Two Common But Invalid Arguments Regarding Affirmative Action
We have reviewed the rationales for affirmative action without even mentioning the two most commonly made points: first, that the real difference in academic ability between minority and white candidates is much smaller than the difference as measured by test scores, and, second, that gradations in ability do not count for much after a certain threshold of ability has been met.
This first point is based on allegations of cultural bias in the tests, covered in Chapter 13 and Appendix 5. As readers will by now be aware, much research argues strongly against: it. The second point, often expressed by university officials with the words “everyone we admit can do the work,” is true in the limited sense that students with comparatively low levels of ability can get passing grades. It is not correct in any broader sense. Higher scores predict better academic performance throughout the range of scores. There is no reason to think that a threshold exists above which differences in tested ability have little effect on the quality of the student body, student performance, and the nature of student interactions.25
So there are three coherent rationales for concluding that it is just, as well as institutionally and socially useful, to admit minority students from specific minority groups even if they are somewhat less qualified than the other candidates who would be admitted. The rationales are not even controversial. Few of the opponents of affirmative action are prepared to argue that universities should ignore any of these criteria altogether in making admissions decisions. With that issue behind us, the question becomes whether affirmative action as it is being practiced is doing what its advocates want it to do. Does it serve worthwhile purposes for the institutions themselves, for students, for society at large, or for a commonly shared sense of justice?
A Scheme for Comparing Rationales with Practice
We will set the problem first with hypothetical applicants to college, divided into four categories, then we will insert the actual cognitive ability scores of the college students in those categories. The four categories are represented in the 2 × 2 table below, where “low” and “high” refer to the full range of cultural and economic advantages and disadvantages.
A Framework for Thinking about the Magnitude of Preference that Should Be Given to a Minority Candidate
WHITE
Low High
High (3) Scarsdale Appalachia (4) Scarsdale Scarsdale
MINORITY
Low (2) South Bronx Appalachia (1) South Bronx Scarsdale
“Scarsdale” denotes any applicant from an upscale family. “South Bronx” denotes a disadvantaged minority youth, and “Appalachia” denotes a disadvantaged white youth. Each cell in the table corresponds to a pair of applicants—a white and a minority—from either high or low socioeconomic and cultural circumstances. Starting at the lower right and going clockwise around the table, the categories are: (1) a minority applicant from a disadvantaged background and a white from a privileged background; (2) a minority and a white applicant, both from disadvantaged backgrounds; (3) a minority applicant from a privileged background and a white from a disadvantaged background, and (4) a minority and a white applicant, both from privileged backgrounds.
Imagine you are on the admissions committee and choosing between two candidates. Assume that all the nonacademic qualifications besides race are fully specified by high and low status for this pair of candidates and that the IQ is the only measure of academic ability being considered. (In other words, let us disregard grades, extracurricular activities, athletics, alumni parents, and other factors.) You are trying to decide whether to admit the minority applicant or the white applicant. How big a difference in IQ are you willing to accept in each cell and still pick the minority candidate over the white candidate? Let us consider each cell in turn, starting with the situation in which the minority might be expected to get the largest premium to the one in which the premium arguably should go to the white.
CELL 1: THE SOUTH BRONX MINORITY VERSUS THE SCARSDALE WHITE. The largest weight obviously belongs in the cell in which the minority student is disadvantaged and the white student is advantaged. Considerations of just deserts argue that it is not fair to equate the test scores of the youngster who has gotten the finest education money and status can buy with the test scores of the youngster who has struggled through poor schools and a terrible neighborhood. Considerations of social utility argue that it is desirable to have more minority students getting good college educations, so that society may alter the effects of past discrimination and provide a basis for an eventually color-blind society in the future. We assign ++ to this cell to indicate a large preference for the minority candidate. A relatively large deficit in the minority applicant’s test score may properly be overlooked.
CELL 4: THE SCARSDALE MINORITY VERSUS THE SCARSDALE WHITE. If a college is choosing between two students in the high-high cell, both from Scarsdale with college-educated parents and family incomes in six figures, the social utility criteria say that there is a rationale for picking the minority youth even if his test scores are somewhat lower. But doing so would violate just deserts when the white student has higher test scores and is in every other way equal to the minority student. Which criterion should win out? There is no way to say for sure. Our own view is that, as personally hurtful as this injustice may be to the individual white person involved, it is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. The privileged white youth, with strong credentials and parents who can pay for college, will get into a good college someplace. We therefore assign a + to this cell to signify some ethnic premium to the minority candidate but less than in the first instance.
