Twenty-five percent of white students reported taking no AP courses in high school, but almost twice as many (45 percent) African-American students reported no AP experience. . . . With respect to high school GPA, white students clearly fared the best: only 11 percent were in the bottom quintile of the secondary school GPA distribution. In contrast, 49 percent of African-American students and 37 percent of Hispanic students had high school GPAs in the bottom quintile. While these gaps are troubling, the gaps in SAT/ACT scores are even more so. Only 9 percent of white students scored in the bottom quintile of the SAT/ACT distribution. In contrast, more than six times as many (59 percent) African-American students scored in the bottom quintile.12
Affirmative-action advocates generally downplay the racial achievement gap among entering college freshmen, but it is pronounced—particularly at more selective colleges—and has been for decades. In the early 1980s, when a perfect SAT score was 1600 and college freshmen at selective schools were averaging scores of around 1200, very few blacks came close to meeting that standard. In 1981 seventy thousand blacks took the SAT, and fewer than one thousand of them (1.2 percent) scored as high as 600 (out of 800) on the verbal portion. By comparison, nearly fifty-eight thousand white test takers, or 8 percent of the total, had verbal scores that high, which put the ratio of whites to blacks at 61 to 1. And the racial differences in math were even larger.13
Between 1978 and 1988 the scores of black freshmen at the University of California, Berkeley, trailed white test scores by between 250 and 332 points on average. The gap between whites and Asians over the same period averaged between 54 and 91 points, with whites leading in some years and Asians leading in others.14 Berkeley is a selective school, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s a typical freshman there had an SAT score in excess of 1200 points. Yet between 1990 and 1994 the nationwide SAT score among whites and Asians averaged around 945. Among blacks, it was about 740. That gives you some indication of how difficult it would have been for Berkeley to find black students who met its normal standards. And while Berkeley is selective, it’s not Harvard or Yale or Stanford or MIT, where average SAT scores in the 1990s were closer to 1300.
By 1995 blacks had made gains, but the racial gap remained quite large. The percentage of blacks scoring above 600 on the verbal section of the SAT that year rose to 1.7 percent, versus 9.6 percent among whites. So for every black student who scored that high, there were thirty-seven whites who did the same. The SAT added a writing portion in 2006, and blacks have lagged badly in that category as well. The 2012 black test scores trailed white test scores by 99 points in reading, 108 points in math, and 98 points in writing—and were well below the national average in all three categories.
These gaps and ratios are relevant because defenders of racial preferences like to pretend that affirmative action is an innocuous policy that simply gives a slight edge to otherwise qualified black applicants. Or they insist that race is just one factor among many that colleges consider. But if race were simply being used as a tiebreaker by admissions officers, there is no way the nation’s top schools could boast as many black students as they do. In 2011 the percentage of black freshmen at the nation’s eight Ivy League colleges ranged from 7.9 percent at Cornell to 12.5 percent at Columbia. Other very selective schools, including Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, and MIT, also reported freshman classes in 2011 that were more than 8 percent black.15
As the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education noted in 2005, these outcomes are all but impossible if black applicants are held to the same standards as whites and Asians.
In a race-neutral competition for the approximately 50,000 places for first-year students at the nation’s 25 top-ranked universities, high-scoring blacks would be buried by a huge mountain of high-scoring non-black students. Today, under prevailing affirmative action admissions policies, there are about 3,000 black first-year students matriculating at these 25 high-ranking universities, about 6 percent of all first-year students at these institutions. But if these schools operated under a strict race-neutral admissions policy where SAT scores were the most important qualifying yardstick, these universities could fill their freshman classes almost exclusively with students who score at the very top of the SAT scoring scale. As shown previously, black students make up at best between 1 and 2 percent of these high-scoring groups.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with top schools wanting to attract students from different backgrounds, but how they pursue that goal is important. “If there was a way to enroll more underrepresented minorities without considering race, we’d do it,” said the dean of the University of Michigan’s law school. “It’s not that we like being race-conscious.”16 But that begs the question of whose interests are being served. Black law-school graduates fail the bar exam at four times the white rate. Michigan’s law school likes to tout its diversity, but is it doing black students any favors by admitting them with lower standards and setting them up to fail? The left believes that the large black-white gap in academic credentials among college freshmen doesn’t matter, or that racial and ethnic diversity is a bigger concern. Schools go out of their way to hide information on admissions and student outcomes. But what if these efforts to color-code campuses at any cost are not so benign? Putting aside the constitutionality of race-based college admissions, a separate question is whether black students are helped or harmed when they are admitted to a school with lower qualifications than those required of other students at the same institution. Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate about the answer, because some states have banned the use of race in college admissions, and enough time has now elapsed to evaluate the results.
