On the Affirmative Action ruling

What it did, who it affected, what its end means

Below are some comments on the Supreme Court's affirmative action (AA) ruling. These will, among other things, address some arguments from those on the liberal side of the spectrum who have, for various reasons, essentially said good riddance to AA in college admissions. One thing I want to focus on is what I’ve seen as a misleadingly simplified account of what AA does, whom it affects and, therefore, the consequences of its elimination. He's only one example, but since Matt Yglesias is very popular and lots of people have cited his 19 theses on affirmative action, I'll refer to his observations as a proxy for some of that liberal skepticism.

- Let's start with what will certainly be one effect of the ruling. Fewer Black students will be admitted to and attend many of the affected schools. Whether, over time, admissions offices find different means than explicit consideration of race to construct the kinds of diversity they want in their incoming classes, in the short term, there will be fewer Black students at places like UNC. That's really not debatable. When the University of California system was compelled to stop using AA in the late 1990s, the impact was clear. In 1997, the last incoming class for which Cal-Berkeley's admissions office used AA, about 7.5% of the incoming class was African-American. In 1998, after a statewide ban went into effect, it was about half that, and has remained so ever since. Michigan had a similar experience after a 2006 ban. The same will almost certainly be true at UNC, one of the two schools at the center of the lawsuit that just ended AA. 

- in the above comment, I used the word "diversity." What does that mean?

Jay Caspian Kang, in a thoughtful essay on the impending end of AA last fall noted that when it first became policy in the early 1960s, AA's drafters thought in literally Black and White terms. But the United States has become vastly more racially and ethnically complex and diverse since then. And AA has, in some ways, struggled to keep up with that evolution. Perhaps the clearest consequence of that bears on the impact that AA has had on the admission of some Asian students to places like Harvard and UNC. To be clear, Asians represent a very large proportion of the student body at virtually all schools that are deemed highly selective in whom they admit. But the heart of the lawsuit that the Court just decided, specifically in the Harvard part of the case, is that Asian Americans were discriminated against in admissions. Yglesias included a comment from an Asian-American, Milan, that rightly argued Asian Americans were not responsible for the enslavement of Black people in this country nor the larger legacies and realities of racism that stand as a core justification for AA. Therefore, Milan believes, it’s fundamentally unfair that Asian Americans should have to bear the burden of AA’s efforts to redress historical injustices. Whether that is the empirical effect of AA is another question. Elie Mystal argues that “in California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities.” This is at least one data point that suggests the focus on Asian Americans as the key “losers” due to AA is overstated.

Regardless, if as a result of this ruling, the percentage of Asian students increases at UNC, while the percentage of Black students decreases, is that student body less diverse, more diverse, or just differently diverse? These are the kinds of questions reasonable people are raising. And those questions speak to some of the larger confusions that diversity talk has engendered and that has made defending AA on the basis of diversity, especially to people who are already skeptical, difficult and ineffective.

- Many people have pointed out that affirmative action itself is only a meaningful part of admissions processes at a small number of schools to begin with, the highly selective schools I referred to above. Lots of postmortems on the ruling have suggested we're talking about perhaps a hundred schools total, out of the many thousands of institutions of higher education in this country.

This is likely an undercount. Surveys of schools and admissions professionals suggest that about 20% of four-year state universities in the United States have used race as a consideration in admissions. The total number of students who would be affected by that is essentially impossible to say. 

Regardless, the debate has focused on the country's most elite universities, where the greatest number of students will be affected by the ruling. In that connection, Yglesias argues that AA is not much more than a tool for making elite institutions feel better about themselves and their social missions. In this line of thinking, despite its proponents' claims, AA does not meaningfully ameliorate the deep inequities in our society because it really only affects a small coterie of schools and a tiny already well-heeled fraction of our population. Put another way, an unmistakable impression one gets from reading a number of these missives is that AA does little more than make it more likely that some already bright kids from elite backgrounds who happen to be Black get into Harvard (or Stanford or Princeton), whereas otherwise they’d go to the aforementioned Michigan or Berkeley. In this view, AA is a trivial intervention at best, and a perverse one at worst.

