Over at New York today, Zak Cheney-Rice has a long piece about the imminent death of affirmative action if the Supreme Court, as expected, kills its final foothold in higher education later this year. It's a good piece, with loads of historical detail, and Cheney-Rice is certainly correct that the backlash against affirmative action in the '70s was all but instantaneous:
[Affirmative action for jobs] was ultimately doomed by several overlapping factors: the GOP’s wholesale turn against Black communities, the white working class’s betrayal of their Black peers, and the government’s terror of sparking a backlash from white voters. Alongside the Harvard Plan [for higher education], it represented the other half of the affirmative-action equation: the idea that the government could help build a Black middle class the same way the labor movement made a white middle class, by creating good-paying jobs for low-skilled workers without a lot of education. And it never had a chance.
I hate to pick nits in a thesis that I think is basically correct. But there really is more to this story. For one thing, although it's true that whites have long opposed affirmative action, it's been unpopular even among Blacks for the past quarter century:
There are legitimate issues with affirmative action, and not all of them are motivated by white racial animus. These problems are serious enough that I've long believed class-based affirmative action would, on net, be a better policy than race-based affirmative action.¹
Black small business owners account for 6.7% of federal procurement spending compared to an overall Black business ownership rate of 8.9%. I don't know precisely what this number was in 1970, but I think it's safe to say that it was more or less 0%—and the increase since then has been at least partly due to minority hiring requirements.² That is, affirmative action.
It's been one of my longtime wishes that we could all keep two thoughts in our heads at once. It is simultaneously true that affirmative action faced enormous opposition among whites from the very beginning and that it nevertheless had (and has) a continuing impact on Black outcomes in various areas.
In other words, things can be better but still need to improve. The evidence suggests that affirmative action has been effective for the past 50 years but that most people—including minority populations—don't believe it should last forever. Its importance has faded over time, but perhaps that's as it should be.
¹If you want more detail about why I believe this, I've written about it before. Here's a piece from 2003, here's one from 2010, and here's yet another from 2013.
²I would love to see a time series of this and related statistics, but I was unable to find one
I've long thought class/income based affirmative action in college admissions made more sense for much the same reasons, and perhaps some of the criteria could involve geographically underrepresented populations that are not explicitly race based but correlate with racially underrepresented populations. I'd be interested to see a study that tried to analyze how such a system might be designed and compare expected outcomes to the current race based affirmative action programs.
Universities haven't been prevented from shifting to class instead of race. They've avoided doing it in part, I believe, because it's more expensive to do so. Both private universities and public ones (to the extent they charge out-of-staters higher tuition) prefer to attract a certain percentage of applicants who don't need financial aid. Switching to class-based outreach would hurt their bottom lines, because it would mechanically reduce the percentage of students who are affluent, and can pay rack rate tuition.
The reduction in state support of public universities has certainly contributed to their preference to attract a certain percentage of "full fare" students.Hard to believe now, but back in the seventies my tuition at a state flag ship school was around $125 a term.
The reduction in state support of public universities has certainly contributed to their preference to attract a certain percentage of "full fare"
Yes. But private universities—even the richest of the rich ones—likewise seek out full fare students. Baumol's cost disease: Fancy universities are money pits! It's resulted in some curious outcomes. A quite high percentage of Harvard students are from very affluent families and pay full tuition. And yet those who do not are some of the least tuition-burdened in the country, because the school is in a position to be lavish in its tuition waivers (scholarships)—and this goes way up the income scale (over 200K in family income if IIRC).
Harvard has affirmative action for legacy admissions as part of its alumni fundraising efforts. Moving to a class/merit based approach would slow endowment growth.
MIT, across town, offers need based scholarships, but it has rigorous, measurable entry criteria, so it has a lot more students from the working class.
Both schools have pretty big endowments, so they can afford to offer scholarships.
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Gallup got a completely different result for black support for affirmative action:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/18091/race-ideology-support-affirmative-action.aspx
Kevin should dig down into the questions asked - that can make a big difference.
There are legitimate issues with affirmative action, and not all of them are motivated by white racial animus.
My sense is people of Asian heritage have the biggest legitimate beef in terms of college admissions these days, and are the ones raising the loudest hackles. And they've frankly got a point.* AIUI there's inarguable evidence that, all things equal, Asian kids typically have a statistically much more challenging time gaining admittance to prestige colleges.
*In full disclosure, I'd let the current college admissions system remain in place if it were up to me, because on balance I don't think America's top universities are a problem (but rather a critical national treasure). Still, I'm admittedly not an 18 year old Indian-American trying to get into MIT.
The historical precedent was the Ivy League limiting the number of Jewish students they accepted.
It is fairly common for universities to favor recruiting male students, even though their qualifications are inferior to female applicants. This is done to maintain a reasonable male/female ratio in the student body, in part because this makes the school more attractive to the top tier female applicants.
