The facts say one thing but the ideology says another

The Hill leans lightly left and so I am surprised to see this article, Race-preferential admissions offer only a mirage of opportunity by Alison Somin.  

The argument is an old one and the data well established but it is still not widely acknowledged or accepted in academia or policy circles.  The data says that student under preferences, whether affirmative action or legacy admits, to the extent that their academic scores are measurably less than their peers, suffer real negative life impacts.  The impacts are three-fold.  They fail out of school at markedly excess rates.  Secondly, to the extent that they remain in the graduating class it is with both lower grades which impact market opportunities.  Finally, many of those who survive downgrade into less rigorous degrees which command much lower market compensation premiums.  The graduate, for example, as a sociology major rather than as an engineer as they had intended.  Then there is the whole matter of lost time and incurred debts when they dropout.  Recovery rates are low.

There was a great natural experiment a decade or two ago in California.  The public passed a referendum forcing universities to stop discriminating based on race.  Affirmative Action did not disappear but it was certainly lessened.

The affirmative action enthusiasts forecast a plunge in racial diversity and in particular a decrease in African American students.  Instead, diversity increased because Asian Americans surged.  African American participation fell at the flagship universities such as Berkeley and UCLA but it substantially increased elsewhere in the system.  Graduation rates soared by 50%.  Tertiary education results improved, etc.  Getting rid of affirmative action boosted systemwide diversity and boosted the outcomes for individual African Americans.  See Speaking facts rather than spinning for details.

It all seems like a well intended social policy which has gone disastrously wrong and which no one wants to acknowledge.  

Is the boost given to racial and minority students in admissions causing them to attend schools where they learn less than they might at institutions where their preparation is closer to that of the median student?  

Research into this question stretches back decades. It consistently indicates that race-preferential admissions, as practiced at nearly all major universities, hurt the students they are supposed to help. Students who receive race preferences in admissions are less likely to complete degrees in science, technology, mathematics or engineering; to pursue PhDs and subsequently enter academic careers; and law students are less likely to pass the bar.    

While former Princeton and Harvard presidents William Bowen and Derek Bok’s “The Shape of the River” was intended as a defense of race-preferential admissions, their data tables indicate that “it is better to be an African American male at Penn State in the top third of the class than to be an African American male at Princeton in the bottom third of the class. The increased earnings he gets from high grades are worth almost twice the increased earnings he gets from attending a Tier 1 school.”  

Similar effects exist for students with other types of admissions preferences. A study conducted at Duke University found that legacy students — those who received preferential treatment in admissions because a parent or grandparent graduated from Duke — also abandoned highly quantitative majors because of mismatch effects. Their collective drift away from the sciences cannot be explained by anti-legacy bias, lack of legacy role models, or any other explanations commonly offered to explain minority students’ attrition from science majors. Preparation gaps appear to be, by far, the bigger factor. 

Most recently, law professors Rick Sander and Robert Steinbuch have found that “Law school mismatch is worse than we thought.” They examined data from 12 cohorts of law students at four law schools, covering about 6,500 students in all. They conclude, “A student’s degree of mismatch in law school is by far the strongest predictor of whether he or she will pass a bar exam on a first attempt.”   

According to Sander and Steinbuch, students at an elite school with LSAT scores 12 to 14 points below the median of their fellow students (i.e., LSAT scores of 150-152) had only a 22 percent first-time bar-passage rate, while students with LSAT scores in the same range at the non-elite school in question had a 79 percent first-time bar-passage rate.  

While some new law graduates can find good jobs in fields such as business, government or public policy that don’t require bar passage, the vast majority will want to pass the bar exam so that they can enter legal practice.  

If race-preferential admissions are sorting minority students to schools where they are less likely to pass this vital test, then these preferences aren’t creating opportunity. They are just taunting students with a mirage of opportunity.  

The whole article is worth reading for all the links to original sources and data. 

They key argument is that it is wrong to racially discriminate among people and that doing so also causes real and lasting damage to those who are the putative beneficiaries of such discrimination.

We know it but we don't have a public policy consensus yet to undertake things that actually make individuals successful rather than the emotionally rewarding appearance of doing good.