Today the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a pair of cases that could spell the end to affirmative action in university admissions. Conversation around the case has been almost entirely about elite universities, which enroll only a small fraction of all college kids, but there's good reason for that.
I'm going to use California as an example because in 1996 we banned affirmative action via Proposition 209. That makes California an excellent test bed for how well affirmative action works and how easily it can be replaced by something else. Here is enrollment at the non-elite California State University system:
As you can see, diversity is not a huge issue in the CSU system. White students are slightly underrepresented while Asian students are slightly overrepresented compared to their population. Black and Latino students are represented in numbers very close to their population. And Latinos in particular have improved their position considerably since Prop 209 passed: In 1998 they were enrolled at a rate about ten points below their population, while in 2018 they've almost completely closed the gap.
In other words, CSU might be twice the size of UC but that doesn't mean it deserves twice the attention. Quite the contrary: its very size and non-eliteness means there's little point in studying it since it doesn't pose a big diversity problem in the first place.
So now let's take a look at the elite University of California system. Enrollment numbers are surprisingly (?) hard to come by, but here's an estimate from an ETS paper by William Kidder and Patricia Gándara:
In 1998, Hispanic students were enrolled at UC campuses at a rate 19 points below their share of the population. In 2014, it was still 19 points.
Among Black students, enrollment was about four points below their share of the population in 1998. By 2014 they had closed the gap to two points.
Here are the numbers for Asian students:
Asian students are overrepresented by about 27 points. There are two big takeaways here:
- The elimination of affirmative action seems to have had little effect. Black and Hispanic students were underrepresented in 1998 and they're still underrepresented today. More to the point, they're underrepresented by the same amount as they were back when UC campuses actively used affirmative action.
- These numbers are never going to change much because Asian students are massively overrepresented. If Asian students are overrepresented by 27 points, then by definition every other racial group is going to be underrepresented by an aggregate of 27 points. There's no way to change this arithmetic.
This is California, not the nation as a whole, and both Latinos and Asians play a bigger role here than in most states. Still, California presents an unusual natural experiment, and that experiment suggests that affirmative action is not all that effective.
Personally, I've always been a fan of replacing race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action. This is not because it's just as good at redressing racial disparities. As near as I can tell from the evidence, it isn't. However, the evidence also suggests that it's almost as good. And it has the benefit of being far less controversial; helping a greater number of people; and appealing to most people as fairer. In other words, it eliminates a lot of problems at a very small cost.
For this reason I'm not too panicked about today's Supreme Court arguments. I would prefer that the court allow race-based affirmative action to continue because I think universities should have the flexibility to use it if they want to. At the same time, if it's banned I suspect the impact will be small. As in California, elite universities will have to find other ways of increasing diversity on campus, and they probably will.
I expect this court - the one that ignored the 15th amendment & gutted the Voting Right Act - to rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional.
While the technical, legal impact may be something you analyze with numbers & charts, the political impact will be "RACISM IS BACK, BABY!" And it will be at every university in America.
Is racism BACK in the California universities?
The cool kids say yes!
Regarding this:
“I would prefer that the court allow race-based affirmative action to continue because I think universities should have the flexibility to use it if they want to.”
But isn’t it kind of sort of technically illegal? This part of the situation has never fully made sense to me, and I suspect a lot of others must feel the same.
There are any number of articles out there citing the 14th amendment and/or the civil rights act, and the language barring race based admission looks about as clear as it could possibly get.
The Supreme Court propped up affirmative action anyway, so in that sense I guess you could say it’s “legal.”
But the language in the constitution and the civil rights act makes the eventual removal of affirmative action (based on race) seem pretty clearly like a no-brainer.
Yet this is one of those areas where I often find myself diverging from others on the Left. Kevin’s comment above is a good example: is “flexibility” really a sufficient rationale for maintaining a law that appears so blatantly unconstitutional?
I really don’t think so: and yet I’m well aware there are so many people on the Left who I simply would not say that to out loud. Odd.
What you write all makes sense to me. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights laws were written to outlaw racial discrimination by public and private institutions. Great. But then some institutions still wanted to do racial discrimination, but in a new way. The SC went along with this as long as the institutions more or less hid what they were doing. This all seems bound to collapse eventually.
I agree that a class-based sorting, at the university level, is superior to a focus on race. The challenge with the race-based model, it can benefit economically prosperous students of color and, at times, not support poor white/Asian students.