CELL 2: THE SOUTH BRONX MINORITY VERSUS THE APPALACHIAN WHITE. Now imagine a minority student from the South Bronx and a white student from an impoverished Appalachian community. The families of both students are at the wrong end of the scale of advantage. Which one should get the nod in a close call? The white has just as much or nearly as much “social utility” going for him as the black does. American society will benefit from educating youngsters from disadvantaged white backgrounds, too. Both have a claim based on just deserts. America likes to think that people can work their way up from the bottom, and Appalachia is the bottom no less than the South Bronx. Perhaps there is some residual premium associated with being black, based on the supposition that just being black puts one at a greater disadvantage than a white in the “all else equal” case—a more persuasive point when applied to blacks from the South Bronx than when applied to blacks from Scarsdale. We assign ≈0 to this cell, indicating that the appropriate ethnic premium for the minority student is not much greater than zero (other things being equal) and is certainly smaller than in the Scarsdale-Scarsdale case.
CELL 3: THE SCARSDALE MINORITY VERSUS THE APPALACHIAN WHITE. Now we are comparing the privileged minority student with the disadvantaged white student. Where one comes out on the scale of social utility depends on how one values the competing goals to be served. It seems hard to justify a social utility value that nets out in favor of the minority youth, however. (Yes, there is social utility in adding a minority to the ranks of successful attorneys, even if he comes from an affluent background, but there is also social utility in vindicating the American dream for poor whites and in adding a representative of disadvantaged white America to the ranks of successful attorneys.) Something close to zero seems to be the appropriate expected value on the social utility measure, and the white youth should get a plus on the just deserts argument. If the choice is between a poor white youngster from an awful environment and an affluent minority youngster who has gone to fine schools, and if the poor white has somewhat lower test scores than the affluent minority, it is appropriate to give the poor white at least a modest premium. We thus enter—into this cell, to reflect the fact the white youth gets the nod in a close call.
The filled-in table is shown below. We may argue about how large an ethnic premium, expressed in IQ, should be tolerated in each
cell, but the ranking of the premiums seems hard to dispute. With this in mind, we are ready to examine how affirmative action in the NLSY sample squared with this view of the appropriate discrepancies.26
A Rationale for Thinking About the Preference Given to a Minority Candidate
WHITE
Low SES High SES
High SES (3) - (4)+
MINORITY
Low SES (2) ≈0 (1) ++
Rationale vs. Practice
To fill in the table with data, we divided NLSY students who went to four-year institutions into those in the upper and lower halves of socioeconomic background, using the socioeconomic status index described in Appendix 2. (We also conducted the analysis with more extreme definitions of privilege and disadvantage.)27 We then selected the subsample of whites and blacks who had attended the same schools, and computed the mean IQ for the upper and lower halves of socioeconomic status for these matched pairs, statistically controlling for institution. Sample sizes of these matched pairs ranged from 72 for the cell in the top left to 504 for the cell in the lower right. The filled-in table below shows the difference between the white and black IQ scores in standard deviations.28
Let us try to put these numbers in terms of the choices facing an admissions officer. He has two folders on the desk, representing the lower left-hand cell of the table. The two applicants differ in cognitive ability by 1.17 standard deviations, and both are socioeconomically disadvantaged. More specifically (incorporating information about the means not shown in the table), one student is almost exactly average in cognitive ability for such college students, at the 49th percentile of the distribution; the other is at the 12th percentile. Is it appropriate to treat the choice as a toss-up if the student at the 12th percentile happens to be black?29 The typical admissions officer has, in effect, been treating two such applicants as a toss-up.
The Actual Magnitude of the Preference Given to Black Candidates
WHITE SES
Below average Above average
Above average +.58 (-) +.91 (+)
BLACK SES
Below average +1.17 (≈0) +1.25 (++)
We put the question in that way to try to encourage thinking about a subject that is not much thought about. How big an edge is appropriate? In a properly run system of affirmative action, should the average disadvantaged black and average disadvantaged white who got to a given college differ by so large a margin?
Consider the next pair of folders, with two applicants from privileged backgrounds (the upper right-hand cell). One is at the 57th centile of college students, the other at the 23d centile, corresponding to almost a standard deviation difference. Is it reasonable to choose each with equal likelihood if the one at the 23d centile is black, as the typical admissions officer now does?
How might one justify the upper left cell, representing the privileged black versus the disadvantaged white, where the edge given to the black candidate should be no greater than zero under any plausible rationale for affirmative action (or so we argue), and probably should be less than zero? A disadvantaged white youth with cognitive ability at the 36th centile of college youths now has the same chance of being admitted as a privileged black youth at the 17th centile.
Finally, consider the lower right cell, the one that most closely fits the image of affirmative action, in which a privileged white is competing with a disadvantaged black. The logic of affirmative action implies a substantial difference in the qualifications of two youths fitting this description who have an equal chance of being admitted. Is the difference actually observed—between a white at the 57th percentile of college students and one at the 12th percentile—a reasonable one? In IQ terms, this is a difference of almost nineteen points.