I was reminded of this when my nephew, who is half Asian, attended an open house at the software department of the local state flagship university. He came back unimpressed, as he felt it was "too Asian".
Asian Americans should focus their ire on legacy submissions, this is what limits their chances.
I'm curious about legacy admissions. Do colleges only engage in them for significant contributions (ie, for the sons and daughters of alumni who are wealthy?). If so, I don't have a huge problem with it, to be frank, as long as there are limits: the fact that leading US universities are extraordinarily well-resourced isn't irrelevant to their lofty perch in world rankings, and this directly benefits the US in myriad ways (our universities are veritable miracles of innovation and research, and part of what has made them that way is their immense wealth).
But giving any preference whatsoever to non-rich legacy applicants, well, that's just irrational, and doesn't justify the dilution of meritocracy in admissions.
I find the higher ED element of Affirmative Action to be a silly plateau for the Democratic to want to fight over.
1. the US has approximately 3,000 (depending on how you count ists closer to 4,000) universities. Most of the aforementioned schools have 80% plus admissions rate: affirmative action is NOT a limiting factor for access to college. Rather, at maybe 200 universities, about 6% of all colleges and universities, does affirmative action meaningfully impact admissions.
2. The Harvard data is pretty damming: Asian applicants are discriminated against.
3. More Federal financial aid, rather than a continuation of affirmative action, would almost certainty impact Black and Brown college graduation rates.
4. The popularity of affirmative action, given that California voted it out, is mixed at best.
This:
“The popularity of affirmative action, given that California voted it out, is mixed at best.”
You may be referring to a CA state referendum a few years ago that wanted to impose affirmative action quotas on various hiring and admitting practices across the state.
I voted against it.
And one of many interesting aspects of that situation was how much that referendum was pushed by high profile DEM figures. The DEM Governor of CA, Newsom, put out commercials supporting it (as I recall). Kamala Harris (now VP, obviously), also supported it.
And yet it bombed among DEM voters and failed to pass.
So, not only does affirmative action appear to be unpopular, but at the same time DEM operatives seem oddly eager to stick their necks out for it anyway.
Why is that the case? I have no evidence, but I suspect it’s yet another sign of an echo chamber among the Left. Biden famously ignored Twitter during the 2020 campaign, and I agree with the general consensus that his approach helped him.
And I’m fairly confident that he’ll do a good job getting re-elected by maintaining his generally moderate approach.
But I really do worry about the DEMs after Biden is gone. I believe firmly that Harris will need to moderate her culture war views if she ever hopes to win the Presidency on her own, but I don’t know if she’ll ever gain sufficient freedom from her echo chamber to allow her to do that.
How does AA poll among Black voters? I suspect some of the Democratic Party's dedication to this less than hugely popular policy flows from the belief (valid or not) that Democrats need to be seen defending the interests of Black America, given the party's enormous reliance on its margins with Black voters.
AA honestly seems to be unpopular across the board. Look up Inside Higher Ed: "Poll Finds the Public Doesn’t Favor Affirmative Action":
"Pew broke down the responses on race and ethnicity in admissions by race and by political identity. The proportions who believe that race and ethnicity shouldn’t be considered were: 79 percent for white people, 59 percent for Black people, 68 percent for Hispanics and 63 percent for Asians."
If I understand the current case, it challenges only AA in education. The existing preferences in federal procurement for veterans, women, and minorities would not be affected. With education it seems plausible that Asian American students suffer from minority preference, so it's possible to grant them standing. With procurement it seems less plausible for a white small business to get standing.
Get rid of AA in education and in a few years the entering frosh class at Harvard will be legacies, football players and Asian American women.
Legacies also need to go, obviously.
Why? If a University (particularly a private university) values the tradition of legacy students, what’s wrong with that? It’s just a perq of being admitted there.
In the case of select universities (the ivy league for example), it's affirmative action for the rich and privileged, the people who need it the least.
And I don’t think the university should be concerned with who needs it the most.
So you do support affirmative action as long as it's limited to the rich and priviledged.
No. I don’t consider giving extra considerations to legacies to be affirmative action. I’m not saying schools should definitely do it. But I don’t have a problem with it if they value that.
And our Slaver apologist does it again. The Slaver rebellion wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights. Legacy admissions aren't affirmative action for the rich and privileged, ithey're about valuing the tradition of legacy students. I think I see a pattern here ...
One of our more despicable trolls as he knows exactly what he's doing.
Legacies ARE the problem not Affirmative Action. They keep the pie so small due to needing so many slots for legacies to fund the endowment that Asians get the short end of the stick. SIGH.
If they are the most qualified, what’s the problem?
It depends on how you define most qualified. How about a minority student who went to crappy public schools and still has test scores only slightly lower than a rich kid who attended a pricy private school and had coaching sessions prior to the test? Who is really the most qualified?
The one who got better grades and better test scores. People should never be negatively impacted because their parents busted their asses to provide them with things like a good education.
