Shmuel Ka

Mr. Hannigan
WRT 102
December 2, 2013
Research Paper
At the heart of afrmative action is an admirable moral impulse - to help those mem-
bers of society who are, for reasons historical and cultural, subject to various disadvan-
tages in our society. Despite these good intentions, the current implementation of af-
rmative action in academia does a disservice to both its recipients and those it implic-
itly reverse-discriminates against. Although not entirely without merit, scholastic afrma-
tive action will need to take signicant strides before the ultimate goal of a post-racial
America may be realized.
The modern conception of afrmative action dates back to the days of the civil rights
movement. John F. Kennedy, concerned by the racism against African Americans ram-
pant at that time in the work place, signed into action an Executive Order stating that
employers must ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated
during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin(Af-
rmative Action). Order 10925 also established the Presidents Committee on Equal
Employment Opportunity, the federal law enforcement agency tasked with enforcing the
nascent discrimination laws. Later iterations of the Executive Order would include
women and extend the domain of the Civil Rights Act to higher education. Crucially, no
existing federal law actually mandates the adoption of afrmative actions by universities;
the legal focus has always been on preventing and punishing negative bias, not institut-
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ing recriminatory positive bias. And yet, in the years following the Civil Rights Act, col-
leges nonetheless began adopting explicitly pro-minority admissions policies(Afrma-
tive Action: Overview). This widespread effectuation has raised a host of issues - when
does helping the minority become hurting the majority? And at what point do minorities
no longer need our support(e.g. Asian Americans make up only 5% of our population
but do not receive academic perquisites) - that have become quite controversial in large
part because of their legal ambiguity. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the Univer-
sity of Michigans admissions preference towards African-American, Hispanic, and
Native-American students violates the Equal Protection Clauseand was thus unconsti-
tutional(Gratz v. Bollinger). A few months later, the Supreme Court considered a virtually
identical University of Michigan case, this time with regards to Law School admissions,
and voted by 5-4 majority decision in favor of afrmative action, reasoning that such
policies further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benets that ow from
a diverse student body(Grutter v. Bollinger). Just four months ago, the Supreme Court
provisionally reiterated its support of afrmative action in Fisher v. University of Texas,
noting that universities must prove that their admissions program is narrowly tailored to
obtain the education benets of diversity(Fisher v. University of Texas). Which begs the
question: how prevalent is afrmative action in higher education? And in the context of
college admissions, what does afrmative action even mean?
Although universities are understandably reticent to disclose the full nature of their
admissions processes, surveys conducted by Gallup and Inside Higher Ed have shown
that the vast majority of colleges do employ some kind of racial component in determin-
ing student admittance(Sander 6). And that component can carry great weight: during
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Gratz v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan admitted to giving applicants from select
minorities an automatic 20 point bonus on the 150 point scale they used to rank applica-
tions - a roughly 13% advantage purely on the basis of ethnicity(Gratz v. Bollinger).
More generally, sociologists have found that, controlling for relevant factors(e.g. grades,
legacy status, athletic ability etc.), Hispanic applicants are twice as likely to be accepted
as equivalent white students, and 6 times more likely to be accepted than equivalent
Asian-American students(Espenshade et al, 2009). African- American students are most
beneted by the prevailing approach to afrmative action: an otherwise identical black
student is 15 times more likely to be accepted at an American university than an Asian
American student(Espenshade et al, 2009). It is hard to say whether such partiality
crosses the line into outright reverse-discrimination, but a majority of the public does
seem to think so: a recent Pew Research Center values survey found that more than
65% of Americans disagree with the preferential treatment of minorities in educa-
tion(Pew Research).
Ultimately, the group most hurt by afrmative action may very well be those students
it purports to help. As Richard Sander points out in his analysis of law school appli-
cants(and graduates), minority students who are accepted to law school are far more
likely to drop out or otherwise underperform professionally than their non-minority coun-
terparts(Sander 2005). This phenomenon is called the mismatch effect, and can be ex-
plained as follows: because (for example) African-American students are both numeri-
cally fewer and statistically less likely to apply to college than white students, universi-
ties intent on creating a diverse student body must relax their academic standards for
certain applicants so that black students can make up a signicant proportion thereof. In
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doing so, universities make the tacit assumption that those minority students who have
been admitted on the basis of lower, racially induced standards will be able to catch up
to their better-prepared peers once college begins. Unfortunately, as Sander notes, in
practice this just doesnt hold up: these minority students are put in a position to fail, and
a disproportionately large percentage of them do so(Drop Out Rates).