We do not suppose that admissions officers have these folders side by side as they make their decisions. In fact, given the pressures on admissions committees, the determining factor for admission is often the sheer numbers of minority applicants. If the percentage of minorities in the incoming freshman class goes up, that is considered good. If the percentage goes down, that is considered bad. To make the numbers come out right, the admissions committee feels pressed to dig deeper into the pool of available applicants if necessary. They do not want to admit unqualified minority candidates, nor do they want to prefer advantaged minority applicants over disadvantaged whites. But these questions arise, if they arise at all, only after the more pressing matter of minority representation is attended to. The goal is to have “enough” blacks and other minorities in the incoming class. Meanwhile, white applicants are judged in competition with other white candidates, using the many criteria that have always been applied.
The main purpose of the exercise we have just conducted is to suggest that admissions committees should be permitted to behave a little more like our imaginary one than they are at present, given the pressures from higher levels in the university. If university officials think that these data are not adequate for the purposes we have used them, or if they think that we have misrepresented the affirmative action process, there is an easy remedy. Universities across the country have in their admissions files all the data needed for definitive analyses of the relationship of ethnicity, socioeconomic disadvantage, and academic ability—test data, grade data, parental background data in profusion—for students who were accepted and students who were rejected, students who enrolled and students who did not. At many schools, the data are already in computer files, ready for analysis. They may readily be made available to scholars without compromising confidentiality. Our proposition is that affirmative action as it is currently practiced in America’s universities has lost touch with any reasonable understanding of the logic and purposes of affirmative action. It is easy to put this proposition to the test.
THE SUCCESS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN THE UNIVERSITIES
The success of affirmative action in the university is indisputable, in the sense that a consciously designed public policy, backed by the enthusiastic cooperation of universities, drastically increased the number of minority students who attend and graduate from college. The magnitude of the success during the first flush of affirmative action is apparent in the figure below, which shows the result for black enrollments.30
When aggressive affirmative action began, black college enrollment surged for a decade
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975, 1993, various editions.
In 1967, black enrollment of 20-24-year-olds suddenly shot up, and continued to rise steeply through the mid-1970s. White enrollment experienced no comparable surge during that period. The most plausible cause of the surge is the aggressive affirmative action that began in the mid-1960s. On the other hand, this figure previews a problem we will discuss at more length in the next chapter: Whatever initial impetus was provided by affirmative action, it soon lost momentum. Black enrollment in the early 1990s was higher than the trendline from 1950 to 1966 would have predicted, but some sort of evening-out process seems to have set in as well. Black enrollment dropped during the late 1970s, recovered modestly during the early and mid-1980s, then increased sharply at the end of the decade. The level of black college enrollment as of the early 1990s is higher than at any other time in history.
Furthermore, the enrollment of blacks rose not only to equality but to more than equality with whites of comparable socioeconomic background and intelligence. As we showed in Chapter 14, the proportion of blacks obtaining college degrees substantially exceeds that of whites, after controlling for IQ. As we have just finished documenting at length, the opportunity for college is also more open to blacks than to whites with equivalent test scores.
Given the goals of affirmative action, it is appropriate to see this increase as a success. We assume as well (we have found no hard data) that affirmative action has also increased the sense among minority youths that college is an option for them and increased the number of college-educated minority role models for minority youths. Still other benefits claimed for affirmative action—helping j
ump-start advances in the next generation of minority groups or improving race relations—are yet in the realm of speculation.
THE COSTS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN THE UNIVERSITIES
The costs of affirmative action have been measured in different ways.31 Relatively little of this commentary has involved the costs to whites. There are such costs—some number of white students are denied places at universities they could otherwise have won, because of affirmative action.32 But most of the concern about affirmative action comes down to this question: How much harm is done to minority self-esteem, to white perceptions of minorities, and ultimately to ethnic relations by a system that puts academically less able minority students side by side with students who are more able? There are no hard-and-fast answers, but at least we can discuss the magnitude of the problem from the student’s eye view and from the vantage point of the general population.
The Student’s-Eye View of Minority and White Cognitive Ability
Getting to know students from different backgrounds is a proper part of a college education. But given the differences in the cognitive abilities of the students in different groups, diversity has other consequences. To the extent that the groups have different scores, both perceptions and grades will track with them. Consider once again the probability of reaching college for students at different levels of cognitive ability. Comparatively small proportions of students with low intelligence get to college, no matter what their race. But the student on the ground does not see the entire population of students with IQs in the bottom quartile (let us say). Rather, the only people in the bottom quartile whom he sees are the ones who reached college.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Page 53