As a result of the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on affirmative action, schools will now discard any openly race-based point systems they may have formerly employed, while simultaneously continuing their longstanding practice of using totally subjective criteria to manipulate the racial composition of their student bodies as they wish – criteria like an applicant’s demonstration of such qualities as self discipline, civic pride, altruism, leadership, energy, perseverance, and generosity. Indeed just a few years ago, the highest-ranking members of our country’s legal-education establishment issued a joint press release explaining that “personal statements from applicants, letters of recommendation, work experience, and the applicant’s prior success in overcoming personal disadvantage” were all factors that should be considered in the admissions process. Obviously, such malleable, amorphous standards essentially amount to having no standards at all. So instead of being openly awarded 20 points for having dark skin, African Americans applying to the University of Michigan will now earn their extra credit by showing “civic pride,” “energy,” and an ability “to overcome obstacles” – among which, of course, is the purportedly titanic obstacle of being black in America.
Justice O’Connor asserts that “access” to higher education “must be inclusive of talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity, so that all members of our heterogeneous society may participate in the educational institutions that provide the training and education necessary to succeed in America. . . . Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civil life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized.”
If we cut through the polite rhetoric, however, we are confronted with a mountain of truly disturbing facts. Consider the numerous, well-designed, recent studies conducted by the Washington, DC-based Center For Equal Opportunity (CEO), which powerfully demonstrate that the more competitive a school’s admissions standards are, the greater the degree of racial or ethnic preference we are likely to observe there. In the University of Washington’s (UW) 1995 freshman class, the raw admission rate for blacks was 96.6 percent, as compared to 78.5 percent for Asians and 74.4 percent for whites. These figures were in the precisely inverse order of the students’ actual academic qualifications. For instance, black freshmen had scored 80 points lower than whites on the verbal SAT exam, and 140 points lower on the math SAT. In fact, the verbal and math SAT scores of black freshmen in the 75th percentile were roughly equivalent to the scores of whites in the 25th percentile; that is, black admittees who outscored three-fourths of all other blacks admitted to UW, scored only about as well as whites at the bottom one-fourth of all whites admitted to UW.
We mustn’t forget that these figures are not mere abstractions, but translate into large numbers of actual human beings who are denied admission to the school of their choice solely because of their skin color. Things don’t often get much uglier than that. All told, in 1995 UW rejected 912 whites and 164 Asians whose verbal SAT scores, math SAT scores, and high-school grades equaled or surpassed the median of blacks who were admitted. As has been demonstrated time and again, students who are admitted to a given school under lowered academic standards can be expected to struggle mightily to keep up with their peers who met the school’s normal admissions requirements. In general, there is a strong negative correlation between preference in the admissions process and graduation rates. At UW, the percentage of 1995 freshman who eventually graduated within six years was 70 percent for whites, 65 percent for Asians, and a mere 29 percent for blacks.
The story was similar at Washington State University that same year, where blacks were also admitted with academic qualifications far below those of their white and Asian peers. Black admittees scored about 70 points lower than whites on the verbal SAT, and 110 points lower on the math SAT. Predictably, the eventual graduation rates of those students were 44 percent for blacks and 61 percent for whites.
In the 1995 freshman class at the University of California at Irvine, the 75th percentile math SAT scores of blacks admitted were a remarkable 20 points lower than the corresponding scores of whites in the 25th percentile. UC Irvine actually rejected 1,516 Asians and 546 whites whose math SAT scores were higher than the median score for black enrollees, as well as 879 Asians and 637 whites whose verbal SAT scores were better than the black enrollee median. Not surprisingly, the graduation rate for that cohort of blacks was about 47 percent, as opposed to 68 percent for whites and 73 percent for Asians.
The situation at UC San Diego was so bad that CEO researchers commented, “There are two distinct populations of enrollees at UCSD as measured by math SAT scores: African Americans and Hispanics on the one hand, and whites and Asian Americans on the other.” The 75th percentile scores of black and Hispanic admittees in 1995 were roughly the same as the white and Asian 35th percentile scores. The graduation rates for blacks at UCSD during the 1990s hovered around 41 percent. For whites and Asians, the rates generally exceeded 70 percent.
Though blacks had by far the weakest academic qualifications in the University of Virginia’s (UV) 1999 freshman class, they were admitted at a much higher rate than white and Asian applicants, whose composite SAT scores were nearly 200 points higher. In that one year alone, fully 4,591 whites were rejected despite having higher test scores than the median black enrollee. Statistically, black applicants were an astonishing 111 times more likely to be admitted to UV than were whites with equivalent qualifications.
In the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s 1995 freshman class, whites and Asians (whose composite SAT median scores were 1250 and 1300, respectively) were accepted at significantly lower rates than blacks, whose median score was only 1020. A total of 1,090 whites and 297 Asians were rejected with better SAT scores than the median black admittee. The six-year graduation rate for blacks was 66 percent, as compared to 86 percent for Asians and 87 percent for whites. The odds of a black applicant with the same qualifications as a white applicant being offered admission to UM Ann Arbor was an incredible 173.7 to 1. The corresponding ratio at UM Dearborn was not nearly as high, though still very substantial at 36.5 to 1.
At North Carolina State in 1995, blacks were admitted at a slightly higher rate than whites and Asians, though their SAT scores were, on average, 210 points below those of Asians and 190 points below those of whites. A black applicant was statistically 177 times more likely to be accepted than a similarly qualified white applicant. At the University of North Carolina at Asheville, the degree of preference was not nearly as egregious, but nonetheless black applicants were 10 times likelier to be accepted than similarly qualified whites. At UNC Charlotte, the corresponding preference ratio in favor of black applicants was 8.37 to 1, and at UNC Wilmington 57.2 to 1.
At the University of Maryland Medical School in 2000, blacks with college grade-point-averages (g.p.a.) of B or B+ and Medical College Admissions Test scores in the bottom half of all test-takers had a 70 percent chance of admission; for whites and Asians of similar credentials, the chance was 2 percent. At our nation’s top law schools, blacks are admitted at 17 times the rate that a colorblind process would allow. At UCLA Law school in 1994, a black applicant with a college g.p.a. between 2.5 and 3.5, and a Law School Admissions Test score between 60 and 90, had a 61 percent chance of admission. The corresponding rates for similarly qualified Asians and whites were 7 and 1 percent, respectively.
The champions of affirmative action strive to put a happy face on all these facts by deluging us with bromides about the value of “diversity” and the need for “equal access” to educational opportunities. But in the end, we as a people must decide whether it serves society to perpetuate a policy that makes such an utter mockery of standards.