The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  Affirmative action defenders have yet another explanation for the poor SAT performance of minorities. Low-income applicants from schools with underperforming student bodies, they contend, have never gotten the chance to develop their academic talents and so should not be held to the same standards. A 900 for them is the equivalent of a 1400 for a more privileged applicant. Colleges can compensate for deficiencies in K–12 education, said Rashid, “if you devise a process that identifies applicants with the willingness to succeed. Initially they need services, but by their third year, they’re really screaming along.” Yet while undoubtedly some ill-taught high school students end up trouncing their peers in college, such cases are not the norm. And college admissions have to be about averages.

  The most radical preference advocates simply dismiss the validity of tests—for everyone. One UC report, for example, stressed that high school GPAs and standardized test scores combined predict only about 25 percent of freshman-year grades at the university—which, the authors imply, is a pathetically low predictive validity. Such objective measures, therefore, should give way to “holistic” factors for determining eligibility. But the 25-percent validity that they scorn in this case is higher than the correlation between SATs and socioeconomic status, which they invoke as a reason to discontinue the use of SATs in college admissions (SATs unfairly disadvantage the poor, goes the argument). If, as ex–Berkeley admissions director Laird put it, there is an “absolute correlation between income and SAT scores,” then the correlation between SATs and academic performance is beyond absolute. By contrast, the factors that the 209 foes want to use instead of SATs for admission, such as “spark” and leadership, have predictive powers of about 2.5 percent—in other words, almost no relationship to academic success.

  In 2004, a groundbreaking study of affirmative action in law schools blew away every rationale for racial double standards ever put forth. Richard Sander found that law schools that admit black students with lower GPAs and LSAT scores than their nonblack peers—almost all law schools, in other words—actually lowered those students’ chances of passing the bar.7 Because of the “mismatch” between their academic preparedness and the academic sophistication of the school that has bootstrapped them in, the preference beneficiaries learn less of what they need to pass the bar than they would in a school that matched their capabilities. Far from increasing the supply of black lawyers, affirmative action actually decreases the diversity of the bar.

  The data that Sander offered about black performance in law school were stunning. After the first year, 51 percent of black students were in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 5 percent of white students. Two-thirds of black students were in the bottom fifth of their class. Blacks were twice as likely to drop out as whites, and only 45 percent of black law school graduates pass the bar on their first try, compared with 80 percent of white grads. Blacks were six times as likely to fail the bar after multiple efforts.

  Law school is the perfect place to evaluate whether aptitude tests such as the LSAT and SAT do or do not predict academic success. College gives no objective exit exam that measures what undergraduates actually learned. Grades are imperfect measures, since courses vastly differ in difficulty, and grade inflation is rampant. Law school grades, by contrast, provide a more reliable gauge, since they are often calculated blind and on a curve. The bar is an objective exit exam.

  The correlation between black law students’ rock-bottom LSATs and their performance in law school and on the bar exam was overwhelming. Sander’s study demolished the two mainstays of the preferences regime: the argument that objective aptitude tests do not anticipate minorities’ academic performance, and the argument that admitting affirmative action beneficiaries to schools where their academic skills are below the norm is in their interest.

  Clearly, Sander’s work was a mortal threat and had to be treated as such. The article was “a piece of crap that never should have been published and has no merit of any sort,” Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber huffed.8 Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu (now an associate justice of the California Supreme Court) misrepresented the article’s message, charging Sander with telling blacks that they “should lower their sights”9 in choosing a law school—as if blacks can aspire to the top tier only with the crutch of affirmative action.

  Other law professors offered increasingly tortured explanations of Sander’s data. All involved the phlogiston of modern liberalism: racism—which can neither be perceived nor measured but can be invoked as an explanation in the face of ignorance or (as here) bad faith. Harvard law professor David Wilkins, for instance, ascribed the racial achievement gap to some law professors’ low expectations of black students—a fanciful explanation, given that the classroom interaction between law professors and all students at Harvard is only slightly more intimate than that between a marquis and a peasant, and is not much more engaged elsewhere.