In 2013 the New York Times ran a front-page story on the University of California system’s efforts to maintain a racially and ethnically diverse student body without using group quotas, which had been banned in the state seventeen years earlier. “California was one of the first states to abolish affirmative action, after voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996,” wrote the Times. “Across the University of California system, Latinos fell to 12 percent of newly enrolled state residents in the mid-1990s from more than 15 percent, and blacks declined to 3 percent from 4 percent. At the most competitive campuses, at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the decline was much steeper.” The article went on to acknowledge that “eventually, the numbers rebounded” and that “a similar pattern of decline and recovery followed at other state universities that eliminated race as a factor in admissions.”17 And given all of the dire predictions made at the time, it’s nice to see that the worse-case scenarios didn’t come to pass. But the too-seldom-told story of affirmative action in the University of California system is the black gains that have occurred since it was abolished.
In their book, Mismatch, authors Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. tell this good-news story by comparing the pre- and post-Proposition 209 eras. Here is a sample of their findings:
•The number of blacks entering UC as freshmen in 2000 through 2003 is, on average, only 2 percent below pre-209 levels, and black enrollment jumps when we take into account transfers and lower attrition.
•The number of Hispanic freshmen is up by 22 percent over the same period, and again more when we include transfers.
•The number of blacks receiving bachelor degrees from UC schools rose from an average of 812 in 1998–2001 (the final cohorts entirely comprised of pre-209 entrants) to an average of 904 in 2004–2007 (the first cohorts entirely comprised of post-209 entrants). For UC Hispanics, the numbers rose from 3,317 to 4,428.
•The number of UC black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years rose 55 percent from 1995–1997 to 2001–2003.
•The number of UC black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] degrees rose 51 percent from 1995–1997 to 2001–2003.
•The number of UC black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years with GPAs of 3.5 or higher rose by 63 percent from 1
995–1997 to 2001–2003.
•Doctorates and STEM graduate degrees earned by blacks and Hispanics combined rose by one-quarter from cohorts starting in 1995–1997 to cohorts starting in 1998–2000.18
Prior to the passage of Proposition 209, blacks and Hispanics in California were steered into schools where they were under-prepared relative to the other students. They were being “mismatched” to satisfy the cosmetic concerns of administrators, to embellish photographs in school brochures. “Diversity” was deemed more important than learning. Proponents of racial preferences weren’t overly concerned with whether these minorities actually graduated, and many of them didn’t (or only did so by switching to a less demanding major). After race preferences were banned, blacks and Hispanics were more likely to attend a school where they could handle the work, and as a result many more of them have flourished academically.
Yes, fewer minorities attended Berkeley and UCLA in the wake of the new policy, and instead matriculated at less selective places like UC Santa Cruz, but more minorities overall not only graduated, but obtained degrees in engineering and science. What’s more important? Once again empirical data show blacks doing better in the absence of a government policy originally put in place to help them. Once again the political left, which has a vested interest in convincing black people that group success is highly dependent on policies like affirmative action, has ignored or downplayed results at odds with its agenda.
Members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have noted the “extensive empirical research indicating that students who attend schools where their entering academic credentials put them in the bottom of the class are less likely to follow through with an ambition to major in science or engineering than similarly-credentialed students who attend schools where their credentials put them in the middle or top of the class. Affirmative action thus works to the detriment of its supposed beneficiaries.” Furthermore, “students, regardless of race, are less likely to graduate from law school and pass the bar if they are the beneficiaries of preferential treatment in admissions than if they attend a law school at which their entering academic credentials are like the average student’s.”19 Researchers at Duke University, where blacks are admitted with SAT scores much lower than those of whites and Asians, found that more than 76 percent of black male freshmen intended to major in the hard sciences, which made them more likely than their white peers to pick those majors. The Weekly Standard reported:
But more than half of those would-be black science majors switched track in the course of their studies, while less than 8 percent of white males did, so that by senior year, only 35 percent of black males graduated with a science or economics degree, while more than 63 percent of white males did. Had those minority students who gave up their science aspirations taken Introductory Chemistry among students with similar levels of academic preparation, they would more likely have continued with their original course of study, as the unmatched record of [generally less selective] historically black colleges in graduating science majors suggests.20
Most of these students are capable of succeeding in majors of their choosing at good schools that are less selective. But affirmative-action policies work against them. As Sander and Taylor noted,
It is not lack of talent or innate ability that drives these students to drop out of school, flee rigorous courses, or abandon aspirations to be scientists or scholars; it is, rather, an unintended side effect of large racial preferences, which systematically put minority students in academic environments where they feel overwhelmed . . .