Some students do fit this characterization of AA. But it is false to assert or imply that those were its only beneficiaries. Other Black students, who have come from much more challenging circumstances and in many cases were the first in their families to attend college, also got an extra boost in admissions processes that considered race as a factor. And it's an indisputable fact that some of them will now not be admitted to places like UNC and will, therefore, go to schools that have fewer resources to help them succeed than a school like UNC has. It does no favors to an honest accounting of the pros and cons of AA to pretend this group of students doesn't exist. 

- This erasure of the non-elite individual beneficiaries of AA has led some commentators to draw conclusions about what the end of AA will bring about that are likely wrong, or incomplete. And they’re also at odds with what some of these liberal critics say their preferred vision for higher education would be. For example, many have argued over the years that, for the sake of fairness and equity, we should replace consideration of race with consideration of socio-economic circumstances. If we really want higher education to serve as a vehicle for upward mobility and greater opportunity and to account meaningfully for what it means to grow up under adversity, we should focus on the less well off of whatever stripe. But an implication of analyses like Yglesias is that, since AA only results in the distribution of students from elite backgrounds among elite schools, there will be no change in the socioeconomic composition of the affected schools when AA is no longer used. I think Yglesias is wrong about that, in part, again, because he's ignoring one segment of the population that has benefited from AA.

There is, by the way, an irony in Yglesias' analysis and in particular in his claim that we're all too focused on the Harvards of the world, resulting in a distorted understanding of how ordinary Americans live and what kinds of policy interventions would meaningfully ameliorate real inequities in American life. In his 19 theses, Yglesias doesn't so much as mention UNC once. It's as if UNC itself were not a party to the lawsuit. There's a lot of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton talk. There’s also a claim about the impact of this ruling on Michigan and Berkeley - that Black enrollment will go up at those schools - that creates a clearly false implication about what will happen at UNC (which is much more comparable to Berkeley and Michigan than it is to Harvard, obviously). 

It may well be that because of the unique characteristics of Harvard, there will be no change in the socioeconomic composition of its student body (i.e., the average wealth of students' families won't change). But that will not be the case at UNC. To put it another way, there will likely be a smaller proportion of less well off kids attending UNC in subsequent years as a result of this ruling, not more. If you want that to be the true benchmark for a fair, equitable and progressive approach to admissions, ending AA does not accomplish that. 

- As I wrote about last fall, when these cases were argued, if you're concerned about how admissions processes skew the playing field to favor elites, you should be much more exercised by legacy admissions than you are about AA. A common rejoinder to this argument is that two wrongs don't make a right (Yglesias himself did not discuss legacies. Other liberal commentators have made these sorts of arguments). That's a fine argument in the abstract, but it really doesn't work in this context. Why? It cannot plausibly be argued that AA's overall impact at all the affected schools has resulted in the admission of more rich kids than would have been the case otherwise. It's advantaged some well-off students, but it has also helped many other less well off ones.

By contrast, legacy and other privileged admissions clearly and indisputably skew the socioeconomic makeup of campuses in a more elite direction. Jared Kushner got into Harvard because his father made a multimillion dollar donation to the school. It's perverse to claim that AA, on balance, does something comparable, which is the necessary implication of rejecting the juxtaposition of AA with legacy admissions. Legacy admissions raise different legal questions than does AA, so it's not a simple matter of throwing out both or none. But it's facially perverse to talk about how unfair it is that some more qualified applicants are getting rejected because some less qualified applicants are being accepted while dismissing the relevance of legacies to that discussion. The young man, for example, who joined the litigation masterminded by Edward Blum and Students for Fair Admissions, who got a 1590 on his SATs and had an otherwise all-world academic record, believes he was rejected from several elite schools, including Harvard, because he was Asian. The implication of his and all such claims and the basis of the lawsuit is that slots for students like him were taken by a less deserving Black student. But he has no idea  and *cannot know* whether the slot that rightly belonged to him was given to a Black student with lower SATs or whether it was given to a Jared Kushner. You can oppose both AA and legacies, of course. But you can't seriously expect people *not* to bring up the latter when the former is in the crosshairs.

Concluding for now, from the perspective of equity, socioeconomic or otherwise, the end of affirmative action leaves us worse off. Whether it can nevertheless be replaced by an approach that accomplishes some of the goals AA proponents argue for, on a more defensible legal footing and in ways that find more popular support, remains to be seen. I'm skeptical. I think we've closed doors in the face of people we shouldn't be closing them on with no plan or real prospect for how to welcome them in a different way. But I sincerely hope to be proven wrong.

Non troll-y comments welcome.