Always wondered that. Just doesn’t seem fair that Obama’s daughters or whoever would be given preference over some poor kid
(Obviously Obamas got in on legacy admission schemes not affirmative action, which is a separate issue, but my point remains)
See the benefit in giving poor kids a leg up, but isn’t giving rich minorities a preference sort of hypocritical? Given that the argument is that minorities are disadvantaged because of lack of wealth/opportunity, how does giving preference to people with lots of wealth and opportunity already solve anything. Seems contradictory
I think there is an extra special "presidential preference," which applied to both George W. Bush's kids and Obama's. I don't have a problem with that, I'm just saying.
Although some of my liberal facebook friends, who are both nicer and stupider than the commenters here, did comment on how brilliant Malia Obama must be to get into Harvard. I kind of snickered.
The older daughter would have been legacy but the younger one went to Michigan so not legacy but likely got in on merits as the kids did go to Sidwell Friends the tony Quaker prep school in DC.
"This is California, not the nation as a whole, and both Latinos and Asians play a bigger role here than in most states. Still, California presents an unusual natural experiment, and that experiment suggests that affirmative action is not all that effective."
The problem here is that California isn't too helpful to discern affirmative action effectiveness because the State is quite diverse, and more importantly, it is pretty liberal and racially inclusive already. Affirmative Action is intended to give racial minorities a chance in places where they would be otherwise ignored regardless of their merits. In other words, in States that are less racially diverse, and that have a history of racial discrimination.
It's nice that you are so virtuous and un-racist, but the underrepresentation of blacks in the UC system is in line with other flagship state U's, so far as I know. So you may be going to Heaven, but your black fellow citizens aren't going to be studying at Berkeley in this lifetime.
I worked on my college paper back in the 80s, and one of the others on the editorial board argued for class-based "affirmative action." When he noted there were more white people in poverty, another person just wouldn't believe him.
Class based admission has one major problem--lower classes can not afford college.
Can usually get federal loans or college is just paid for by the college. The latter especially at elite institutions
Grants rarely cover costs, so they are stuck with loans...and a lot of them.
Elite institutions can offer aid--but there is a limit on the number of need based admissions--they really like those who can pay. That income is even more critical at mid-range and even state schools. That main break for the latter is in-state tuition.
The salad days are long gone. For students in need Pell Grants are a joke that hasn't keep up with tuition hyperinflation. The loans are worse than what a loan shark would offer.
The people I know who do complain about affirmative action, complain about perceived financial imbalance. Like their kid's financial aid is limited compared against some minority kid's. They may be right or wrong, I have no idea without kids myself. But they are pretty aware it's not some minority kid keeping their c-average kids from getting into a top school.
How does looking at a state where affirmative action was (supposedly) discontinued provide a test of affirmative action? If you were going to do such a test in California, it would presumably be in the years from before the sixties (apparently there was no single law or order establishing it) to 1993. Of course in California there is a question of whether it has been used since 1998 anyway - who has been enforcing the ban? Setting that aside, real test would be to compare California since 1998 to other states which have been applying affirmative action.
However, I think you would have to go back to how things were before the sixties to see what affirmative action has done. I doubt if the enrollment of blacks and Latinos in the fifties was close to what it was in 1998.
There have been a lot of articles claiming that affirmative action did no good, or claiming on the other hand that it would be a disaster to kill it, but the articles don't have the data that would back up those claims. This post doesn't either. It's very complicated for several reasons.
I find it ironic that Clarence Thomas, who was likely a beneficiary of educational affirmative action in getting into Yale and in the greater sense of being Black at a time when it was considered appropriate to replace Thurgood Marshall with another Black is one of the lead voices on this matter.
But that said, in practical terms, I agree that the likely ruling against affirmative action will have relatively small effects on composition of student bodies and opportunity. Meanwhile, getting rid of it will get rid of one of those thigs that really torque off a lot of (White especially) people.
>>I find it ironic that Clarence Thomas, who was likely a beneficiary of educational affirmative action in getting into Yale<<
One of Thomas’s beefs with Affirmative Action is that it creates a stigma on people of color who are graduates of “elite” colleges. That they only got into that institution because of affirmative action, not merit. I agree with Thomas on almost nothing, but this is where the“almost” comes in for me. Even so, I still think it should exist in some form. Perhaps Kevin has the right idea.
Whites will just pretend that affirmative action continues to exist somehow, just like they complain about kids being taught CRT and the green new deal.
