Several highly selective universities have recently reported that in their first freshman classes admitted after the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students has fallen.
The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.
The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.
A first question to ask: Will Black students who weren’t admitted be OK? There is every reason to suppose so. Racial preferences were banned for the University of California in 1996, and the way critics discussed it back then, one would almost have thought that the highly selective U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. were the only campuses in the entire university system. I taught at Berkeley at the time, and some young Black filmmakers had me audition (long story) for a film about a fictional Black teenager who was so devastated by being denied admission because of the new rules that he took his own life in despair.
In real life it was hard to see tragedy in a Black student having to go instead to one of the other many excellent options, like U.C. Davis or U.C. Santa Cruz. As regards that student’s future success, time has borne out that intuition. A study by the Berkeley economist Zachary Bleemer found that the ban had no effect on the post-college wages of Black applicants to University of California schools. (There was, however, a differential for Latinos, an effect that was difficult to explain.)
A second question to ask is whether the universities themselves are OK. There seems to be an assumption that they suffer if Black students are represented at less than our 14 percent presence in the population. But it is difficult to specify just what that assumption is based on.
For example, at Brown, almost one in 10 freshmen is Black (and that doesn’t count applicants who did not specify their race). Black America has suffered too much genuine tragedy for it to be considered ominous that “only” one in 10 students in a matriculating class at an Ivy League school is Black.
Nevertheless we are told to bemoan the decrease in general diversity. But wait — how many Black students do the white ones need in order to get an acceptable dose of diversity? The same question applies to whether Black students will feel there are enough people who look like them to feel at home at the school. I would think that at Chapel Hill, for example, 7.8 percent — about 1 in 12 freshmen — is enough to build a healthy community.
Plus, there is no real evidence that diversity enhances a good college education. No reasonable person is seeking lily-white campuses. But the idea that diversity means, specifically, better learning has turned out to be difficult to prove. Terrance Sandalow and others observe that what are considered Black views — on topics like police conduct or the availability of quality schooling — are as likely to be aired by non-Black students as by Black ones (a good thing, by the way). The 1999 report by the psychologist Patricia Gurin, which is often cited as demonstrating that diversity improves college education, was based on students self-reporting vague, self-congratulatory qualities such as whether they came out of college with a drive to achieve or with a sense of satisfaction with their college work. Nor is there much proven benefit post-graduation: This spring, a meta-analysis of 615 studies has shown that workplace diversity does not substantially enhance team performance and cooperation.
There is, however, one other argument for giving extra points to Black applicants. Despite the California data I mentioned, nationwide it is true that going to an Ivy League school rather than a solid non-Ivy increases lifelong earnings, as well as the chance of attending graduate school or getting a job at a top-ranked law firm.
But that one advantage is not worth the endless dissonance that racial preferences in admissions would continue to create, whether we liked it or not.
There would always have been a sense among many non-Black students (and even professors) that many Black applicants got in for different reasons than white and Asian applicants did.
Asian families would always have felt they were evaluated more stringently than Black students, as was clearly shown to be the case at Harvard. This feeling would have persisted especially because they, too, are part of minority groups that experience racism.
Eliminating both Black students’ stigma and Asian students’ sense of foul play is more important than closing any gap in future earnings, which in any case hardly indicates that Black students outside of the Ivies are relegated to washing cars for a living. Admissions preferences designed to promote socio-economic rather than just racial diversity would encounter much less pushback and confusion.
Here’s a proposal, radical though it may (unfortunately) seem: Colleges should be very happy with the new numbers. Brown, for example, should be saying, “Hey look — even without that outdated and condescending Blackness bonus, we’re still at 9 percent!” Getting into an elite college is hard, and we should celebrate Black applicants pulling it off in such high numbers, even if they don’t happen to fall precisely at 14 percent. We are taught that on race, professional pessimism is enlightened. I don’t get it.
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