In Afrmative Action Around the World, economist Thomas Sowell identies another
major issue with afrmative action in education - its tendency to reward primarily the
most wealthy and educated among a minority group, to the detriment of the intended
beneciaries, who are generally on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
This is particularly true in India, where afrmative action is distributed geographically, to
regions of historical poverty, despite wide economic disparities between inhabitants of
the area. Inevitably, the students with the highest level of scholarship, and consequently
deemed most worthy of afrmative action, are those coming from wealthy, academic
backgrounds(Sowell 36). It is a pattern that is repeated in America, where students from
educated, middle class families constitute the majority of African-American undergradu-
ates, particularly at the top universities(Sowell 163). And as Henry Gates Jr., the chair-
man of Harvards African American studies program has pointed out, many black stu-
dents are in fact the children of West Indian and African immigrants, and so are not
bound in any way by the historical legacy of discrimination that continues to affect the
African- American community(Sara Arensen, 2004). Further compounding matters is the
simple fact that ethnicity is self-reported, and therefore(at least theoretically) subject to
complete fabrication: a student may choose to exclusively put down the race of one
parent or even intentionally mis-report his ancestry. The latter has become especially
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endemic among Asian-American students, who believe(correctly) that their race may be
used to subject them to a different, and far more selective, set of application stan-
dards(USA Today).
Given what we know about afrmative action as it stands today - its unsupported by
the public, largely ineffective, benets afuent members of minorities, and is ultimately
unenforceable - the need for extensive reform is clear.To that end, several solutions
have been proposed.
Some, like Thomas Sowell, feel that afrmative action should be abolished alto-
gether as unconstitutional and ineffective. Sowell takes as a case study the state of
California, which banned afrmative action in 1996. From 1996 to 2002, African-
American enrollment at California State colleges actually went up, and although the
number of African-American students enrolled at UCLA, arguably the top California
state college, dipped dramatically, the number of African-American UCLA students
graduating each year stayed the same, providing support for Sanders mismatch theo-
ry(Sowell 160). However, it is convincingly argued by many economists that an end to
afrmative action of any kind would dissuade a sizable number of minority students from
ever even applying to college(Long 2004; Dickson 2006). Sowells critique of contempo-
rary afrmative action policy is substantive, but his failure to give an alternative renders
his analysis incomplete.
A less extreme alternative, currently in use in Texas, is the Top 10 Percent plan,
whereby automatic admission to a Texas state university is given to any student who
graduates in the top ten percent of his high school class(A Better Afrmative Action).
By ignoring SAT scores and comparing students only to their high school peers(and not
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the students of other high schools, who might be afforded greater or lesser educational
opportunities), the hope is that the Top 10 Percent plan would bypass most of the issues
traditionally associated with afrmative action. However, such programs would be dif-
cult to institute and completely ignore variation within a single high school: a poor,
Native-American student attending a predominantly white, wealthy public high school
would likely have great difculty getting accepted to a good college under such a
scheme. Tellingly, Texas state schools have struggled to enroll members of minorities in
recent years(Tienda et all 2008).
Perhaps the best solution would be to direct our attention and aid towards the root
cause of inequality, racial or otherwise: the imbalanced distribution of wealth in this
country. Research by Sean Reardon of Stanford University suggests that family socio-
economic characteristics are a far better indicator of academic achievement than race,
and that most(if not all) of the differences in academic achievement observed between
various ethnicities can in fact be attributed to these socioeconomic characteristics(Re-
ardon 2011). Put broadly, a more involved afrmative action process would attempt to
offer support on the basis of family income, education, quality of school district, and
other factors found to be relevant, not race. Rather than seek to pigeonhole people on
the basis of family descent, we should perhaps strive towards a much more real diver-
sity - diversity of perspective. There are inarguably those who deserve our support: the
poor, the physically impaired; those who are products of broken homes and dangerous
neighborhoods and yet have surpassed their environments in the pursuit of academic
and professional excellence. These people come from every ethnic background - hard-
ship is colorblind. Our institutional support should be so as well.
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Works Cited
"A Systemic Analysis of Afrmative Action in American Law Schools." law.berkeley.edu.
N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2013.
<http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/rubinfeldd/SanderFINAL.pdf>.
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<http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/afrmative-action-overview.aspx>.
"Afrmative action." LII. Cornell University, n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.
<http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/afrmative_action>.
Arenson, Sara. "Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?." The New York
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<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more-blacks-but-whic
h-ones.html>.
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of minority students applying to college?." Does ending afrmative action in col-
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<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775705000130>.
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20-%20chapter%205.pdf>.
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dents it's intended to help, and why universities won't admit it. New York: Basic
Books, 2012. Print.
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Yale University Press, 2004. Print.
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