If you believe, as many conservatives do, that a private enterprise has the right to
discriminate against groups as in the case of the cake baker in California that refused to bake a cake for a gay couple then why would it not be ok to include race in the admissions process of a private university like Harvard, particularly as they are trying to give an advantage to those who traditionally have much less (I suppose it' s a different matter with UNC and other public institutions.)
I think affirmative action is an attempt to address the long and complicated history of racism and discrimination in our country and the impact on those most affected by it and as such puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of our education system and the kids in it. Is it fair ? Of course not though those who think "fair" is something that's easy to define should probably think more. Is it "fair" that some kids grow up in poverty ? And/or with the weight of discrimination and bigoty on them ? And is it "fair" that George W. Bush and Jared Kushner got spots at Yale and Harvard ?
Unless you’re a black Israelite hard to see how religious protections apply
Not that I buy the horseshit about gay cakes but it’s apples and oranges
Why are Asian students overrepresented? Kevin should tell us.
I’ll tell you: they’re smart as shit
Um, because they don't face racism in buying homes in suburbs with good schools? (One of many reasons, I think...)
White people "don't face racism in buying homes in suburbs with good schools". So why are Asians overrepresented compared to whites?
Um, am I expected to do all your thinking for you? You're comparing immigrants to a population that has been here for hundreds of years. Think there's any difference?
OK, now substitute Indian for Asian. Or hell substitute Nigerian. Or, back in the old days, substitute Jew.
The issue is not primarily "buying homes in suburbs with good schools", it is supporting bourgeois values within the home. Such values within the home can (and have, for many different groups) supported climbing up the ladder; perhaps not in one generation, but certainly in two.
But supporting bourgeois values is not cool among the intelligentsia that construct our culture. Oh sure, it's what they will try to indoctrinate in their kids, but for the rest of the world, via movies, TV, novels, opEds, it's all bohemia all the time. With exactly the consequences you'd expect...
Meaning that the flip side of this is that WHITES that do not subscribe to bourgeois values (ie the most problematic poor, mostly rural, parts of white America suffer from essentially the same pathologies and numbers as poor black America).
Aha!
Because they have better grades, score higher on aptitude tests (SAT, ACT), and and in general they work hard to do well in school. More power to them.
California has an admission guarantee for residents who are in the top 9% of their class. That seems like it would mean that the racial make up of the system would be more likely to reflect the population.
Top 9% of the state as a whole
Texas has the kind of policy you're talking about
In deciding whether affirmative action is "effective" (as mentioned in the headline) I think you'd have to figure out some way to measure the effect of the inevitable backlash.
To my mind, a big downside of affirmative action is that it generates so much right-wing publicity and white backlash that you wind up with, for instance, a governor or legislature much more conservative than you would have otherwise. And then the conservative governor and/or legislature reduce funding for elementary education, which is, again to my mind, probably where you can do the most good (i.e., if you massively funded elementary education for poor kids, you'd probably achieve more results than by maintaining affirmative action programs for admissions to elite universities).
Anyway, hopefully if affirmative action goes then the fancy universities are put on the defensive over legacy admissions. I have to think in the cast of a place like Harvard, legacy admissions are just as "injurious" to asian applicants as affirmative action for black and latino kids is. (I mention Harvard because one of the cases involved asian applicants to Harvard complaining that affirmative action hurts them.)
As I recall, another irony of this whole subject is that we already have affirmative action for men (versus women) in college admissions. Do conservatives wanna toss that too?
"in the case* of a place like Harvard..." that should have been
Paul if you could find a way to monetize your typo corrections you’d be one rich man
Teasing of course, we could really use an edit option though
Ha, too true. And I missed one, of course (as I always do!)... "because one of the cases involveS asian applicants to Harvard..."
KD you need to stay in your lane, the issue of affirmative action is fundamentally an issue of southern racism sprinkled northern urbanism. Those are the results we need to see. BTW, Texas admitting the top 10% of all HS classes to state colleges is another way to achieve progressive results.
I see the usual trolls just couldn't resist the bait.
"...Enrollment numbers are surprisingly (?) hard to come by, .."
Perhaps they are hard to come by because they would make it obvious that California has been ignoring the supposed ban.
I would prefer that the court allow race-based affirmative action to continue because I think universities should have the flexibility to use it if they want to.
Agreed. In general, as long as it's not egregiously discriminatory (and I don't think it is) universities should be allowed to manage admissions as they see fit. And, especially when it comes to the country's elite institutions, this suit strikes me as a classic case of a solution in search of a problem. America's top schools aren't a "problem" — they're the country's crown jewels, and they're responsible for an oversized share of progress in science and business.
