A troubling element of affirmative action as currently practiced is the refusal of many who practice and defend it to acknowledge what that current policies, especially in universities, require significant racial preferences. Instead, they claim that affirmative action serves as a mere “diversity” tiebreaker among essentially equally qualified applicants. A case in point is a recent article by Yale Law professor Robert Solomon, who writes the following:
I can’t speak for others, but I do believe in diversity. Let me explain what that means, since you seem to think it means that white men are disadvantaged. That’s not what it means, although diversity does mean that white men from privileged backgrounds now have to earn their admission, which was not always the case, and that women and people of color and people with interesting backgrounds now get to compete on equal footing. Since the grades and LSAT scores are so similar, most of us look at other things, like essays and extra-curricular activities and jobs. When all of this is done, the largest group is white men.
This is just false. While I don’t have any data for Yale, I do have data for two other top 10 law schools, Boalt and Michigan, from the mid-1990s (there is no reason to believe the data has changed much since then).
1996 was the last class at Boalt Law School before Prop. 209 affected admissions. The entering students’s stats were as follows (source: American Lawyer, November 1997):
LSAT(%ile) GPA
Nonminorities 168 (96.9) 3.72
Asian 166 (95.0) 3.71
Hispanic 159 (80.5) 3.50
Black 155 (67.0) 3.54
Similarly, we learn from the district court opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger that in 1995, another top ten state law school, the University of Michigan, had the following statistics: white students had a median LSAT score of 167 and a median GPA of 3.59, while the corresponding figures were 155 and 3.18 for African American students, and 159 and 3.35 for Mexican American students.
More generally, statistics show that annually only a handful of African American students have scores that would remotely qualify them for Yale admission under the standards applied to whites. For the 1996-97 admissions year, only sixteen (self-identified) African Americans nationwide had an LSAT of at least 164 (92.3 percentile) and a GPA of at least 3.50, compared to 2,646 whites (source: American Lawyer). The median scores of entering students at Yale, meanwhile, are somewhere around 171 and 3.9.
There is simply no statistical possibility that the grades and LSAT scores of African American matriculants to Yale are “so similar” to the scores of white matriculants that diversity is used as a factor akin in weight to essays, extracurricular activities, and work experience.
I think affirmative action is a complex issue, and racial preferences in universities can plausibly be defended on social justice grounds (and “diversity” grounds as well). And the article that Solomon was responding to, by a white male student afraid he wouldn’t get into a good grad school because of affirmative action, was somewhat silly. For example, even if top law schools implicitly reserve 15 or so percent of their slots for minority students, that still leaves 85% of the slots available for white students. The vast majority of white students rejected from such schools would have been rejected regardless of affirmative action.
But the entire debate over affirmative action has been poisoned by the failure of its advocates to acknowledge what it really means in practice (O’Connor, in Grutter, studiously avoided this herself). Some schools might not be able to successfully defend their racial preferences in the court of public opinion. On the other hand, if universities were more candid in their acknowledgment and defense of racial preferences in admissions, they might be able to develop a stronger constituency in favor of the preferences. Moreover, a frank acknowledgment by elite universities of the difficulty in finding African American (and to a lesser extent, Latino) applicants meeting the schools’ regular standards might lead to some useful national soul-searching regarding the inferior educational opportunities given minority students.
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