How about if it was the great grandparents who busted their asses, and the succeeding generations have just been coasting. At some point this morphs into an aristocracy, where those of noble birth get special consideration and those of common birth not so much.
Isn’t that why people work hard? To give their kids, grandkids and descendants a good life? You think it should just reset after each generation and you can’t provide opportunities for your loved ones? And what do you propose? Doing an investigation of every candidate to determine if they had tutoring and determine the source of wealth that paid for that tutoring? What about sports? Should they not give a scholarship to the better player because he had private lessons?
To expand on the sports scholarship topic: My daughter is hoping for a lacrosse scholarship. We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on her travel teams, camps, private lessons, etc. My daughter loves lx and has been willing to put in all the hard work and has sacrificed social time and other things she would have enjoyed. We are not rich. My wife and I make big sacrifices foregoing buying new clothes, nice cars, dinners out, and things like that. So should a lacrosse player who is not as good earn a scholarship over my daughter because we’ve provided those opportunities for her?
Two parties with conflicting opinions have to agree on a single course of action. Choose one of the following options.
Option 1: Go with the 1st party's opinion.
Option 2: Go with the 2nd party's opinion.
Option 3: Resolve the conflict.
Answer key: Option 3.
There are no perfect answers, but there are answers that everyone can agree on in every situation. The trick is to get everyone to recognize that they are the most important person in the world, and tied for first place with everyone else.
Otherwise, who is more important than who?
Yeah nope one party is still busy arguing over the shape the table should be.
Me, I would have said the most qualified candidate is the one most likely to graduate and with a higher GPA than otherwise at that. Atticus, of course, decided to vear off on a tangent instead.
You have a crystal ball? How would you know which one is more likely to graduate with a higher GPA if not by their high school GPA and standardized test results?
From the NBER Working Paper 26316 - Legacy and Athlete Preference at Harvard
"Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC [i.e. athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff]. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged."
From the conclusion: jocks versus nerds:
"The advantages for athletes are especially large, with an average admit rate for recruited athletes of 86%. This high admit rate occurs despite admitted athletes often being worse on Harvard’s ratings than the applicant pool itself."
Also: "Each of the ALDC preferences primarily benefit white students."
I think the original mistake was making it a broad, open-ended remedy based specifically on race. They should have tailored it more as a specific remedy based on folks who could show they belonged to families that had been wronged by Jim Crow, which would have in practice meant a lot of black folks would have benefited it from it.
Depending on what the Court does, they still might be able to do that afterwards since it's not specifically a race-based remedy.
But there's more than Jim Crow - one of my dearest friends in college was the son of two Japanese American whose childhoods were completely upended when their families were force into internment camps and their farms in California take away. Then post WWII the US government strongly encouraged Japanese Americans to settle far away from the original communities in smaller towns and even rural area to break up the communities. My buddy's dad ended up in rural Virginia raising chickens. Another co-worker of min grew up in Mexico and then El Paso Texas in the 1960s, Texas was a racist towards Mexican Americans are they were against Black Americans.
I'm not diminishing those experiences, but they do not apply to kids applying to colleges today. The Japanese interment camps were 80 years ago.
That makes sense. Nigerian immigrants have some of the highest SAT scores and best grades. (My guess is that they have Igbo values regarding education and the usual immigrant zeal.)
And the study of "could show belonged to families that had been wronged by Jim Crow, which would have in practice meant a lot of black folks would have benefited it from it." is called CRT.
See the problem?
I don't know whether it's cute or infuriating that Kevin continues to think that moving AA to a class-based status would have any effect on it's broad acceptance. We've seen time and again that if any program is proven, shown, implied or even believed to benefit Black people disproportionately, support for it craters.
Welfare, TANF, SNAP, Medicaid, even the freakin' Lifeline program, FFS (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/phone-home/ which makes no mention of race in the slightest) were all demonized once they were perceived to be primarily used by Blacks. Class-based AA would suffer the same fate.
It's the same way the economic value of work depends so much on whether it is done by a man or a woman.
You don't cure a disease by treating a symptom.
You don't treat a symptom and assume that the disease is cured.
Translation:
The symptom is racism. Affirmative action treats the symptom, but if the assumption is that AA cured the disease, then the assumption is wrong.
I guess I have to offer a suggestion as to what I think is the disease.
We are all part of a shared social system. We are serving that system at our expense, or we are benefitting at the system's expense. If we are all serving the system at our expense, then the system is healthy and we all benefit in the long term. If parts of the system are benefitting at the system's expense, then the system is unhealthy. A cancer is a part of a system that benefits at the system's expense.
AmIright?
That doesn't make any sense. Sometimes you have to treat the symptoms. That's why we have a health care system to deal with our fundamentally flawed human bodies. That's why we have charitable organizations instead of revolutionary cells. That's why we have an army instead of a program to drug mankind into quiescence.
There are much better arguments against affirmative action, however, once one gets into the metaphysics of elite college admissions it gets pretty ugly pretty quickly.