So the laws say it is illegal to discriminate, but if discrimination is not "egregiously discriminatory" it's okay? I get it that this is more or less what the SC has said, but it has never quite made sense to me.
In the case of Asians, I think some elite schools have crossed the line in being "egregiously discriminatory".
“Discriminate” is an overly general term, and a highly charged one at that. The Bakke case established that race can be used as one factor in multiple factors in striving for campus diversity. I think this practice has served our country well. People on the right are pushing for a deeply ahistorical standard of color blindness. The bottom line is they disdain the value of racial and ethnic diversity, and they’re going to force that disdain on the rest of us.
What is the actual goal here anyway?
Is the goal to ENROLL students or is the goal to GRADUATE students?
Because plenty of people including such well-known white supremacists as Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter and Malcolm Gladwell have all pointed out that the main effect of the current system is to allow the universities to signal to their alumni, while discarding and destroying plenty of likely "helped" graduates along the way.
A student who only gets into Berkeley Engineering by dint of affirmative action, struggles with the class, and is forced to drop out helps no-one (except, of course, the all-important Berkeley PR department). That same student enrolling at a CSU is likely to be somewhere in the broad middle of the class, to graduate, to become a genuine engineer, and to start the professionalization and middle-class-ification of his/her family going forward.
To insist that a student "has been failed by the system" if they enroll in CSU rather than UC is a kind of snobbery that I simply cannot comprehend. WTF is wrong with going to CSU? To my eyes (as an outsider) the central American pathology is not racism, it is education snobbery run amok, this aggressive delight in looking down on anyone who didn't go to one of a handful of colleges, and isn't engaged in one of a handful of professions, as less than fully human.
To the extent that getting rid of affirmative action will help reign in this destructive narcissism, I am one thousand percent for it.
> A student who only gets into Berkeley Engineering by dint of affirmative action, struggles with the class, and is forced to drop out helps no-one (except, of course, the all-important Berkeley PR department).
I don't think you understand how affirmative action works at UC Berkeley, or most other places. You do not "only get in" by "dint of affirmative action".
In case you forgot, such schools are massively over-applied for, and they have the pick of candidates to choose from, almost all of whom are more than adequately qualified for admission.
You mean like over 128,000 applicants for Berkeley in 2022? Hard to imagine someone got in only because of AA.
Exactly, right wingers want to put the idea out there that Black graduates of elite schools are unqualified. The exact opposite is true: they’re highly qualified.
Ah, the famed "mismatch" theory that allows right-wingers to claim "we're the real empathetic ones!". We're the ones who want to match the teaching to the poor skills of those dark colored people! See, it's us! We're virtuous!
I don't know why Kevin thinks UC data is hard to find. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-residency-and-ethnicity
There are some problems with Kevin's statistics and indeed with the whole idea of outlawing affirmative action. Who enforces this law and how? What if the colleges went right on using a.a., just under cover of any of the numerous factors that are considered in the ridiculous American college admission process (where I come from people who want to go to university have to take a big exam called "matura" or "abitur". After that they can go to any university of their choosing; they can not be refused except in cases of insufficient capacity).
Seriously: How do you enforce the end of affirmative action? How does any white individual prove his non-admission was due to his whiteness and not because he lacked sufficient "extracurricular activity" points?
To find out more you'd need to consider the curves before and after the official abolition of a.a. If there was an effect you would see a change in the trendlines. If the trendlines go smoothly across the decision date I think lack of enforcement (or unwillingness to accept/ willingness to sabotage the decision by admission departments) is the most likely conclusion.
Affirmative action is a remedy. For what? Past and current structural discrimination. As such, I've never had time for an argument that affirmative action is also racist. That's like saying a penalty imposed for stealing money from someone is stealing. Nice try, but absurd.
Its doesn't surprise me that this SC is ready to end the remedy, they are lawyers, they get it. Plus, they are the type of conservatives who figure the only reason black and brown people aren't getting into elite colleges or better jobs is they are dumb or lazy, and therefore, non virtuous.
I mean, to take the position that there isn't structural racism now is ridiculous, but there you have it.
Kevin does hint on a key point though, mostly in the US hyper-capitalist system there is hyper class discrimination, more so than race.
African Americans were subject to a level of class discrimination almost unheard of in the civilized world for hundreds of years. What gets danced around alot, is not that someone looks at a black kid and thinks "that kids black" - its that too many people look at a black kid and think "that kids poor."