The student who would flourish at, say, Wake Forest or the University of Richmond, instead finds herself at Duke, where professors are not teaching at a pace designed for her—they are teaching to the “middle” of the class, introducing terms and concepts at a speed that is challenging even to the best-prepared student.21
In addition to producing fewer black professionals than we would have under race-neutral policies, affirmative action comes with a stigma and reinforces ugly stereotypes of black inferiority. “When few Jews could get into Ivy League schools, and Jewish students had to be superqualified to gain admission, a Jewish stereotype was created: Jews are smart,” wrote Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. “Admitting black students by lower standards has precisely the opposite effect: It reinforces the pernicious notion that blacks are not academically talented.”22 Some liberals claim that these concerns are trivial, or outweighed by social-justice aims of affirmative-action policies. “I do not feel belittled by this,” wrote Randall Kennedy, explaining how racial preferences were responsible for his admission to Yale Law School and any number of professional organizations:
Nor am I wracked by angst or guilt or self-doubt. I applaud the effort to rectify wrongs and extend and deepen desegregation in every aspect of American life.
There will be those, I suspect, who will put a mental asterisk next to my name upon learning that my race (almost certainly) counted as a plus in selecting me for induction into these organizations. If they do, then they should also insist upon putting a mental asterisk next to the name of any white person who prevailed in any competition from which minorities were excluded.23
Or, as Thurgood Marshall once put it to fellow Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, “You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it’s our turn.”24
But others are less glib. In Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Stephen Carter relates the experience of initially being denied admission to Harvard Law School in the late 1970s, but then being accepted after the school realized he was black. Several days after receiving his rejection letter, “two different Harvard officials and a professor” phoned him to apologize. “We assumed from your record that you were white,” one of them said.
“Naturally, I was insulted,” wrote Carter, adding,
Stephen Carter, the white male, was not good enough for the Harvard Law School; Stephen Carter, the black male, not only was good enough but rated agonized telephone calls urging him to attend. And Stephen Carter, color unknown, must have been white: How else could he have achieved what he did in college? Except that my college achievements were obviously not sufficiently spectacular to merit acceptance had I been white.25
Carter would go on to attend Yale Law School instead, where future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had recently obtained his law degree after doing undergraduate work at the College of the Holy Cross. In Thomas’s memoir he wrote about the evolution of affirmative-action policies in the 1970s and how they impacted black outcomes. “My class at Holy Cross had contained only six blacks, but none of us failed to graduate on time, and most did very well academically,” he noted.
By the time I joined the board of trustees in 1978, though, very few of the black students who came to Holy Cross graduated in the top half of their classes, and the attrition rate for blacks in predominantly white colleges and universities throughout America was disturbingly high. Almost half failed to graduate on time, if at all.26
Thomas wrote that when he left law school and tried to find a job, employers assumed that he had benefited from preferential treatment and couldn’t do the work, notwithstanding his good grades and fancy degree. “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preferences. I was humiliated.”27
Of course, blacks aren’t the only ones who struggle with the ambiguous benefits of group preferences. In 2012, when Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren was accused of claiming Native American ancestry to take advantage of hiring policies that favor minorities, she became indignant. Warren, a liberal Democrat who was running for the U.S. Senate when news broke that she self-identified as Native American in legal directories and that Harvard had showcased her as a Native American professor in the 1990s, responded to the revelations by telling everyone who would listen that she was hired based on merit alone. “I got what I got because of the work I’ve done,” she said.28 Supporters of affirmative action say there’s no shame in being hired
to meet a racial or ethnic quota instead of for your job skills alone, or in being admitted to a college with SAT scores well below those of your white and Asian peers. But the reality is that nobody who has any pride wants to be that “diversity” hire in the office or that token minority on campus, especially if it allows others to dismiss your accomplishments as having resulted from a tilted playing field.
Finally, affirmative-action debates, particularly in higher education, tend to focus on how whites, blacks, and Hispanics are impacted. But increasingly the group that has the most to lose in our racial spoils system is Asians. In 2012, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear Fisher v. University of Texas, four Asian American organizations filed a brief urging the court to ban race-conscious admissions.29 The brief argued that racial preferences intended to help black applicants are detrimental not only to whites but also to Asians. It said that admission to the nation’s top schools is a zero-sum proposition.
As aspiring applicants capable of graduating from these institutions outnumber available seats, the utilization of race as a “plus factor” for some inexorably applies race as a “minus factor” against those on the other side of the equation. Particularly hard-hit are Asian-American students, who demonstrate academic excellence at disproportionately high rates but often find the value of their work discounted on account of either their race, or nebulous criteria alluding to it.30
In the past Asian advocacy groups typically have stood with their black and Latino counterparts to support racial preferences in college admissions, even though Asians have the most to gain from the elimination of these policies. More selective institutions especially are worried about Asian students being overrepresented on campus, so they find ways to cap their numbers. In 1995, for example, Asian freshman enrollment at Berkeley was about 37 percent. The next year California banned racial preferences, and by 2005 Asians comprised nearly 47 percent of Berkeley’s freshman class. Going forward, defenders of affirmative action will have to explain why blacks deserve preference over Asians to address the past behavior of whites.
Please Stop Helping Us_How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed Page 15
