How important is a college degree from a prestige school? Many believe that having such a degree is extremely important – a virtual guarantee of success in life. The higher education establishment works hard at propounding the idea that without a college degree, a young person’s life will be one of almost Hobbesian misery. The elite institutions go a step further and portray themselves as the essential training grounds for the nation’s leaders. If you accept those views, the destiny of the nation is largely shaped by who goes to college and where.
In his new book Color and Money: How Rich White Kids are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action, Peter Schmidt has swallowed those ideas hook, line, and sinker. That isn’t surprising for a reporter who has been immersed in higher education for many years. Schmidt writes, “In modern American society, many of us assume – or at least desperately hope – that the people in leading positions in government, business, and the professions are our best and brightest….How do we decide who deserves such status? Generally, we rely on academic credentials. We entrust the task of identifying and training our best and brightest to our elite higher education institutions….”
If you start with the belief that Harvard, Yale, Princeton and their peers have a special national mission and then add the egalitarian notion that all groups in society should be roughly equal in representation, the conclusion follows irresistibly: We must get more students from “underrepresented minorities” into elite colleges. That’s the mission of affirmative action.
Schmidt says that his book is intended to give an “honest discussion” of affirmative action. In my view, however, it’s a heavily colored discussion that leans strongly in favor of affirmative action and never does justice to the arguments of its opponents
Despite the fact that serious scholars across the political spectrum have found affirmative action to be legally, morally, and educationally dubious, Schmidt casts the opposition as based mainly on the opportunism of Republicans politicians eager to create a “wedge issue” to divide white, middle-class voters from the Democrats. His evident dislike of conservatives and their beliefs pervades the book and prevents him from looking deeply at the holes in the case for admissions preferences.
Affirmative action doesn’t mean that more students will go to college than otherwise. It simply redistributes them. Without affirmative action, only a small number of students from “underrepresented minority groups” would be admitted to elite universities because few of them have the stellar academic profiles those schools want. The others would be admitted to less prestigious schools where the entrance standards are less demanding.
With affirmative action, however, a small number of minority students will be selected by elite schools even though their academic records are weaker than those of most of the other students. But affirmative action is a zero-sum game. Some students who would otherwise have been offered admission at elite universities have to be rejected. They’ll still go to college, but at one of their “backup” schools.
Do those outcomes matter very much? Probably not. Students admitted under affirmative action will usually earn their degrees (although some of them transfer or drop out for academic reasons), but does that mean a superior education? No. The professors at elite schools aren’t any more knowledgeable or better at teaching than are the professors at “lesser” schools. In fact, students might find it easier to get help from a professor at a non-elite school. While having a diploma from a prestige institution might be a benefit to the student in landing his first job, after that, how he fares in life depends on his own productivity. Academic credentials don’t count for anything in the competitive world.
Students who were rejected from elite schools will undoubtedly graduate from whatever college they do attend. That won’t be a tragedy, although they might have been able to progress faster in a more rigorous academic environment.
In sum, there’s no reason to believe that anything significant is accomplished by choosing a few minority students as winners in the affirmative action lottery and demoting a few students to make room for them. Some research – and Schmidt does mention one study – supports the view that where one goes to college makes little difference in the long-run.
Viewed in its totality, affirmative action is at best a zero-sum game, but there are reasons to believe that it’s actually a negative-sum game. Schmidt touches briefly on one reason for believing so, namely that affirmative action mismatches students with schools. Placing a weak student in an environment dominated by far more able ones is apt to have bad consequences. Thomas Sowell has been making that argument for more than twenty years.
Schmidt doesn’t mention Sowell, but he does discuss the findings of UCLA law professor Richard Sander, who has studied the records of affirmative action students in the top California law schools. Sander concludes that racial preferences have had a negative impact because many of the students thus admitted end up near the bottom of their graduating classes. Because law firms often evaluate prospects not just on the law school they attended, but also on class standing, the mismatching is detrimental to the goal of increasing the numbers of lawyers from minority groups.
Other reasons have been advanced to show the educational harm done by affirmative action, but Schmidt doesn’t mention them. One is the idea that so long as students in preferred groups know that affirmative action gives them a big edge, they won’t work as hard in their pre-college studies. The late John Ogbu, a University of California sociologist, concluded that the “safety net” provided by affirmative action was a large part of the explanation for the fact that black students from affluent suburban families performed poorly in comparison with their white and Asian classmates.
The possibility that affirmative action retards minority students from achieving to the best of their ability in school ought to give its advocates pause, but seems not to.
Another argument on the educational harm of affirmative action is that it mixes together students of markedly different academic ability and motivation, thus creating a problem for professors. If they teach at a level gauged to challenge the majority of the students, those admitted under affirmative action may find it impossible to keep up and maintain acceptable grades. On the other hand, if the professor waters down the content of his course and makes it less challenging, the brighter students are short-changed. Some professors admit to taking the latter route, which avoids the potential difficulties involved in giving low grades to students the school is especially eager to retain. You won’t find that problem discussed in Color and Money.
Affirmative action has also been criticized on non-educational grounds. For one thing, it tends to bring about a tense and racially polarized campus where the constant focus on group identity – segregated dorms, specialized cultural centers, separate orientations, and so on – divides students and detracts from the learning environment. Another is that by admitting many poorly qualified minority students, affirmative action undermines the achievements of those who succeed entirely on their own merit. Those arguments don’t make it into Schmidt’s “honest discussion” either.
What about the arguments in favor of affirmative action? On that score, Schmidt is too credulous. For example, he devotes several pages to the amicus briefs in the University of Michigan cases wherein big business expressed its support for affirmative action. (He also ignores the strong briefs against it, such as that of the National Association of Scholars.) The business briefs relied upon the notion that “diversity” is important for them to compete in a global economy. That assertion merits considerable skepticism. If a firm really needs cultural expertise to deal with customers in Africa or South America, there is no reason to believe that black or Hispanic Americans innately have it or are better able to learn it than are others. Furthermore, all affirmative action does is to redistribute where minority students get their degrees. Employers can still get whatever “diversity” they think they need by recruiting at schools below the top level.
The facts warrant this conclusion: Affirmative action is a costly and divisive policy with little or no educational or socio-economic benefit. It doesn’t produce lasting, substantial gains for the students it supposedly helps; it causes serious educational problems; it doesn’t do anything to improve conditions for people in “underrepresented groups.” The book, sadly, is mostly a hymn to it.
One more point needs to be addressed – those “rich white kids” who are “winning” the affirmative action war. Except in states where voters have decided to ban racial preferences, affirmative action isn’t being curtailed, much less defeated. Still, Schmidt raises an important question. Is it fair that a much sharper student should be rejected to make room in the freshman class for a rich white kid with a mediocre academic record? He doesn’t think so.
I agree. Elite schools could dispense with “affirmative action for the wealthy,” but doing so would have some important consequences. True-blue liberal intellectuals like pursuing their vision of “social justice,” but they also like to keep the coffers filled. They want universities to keep putting up lavish buildings, hiring six-figure professors who rarely teach a class, adding new administrative fiefdoms, and numerous other expenditures having little or nothing to do with educating students. If elite schools would curb their spending, they could stop giving admission preferences to rich white kids and admit more of the high achievers (frequently Asians) who now get shuffled down to second-tier universities.
That would be a good move. Even better would be to end all sorts of preferences, racial and financial, and just admit the brightest students who want to attend. That isn’t the conclusion Schmidt wants people to draw, but I believe it’s the only sensible one.