We live in a political environment where the intent of a policy aimed at helping minorities is all that matters; questioning the policy’s actual effectiveness is tantamount to racism.
For decades, diversity-obsessed college administrators have tried to conceal information on admissions and student outcomes broken down by race, but the data that have become public is devastating. An analysis of black students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1980s found that they had scored in the top 10% nationally on the math portion of the SAT but in the bottom 10% among their classmates at MIT. As a result, black students were dropping out at much higher rates, and those who didn’t leave typically received lower grades than their white and Asian classmates. Affirmative action had turned some of the smartest kids in the country into failures, in a misguided effort to obtain some predetermined racial mix...
After racial preferences were banned in the University of California system in 1996, black enrollment at higher-ranked UCLA and Berkeley fell, but black academic outcomes improved. Mr. Sander and Mr. Taylor have demonstrated empirically that as more minority students attended schools where they weren’t at a preparation disadvantage relative to their classmates, grades rose along with graduation rates. That isn’t surprising. Historically black colleges and universities, which are less selective than the top-tier schools, produce about 40% of blacks with undergraduate degrees in math and science, despite accounting for only around 20% of black enrollment.
Racial preferences almost certainly result in fewer black professionals than likely would exist in the absence of such policies, which is bad enough. But they also have a long track record of poisoning the academic environment. The racial unrest on campus today is a byproduct of college admissions schemes that place race above ability.
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