The Affirmative Action Myth

The Supreme Court decided one year ago that racial preferences at public universities are legal, as long as they aren?t too mechanically applied.

I think this decision was a cop-out. It ducks the issue. It says you can't have racial preferences unless they are informal, non-quantitative racial preferences. That's sort of like saying it's OK to rob a bank, just so long as the police don't catch you.

But this has proved cold comfort to affirmative action supporters besieged by evidence that preferences can?t deliver the results desired. With the constitutional issue resolved, Americans are asking whether affirmative action helps students in the first place.

The only thing affirmative action does is lower the standards. If you actually want to improve results for minorities, then the extra assistance needs to be applied before the college admissions stage -- that is, help minorities to succeed academically, instead of lowering the standards so they don't have to.

The reason that more minority students don?t get college degrees has nothing to do with competitive admissions policies. The truth is that most minority students leave high school without the minimum credentials necessary to attend any four-year school, selective or not.

Minority under-representation in college is the direct result of the public schools? failure to prepare minority students. It is a failure that affirmative action does not remedy ? college-ready minorities already attend college just as often as their white counterparts.

These two paragraphs should be the death knell of affirmative action in college admissions. That's unlikely to actually happen, of course, but that's because colleges are liberal bastions and affirmative action is a religious issue.

Now, the argument can be made that it matters which colleges those minorities attend, with the assumption that going to college doesn't actually mean going to a good college. And maybe the Ivy League schools are somewhat vulnerable on that point. But they are vulnerable because, overall, some minorities find it very difficult to meet their standards -- not because of inherent racism.

Now, it's possible that the testing system is somehow biased, and lots of college-age minorities who really are qualified are being artificially blocked from scoring their full potential on those tests. But any bias there would need to be subtle indeed, and there are other minorities (primarily Asians, for some reason) who don't seem to have the same trouble. So think the burden of proof is on those claiming bias in the admissions process (which they want to correct with affirmative action), and I think they have failed to muster such proof.

(Note: This does not necessarily invalidate the case for past discrimination. But I suspect that, by now, anyone in the university-level educational field who honestly if secretly believed in segregation or racism would long ago have been exposed and forced out).

I don't have a ready explanation for why some minorities do very poorly in public schools. I think there are lots of different reasons, and a lot of blame to spread around. But Bill Cosby seems to have the right idea.