling.
Of course, being surrounded by very able peers can confer benefits, too --
the atmosphere may be more intellectually challenging, and one may learn a
lot from observing others. We have no reason to think that small preferences
are not, on net, beneficial. But contemporary racial preferences used by
selective schools -- especially those extended to blacks and Native
Americans -- tend to be extremely large, often amounting to the equivalent
of hundreds of SAT points.
At the University of Texas, whose racial preference programs come before the
Supreme Court for oral argument on October 10, the typical black student
receiving a race preference placed at the 52nd percentile of the SAT; the
typical white was at the 89th percentile. In other words, Texas is putting
blacks who score at the middle of the college-aspiring population in the
midst of highly competitive students. This is the sort of academic gap where
mismatch flourishes. And, of course, mismatch does not occur merely with
racial preferences; it shows up with large preferences of all types.
Research on the mismatch problem was almost non-existent until the mid-1990s
; it has developed rapidly in the past half-dozen years, especially among
labor economists. To cite just a few examples of the findings:
Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or
engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to
abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.
Blacks who start college interested in pursuing a doctorate and an
academic career are twice as likely to be derailed from this path if they
attend a school where they are mismatched.
About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of
their classes (and the bottom 10 percent in law school).
Black law school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as
are whites; mismatch explains half of this gap.
Interracial friendships are more likely to form among students with
relatively similar levels of academic preparation; thus, blacks and
Hispanics are more socially integrated on campuses where they are less
academically mismatched.
Given the severity of the mismatch problem, and the importance of diversity
issues to university leaders, one might expect that understanding and
addressing mismatch would be at the very top of the academic agenda.
But in fact it is a largely invisible issue. With striking uniformity,
university leaders view discussion of the mismatch problem as a threat to
affirmative action and to racial peace on campuses, and therefore a subject
to be avoided. They suppress data and even often ostracize faculty who
attempt to point out the seriousness of mismatch. (See, for instance, the
case of UT professor Lino Graglia, who was condemned by university officials
after he observed that black and Mexican-American students were "not
academically competitive" with their white peers.) We believe that the
willful denial of the mismatch issue is as big a problem as mismatch itself.
A powerful example of these problems comes from UCLA, an elite school that
used large racial preferences until the Proposition 209 ban took effect in
1998. The anticipated, devastating effects of the ban on preferences at UCLA
and Berkeley on minorities were among the chief exhibits of those who
attacked Prop 209 as a racist measure. Many predicted that over time blacks
and Hispanics would virtually disappear from the UCLA campus.
And there was indeed a post-209 drop in minority enrollment as preferences
were phased out. Although it was smaller and more short-lived than
anticipated, it was still quite substantial: a 50 percent drop in black
freshman enrollment and a 25 percent drop for Hispanics. These drops
precipitated ongoing protests by students and continual hand-wringing by
administrators, and when, in 2006, there was a particularly low yield of
black freshmen, the campus was roiled with agitation, so much so that the
university reinstituted covert, illegal racial preferences.
Throughout these crises, university administrators constantly fed agitation
against the preference ban by emphasizing the drop in undergraduate minority
admissions. Never did the university point out one overwhelming fact: The
total number of black and Hispanic students receiving bachelor's degrees
were the same for the five classes after Prop 209 as for the five classes
before.
How was this possible? First, the ban on preferences produced better-matched
students at UCLA, students who were more likely to graduate. The black four
-year graduation rate at UCLA doubled from the early 1990s to the years
after Prop 209.
Second, strong black and Hispanic students accepted UCLA offers of admission
at much higher rates after the preferences ban went into effect; their
choices seem to suggest that they were eager to attend a school where the
stigma of a preference could not be attached to them. This mitigated the
drop in enrollment.
Third, many minority students who would have been admitted to UCLA with weak
qualifications before Prop 209 were admitted to less elite schools instead;
those who proved their academic mettle were able to transfer up to UCLA and
graduate there.
Thus, Prop 209 changed the minority experience at UCLA from one of frequent
failure to much more consistent success. The school granted as many bachelor
degrees to minority students as it did before Prop 209 while admitting many
fewer and thus dramatically reducing failure and drop-out rates. It was
able, in other words, to greatly reduce mismatch.
But university officials were unable or unwilling to advertise this fact.
They regularly issued statements suggesting that Prop 209's consequences had
caused unalloyed harm to minorities, and they suppressed data on actual
student performance. The university never confronted the mismatch problem,
and rather than engage in a candid discussion of the true costs and benefits
of a ban on preferences, it engineered secret policies to violate Prop 209'
s requirement that admissions be colorblind.
The odd dynamics behind UCLA's official behavior exist throughout the
contemporary academic world. The quest for racial sensitivity has created
environments in which it is not only difficult but downright risky for
students and professors, not to mention administrators, to talk about what
affirmative action has become and about the nature and effects of large
admissions preferences. Simply acknowledging the fact that large preferences
exist can trigger accusations that one is insulting or stigmatizing
minority groups; suggesting that these preferences have counterproductive
effects can lead to the immediate inference that one wants to eliminate or
cut back efforts to help minority students.
The desire to be sensitive has sealed off failing programs from the scrutiny
and dialogue necessary for healthy progress. It has also made racial
preferences a force for economic inequality: academically well-prepared
working class and poor Asian and white students are routinely passed over in
favor of black and Hispanic students who are more affluent as well as less
well-prepared.
The way racial preferences affect student outcomes is only part of the story
. Equally relevant is the way the academic community has proved unequal to
the task of reform -- showing great resourcefulness in blocking access to
information, enforcing homogenous preference policies across institutions,
and evading even legal restrictions on the use of preferences. All of this
makes the quest for workable reforms -- which are most likely to come from
the Supreme Court -- both more complex and more interesting than one might
at first suspect. |
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