Bad arguments in defense of race-based admissions policies, Part One

The mainstream media is conducting a race to the bottom when it comes to defending the racial spoils system in college admissions and critiquing the Supreme Court decisions that might curtail that system. One of the worst offenders is Perry Bacon, a columnist for the Washington Post.

Bacon wrote this:

A lot of resistance to affirmative action is the idea that we can quantify precisely who is qualified, who is not qualified, who is most qualified. But my sense is that many, many thousands of people could do well at Yale. Many people are qualified. Yale could take the people they rejected, put those people in the class, and the class could all do well.

Bacon’s first sentence is a straw man. No one believes we can quantify "precisely” how high school students will perform in college. But high school grades combined with standardized test scores are good predictors of college performance.

As for Bacon’s “sense” of things, it’s true that, given grade inflation in humanities courses, many people rejected by colleges like Yale would “do well” at these institutions, grade-wise. However, Bacon overlooks the fact that many students who are admitted to top colleges with less than top credentials and who aspire to become doctors and scientists don’t do well enough in math and science courses to want to major in these fields. Consequently, they switch to the humanities and give up on their career ambitions.

This phenomenon is referred to as “mismatch.” The result of mismatch is fewer black doctors and scientists than we would have if black students with less than top credentials attended colleges populated by white and Asian-American students with similar credentials.

Thus, it’s ironic that one of the pitches for race-based admissions preferences — peddled, for example by Justice Jackson in her dissent in the University of North Carolina case — is the need for more black doctors. (Jackson speciously claimed that for high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.) If anything, race-based admissions preferences work against increasing the number of black doctors.

Bacon continued:

If we think abut these [elite] colleges as less a kind of reward for how hard you worked in high school, which creates lots of weird incentives, and thought about more “How do we educate more people Educate people better?”

Bacon doesn’t explain what “weird incentives” rewarding hard work in high school creates. The only thing that comes to my mind is the incentive to work hard in high school. Why is that weird?

As for educating more people, it has nothing to do with admitting people to Ivy League schools. Heather Mac Donald reminds us that absent race-based admissions preferences, the same number of people, and the same number of blacks, would be educated. It’s just that some would be educated at different colleges.

Nor are we “educating people better” through race-base preferences. It’s probably true that, other things being equal, Yale educates students better than less prestigious institutions do. Thus, a black who’s admitted to Yale because of his race might get a better education thanks to the racial preference (again, if other things were equal). At the same time, though, the white or Asian-American student whose place the black took will get a worse education. Why should the better education go to the less qualified applicant?

Furthermore, other things aren’t equal here. As noted, a black who is “mismatched” with an elite college might well receive an inferior education for purposes of fulfilling his or her career goals. This will be the case if, for example, the mismatched student switches majors from chemistry to black studies because he or she can’t compete in tough science courses with students who were admitted based on merit alone.

A merit-based admissions policy isn’t primarily about rewarding hard work in high school, as Bacon seems to suppose. It’s primarily about matching students with the colleges at which they are most likely to flourish.

And making these successful matches isn’t just about benefiting students. Common sense tells us that society benefits when the brightest and most industrious students learn from the brightest and most talented teachers. This is the best way to promote excellence in any field.

Thus, merit-based admissions policies — as opposed to those infected by consideration of race — promote individual fairness, student achievement, and society’s interest in getting the most value from our institutions of higher learning.

Race-based policies undermine these interests. And as the Chief Justice and his concurring colleagues showed, they are unconstitutional.