Recently a poster declared that affirmative action has been successful. I disagreed; no particular evidence for the success of affirmative action was offered in that thread, so I’ve starting a new thread devoted to the topic.
I read a variety of news and opinion pieces from across the political spectrum. I find that conservative sources like to talk about affirmative action a lot–National Review is leading with the topic right now–while liberal sources tend to mention it much less often. But last week Slate published The Massive Liberal Failure on Race. The second article in the series is titled It’s Time for Liberals to Admit that Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work. This is a lengthy documentation of the failures of affirmative action, but it manages not to mention the biggest reason why affirmative action is better. Salon did mention it in The Liberal Case Against Race-Based Affirmative Action. Quoting Senator James Webb:
Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.
Affirmative action is a type of racial discrimination. If racial discrimination is always wrong, then affirmative action is wrong. If racial discrimination is sometimes right, then one wonders why we hear so much about it being wrong.
Research shows that affirmative action affects who gets admitted to top schools. In some schools, blacks are as likely to be admitted as white whose SAT scores are 310 points higher. Hispanics are as likely to be admitted as whites whose SAT scores are 130 points higher, while Asians are as likely to be admitted as whites whose SAT scores are 140 points lower. The effects of affirmative action got an experimental test in 1996 when California voters eliminated it in government. To no one’s surprise, the percentage of Asians at UC Berkeley and other top schools in the state shot upwards, and the percentage of Blacks and Hispanics fell. Other states have banned racial preferences and seen similar trends.
The second reason why affirmative action is bad is that it hurts the people it’s supposed to be helping, do to a phenomenon called mismatch.
The single biggest problem in this system – a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research – is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively – even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.
We refer to this problem as “mismatch,” a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.
The mismatch effect happens when a school extends to a student such a large admissions preference – sometimes because of a student’s athletic prowess or legacy connection to the school, but usually because of the student’s race – that the student finds himself in a class where he has weaker academic preparation than nearly all of his classmates. The student who would flourish at, say, Wake Forest or the University of Richmond, instead finds himself at Duke, where the professors are not teaching at a pace designed for him – they are teaching to the “middle” of the class, introducing terms and concepts at a speed that is unnerving even to the best-prepared student.
The student who is underprepared relative to others in that class falls behind from the start and becomes increasingly lost as the professor and his classmates race ahead. His grades on his first exams or papers put him at the bottom of the class. Worse, the experience may well induce panic and self-doubt, making learning even harder.
It’s widely known that after affirmative action was abolished in the California system, graduation rates went up for blacks.
Another Straight Doper, doubtlessly with good intentions, posted this:
We can strive for equality of opportunity as much as we possibly can, and I think this is definitely what we should be doing. But considering that this is a very lofty goal that only seems to be getting loftier, AA is decent stop gap. Definitely far from perfect, but still better than nothing.
The assumption there is that affirmative action is better than nothing, but the data suggest it’s worse than nothing. Better to get rid of it then.