The Affirmative Action Debate

The anguish was palpable. Last night the cable networks filled the airways with people who had benefited from affirmative action and diversity quotas.

Seeing their ticket to stardom quashed by the Supreme Court, they seemed to be anguished that someone might discover, as Michelle Obama put it, that they did not belong at Princeton or, as Joe Biden asserted on the basis of no evidence, that affirmative action admissions candidates were eminently qualified.

Of course, Michelle Obama even wrote a senior thesis at Princeton about how she did not feel like she belonged. Apparently, being the first lady of the United States and living in three grand mansions has now made her feel patriotic and has made her feel as though she belongs.

Of course, if it was affirmative action at multiple levels, well, things do not look quite so rosy.

Lest we forget, Shelby Steele has long proposed that the very existence of affirmative action in college admissions made it that anyone who might have benefited from a racial preference did benefit from a racial preference, and did not earn his credentials legitimately.

Yesterday, the eminent Nassim Nicholas Taleb echoed this point on Twitter:

The real trouble with affirmative action is that the market will end up *discounting* the diploma according to race, which would eventually hurt the persons of favored groups who would have commanded unconditional admission.

As for the notion that minority candidates were eminently qualified, Joe Biden said it, so you can rest assured that it is a lie. Recall that when MIT chose to open its enrollment to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the number of minority students in their freshman class jumped to around 25%. But then, nearly none of them could pass freshman math courses, thereby making it impossible for them to advance to sophomore level courses.

As for highly qualified, it all depends on what you mean by qualified. The data tells a different story. If you ask how many high school students scored above 700 on their SAT tests last year, the numbers are shocking. 22oo blacks and 49oo Hispanics reached that threshold. 48,000 whites and 52, 800 Asians had those scores.

So, again, it depends on what you mean by qualified.

As for the highest scores, above 750, the numbers were 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians. 1000 blacks and 2400 Latinos. 

Again, what does it mean to be qualified?

Finally, there is the case, reported on my blog, of Robert Weisberg. As a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana and Cornell, Weisberg was at his post for the beginnings of affirmative action admissions. He quickly discovered that students admitted under the program did not belong and were not qualified.

In truth, said students tended to plagiarize their papers and to cheat on their exams. But then, when professors discovered it, they were told not to say anything, but to give these students the best grades, regardless. Otherwise, they would have put their jobs at risk.

Weisberg suggested that many affirmative action candidates did well in college because professors were not allowed to grade them fairly or objectively. 

So, it is not just admissions criteria. In many cases it’s a special grading scale. 

As for what we can do about this, Weisberg wrote that the practice was so pervasive, that so many people had been granted their credentials and given jobs to fulfill diversity quotas, that it would take some considerable time and effort to undo the damage. But, one thing is sure, if you say anything about these fictions, you are going to be in serious trouble.

In fact, the Supreme Court, for all of its virtues, opened a Pandora’s Box. It opened debate and discussion over whether credentials earned by affirmative action or jobs given to fulfill diversity quotas, were really earned.

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