Affirmative Action Fails

I don’t know why it comes as news, but a recent City Journal article announced that affirmative action in college admissions does not work. It chose the example of MIT, where administrators have recently discovered that students admitted to produce diversity are far more likely to flunk out during Freshman year.

And yet, we will ask whether MIT is an outlier. As we have pointed out here, one Robert Weisberg, a political science professor at Cornell and Illinois-Urbana found that affirmative action students tended to plagiarize their reports. Who knew? And he explained that the dean told him to give the students good grades anyway, lest someone think he is racist.

Weisberg explained that a certain coterie of students was being given credentials they did not earn, by professors who feared being branded a bigot. 

Of course, other schools have found other means to hand out credentials  to students who could not do the work. They set up courses that handed out good grades to whomever and even set up departments that could give all students As. 

One recalls that when he became president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers called in the heads of the African-American studies to ask them why all of their students were receiving A grades. And one recalls that this produced an uproar and an outcry, as though there was nothing abnormal at seeing all students in a specific program getting As.

Of course, affirmative action programs were academic darlings, even though everyone knew that they were corrupting the academic enterprise. If certain students did not earn their credentials how would anyone know the value of any credentials offered by said institutions.

Evidently, a school that maintains standards will eventually fail to meet diversity quotas. Such is the case with MIT, where they feel compelled to have real standards.

Now, the City Journal suggests that the problem begins well before college. It points out that academic disparities are built into high school curricula. So they suggest that we allocate more money to improving the pre-college preparatory programs.

Racial preferences increase the number of black and Hispanic students at America’s top colleges and universities, but this policy does nothing to alleviate the disparities that made it relevant in the first place. If university officials genuinely want to help underprivileged students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds get on a path to greater success, as they claim, then they should refocus their efforts on reducing disparities in elementary and secondary education. If, on the other hand, university officials care only about diversity for aesthetic purposes and virtue signaling, then they can continue to evade SFFA—and get sued.

Now, how can they reduce such disparities? Consider that certain charter schools, like New York’s Success academies with a student population that is largely poor and minority, consistently produce graduates who excel at math and science.

It is not just a question of providing advanced placement courses in calculus and physics. It depends on how these courses are taught, whether students have learned the discipline and focus needed to take them on.

And, of course, the biggest obstacle to this program is the teachers’ unions, who violently oppose anything resembling charter schools. 

And, to be clear, the pedagogical methods practiced in Success Academies are far more rigorous and disciplined than are standard elementary and high school. These academics have far more latitude disciplining students than do public schools. They make an effort to engage parents in the process.

It is nice to think that we can just put every child in a Success Academy and that the result will be, they will all qualify for MIT. Unfortunately, it takes more than a good school. Upbringing matters. Even IQ matters.

As Dana Suskind once discovered, wealthy parents speak more to their toddler offspring than do poor parents. Some children hear more spoken words than do others. And the surplus of spoken language facilitates cognitive development. Sad to say, some of the problem cannot be remedied by having more advanced placement calculus courses.

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