I said I'd do it, and I meant it. We begin with this portion from our latest "watch-worthy" post??(the basic point of which is that the blogger does not like gender-based college admissions preferences but??is fine with??race-based ones):
Because minority students are less likely to attend well-funded schools and less likely to get strong college prep curricula in high school, on average they enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students, and thus end up disproportionately attending less selective colleges. Affirmative action counteracts this, with the result being within-college racial/ethnic makeups that are more representative of the college student body as a whole.
Affirmative action "counteracts" the fact that minority students (black and Latino students, really) in general "enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students" only insofar as it overlooks those credentials. Affirmative action does nothing to solve the underlying problem, which is a yawning gap between the qualifications of black and Latino college applicants and those of their white and Asian counterparts. Instead, it simply ignores the??disparity and gives leniency to applicants of lesser academic qualifications as long as they??manage to be??black or Latino, which is troublesome for all sorts of reasons.
Then there's this:
Crucially, race-based affirmative action as practiced by selective colleges doesn't hurt non-selective colleges, because it simply brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance.
It's unclear a) what this means ("...brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance," for example.??We wonder: A balance with what?), and??b)??why this is crucial or even desirable; furthermore, it's not true. Why not true? Because we??have a finite pool of black and Latino college applicants. And if a number of those who are most qualified to attend the University of Michigan are instead accepted, because of their ethnicities, at Yale (a school at which their standardized test scores and classroom preparation and grades are well below the incoming class's average), then the University of Michigan must look further down??its list. And??Michigan then??accepts less-qualified individuals, which counts, in my book, as being "hurt" by a selective college's affirmative action policies. (Of course, the most selective schools are choosing, technically, to "hurt" themselves.)
Thus, we have this: Yale accepts a black student whose qualifications are average for the University of Michigan, Michigan accepts a black??student whose resume would be appropriate at Florida State, and Florida State fills its classes with black and Latino students whose credentials reflect those of their community college peers.
But forget all that. We should be less worried, of course, about whether affirmative action is unfair to colleges than whether it is unfair to white and Asian students (who may be qualified for, say,??Yale but whose spots are given to less-qualified applicants of a different race) or to the black and Latino students who are accepted at schools that they are, on paper, less ready to attend than are the majority of their classmates.
One wonders: What convincing argument shows that an under-qualified student at Yale will fare there so much better than he would at the University of Michigan, where his credentials match those of his classmates? And how do the advantages of accepting that student to Yale outweigh the disadvantages of a) discriminating against a better qualified white or Asian applicant because of his race and??b) judging the black student simply??because of his race? I've never encountered a convincing or logical justification for this.
"Making up for past transgressions" (i.e., slavery, Jim Crow, and all the other terrible stuff)??doesn't justify it, on any level. First, what if the black applicant's family comes from, say,??France???Second,??how, exactly, does??pushing into Yale a black kid who's qualified for the??University of Michigan make up for slavery? Third, for what, exactly, is the U.S. atoning when the Cuban kid (or the Venezuelan kid, etc.) gets an affirmative action bump into a selective college? Fourth, fifth, sixth....
Another insufficient response is this:??Affirmative action is just like, say,??legacy admissions, and nobody raises a stink about those. First, two wrongs don't make a right. And second, affirmative action is not akin to legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are made on a per-person basis, and they do not assume anything about the legacy students. Legacy students are admitted because someone in their family attended the school in question;??it's unfortunate good ol' boy stuff. Affirmative action policies, in contrast,??are not predicated on a per-person basis--they are based on generalizations and, truthfully, stereotypes about all black and Latino applicants. Legacy admissions are unfortunate, but race-based admissions are noxious and really should be illegal??but for??the perplexing??reasoning of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Finally (not really, but finally for this post's purposes), we read:
But gender preferences at a given selective college do nothing to fix the overall problem of more women in college than men. Instead, they merely push that problem down the higher education food chain, from the selective colleges to the non-selectives. If a selective college rejects a more qualified woman in favor of a less qualified man, she's still going to college somewhere.
We wonder why this exact situation doesn't pertain to black and Latino applicants, too. And then we realize it does.