  In the wake of Sander’s paper, preference advocates were wildly casting about, like sailors on a sinking ship, to find aspects of legal education that they could toss overboard to try to improve black performance. Liu suggested that law schools might jettison time-limited exams, for instance. “But don’t lawyers need to think quickly under pressure, especially in a courtroom?” I asked. “What percentage of lawyers make courtroom arguments?” he responded. Timothy Clydesdale, a College of New Jersey sociologist, argued in response to Sander’s article that law professors’ method of publicly grilling students on their understanding of the law intimidates black students.10 Never mind that litigators can expect far rougher treatment from judges. (Clydesdale did not answer a request to explain why he thinks that black law students are uniquely sensitive to aggressive questioning.)

  Sander’s research empirically exploded the argument that affirmative action benefits its recipients. But the practice of pushing unprepared black and Hispanic students into elite schools raises a logical question as well: If it would be so injurious to their life chances to attend a school that they can handle academically, however less elite, why should any student suffer the fate of going to California State University, Northridge, instead of UCLA, say, or Santa Clara Law School instead of Berkeley’s? Why not close down those allegedly career-destroying second- and third-tier schools, so that everyone can get an elite degree?

  Affirmative action’s condescension toward lesser-ranked schools received its perfect expression in Berkeley’s then-chancellor Robert Birgeneau. In a 2006 interview, Birgeneau opined: “One of my most important practical concerns is that the communities most in need of educated, strong leadership are also the communities most profoundly underrepresented at the state’s flagship university.… [T]here are just too few people here from those communities at present to provide that leadership going forward.”11 In other words, don’t expect UC Riverside or Cal State Long Beach to turn out “community” leaders.

  I asked leading UC affirmative action proponents why we inflict on any student the handicap of attending a nonelite college. I never got an answer. UC admissions committee head Mark Rashid simply parried one question with another. I tried again: “Why is it okay for a white kid to go to Cal State Hayward and not a Hispanic?”

  “That should be the point of the admissions process,” he responded, “to figure out what are various degrees of deserving. What if we knew that more African Americans are capable of succeeding at Berkeley?” Is that only true of blacks, not of whites? “It’s probably more true of blacks than whites or Asians,” he said. “The bottom line is: Race is important, it has a lot to do with how we see ourselves. The critical mass argument for affirmative action should not be casually dismissed.”

  Another question I never got answered was whether minorities were doing everything that they could to qualify themselves for the university. Even supposing that California were inequitably distributing its educational resources, are minorities grasping such opportunities as are available to them? Or does a culture of underachievement—truancy, fail
ure to do homework, indifference to learning, and so on—also impede the proportional representation of blacks and Hispanics? I learned that nothing riles an affirmative action proponent more than the suggestion that academic achievement is an individual, as well as a social, responsibility.

  “Why not encourage the same commitment to learning in underrepresented minorities as in Asians, a group that once suffered discrimination?” I asked Patrick Hayashi, the former UC associate president. Though only 12 percent of California’s population, Asians made up nearly half of Berkeley’s freshman class a decade after Prop. 209. “A lot of Asians are deeply committed to education,” Hayashi advised me, “but a lot are deeply involved in gangs, drugs. Be careful how you generalize.”

  “Doesn’t the stigma against ‘acting white’—i.e., achieving academically—hold back minority achievement?” I asked Robert Laird, Berkeley’s ex–admissions chief. “There’s some truth to the allegation,” he said, “but you can’t blame the victim. It’s really shallow [to say] that this is just a matter of cultural indifference. There are a lot of reasons why that cultural indifference is in place. You can’t simply say, ‘Okay, here are the opportunities, why don’t you just do it?’ You need to overcome the cultural damage that has led to that indifference.”

  I emailed former UC admissions chair Michael Brown, a UC Santa Barbara education professor. (Brown was appointed provost of the UC system in 2017.) Rather than worry about UC eligibility standards, I suggested, more might be accomplished by trying to foster among underrepresented minorities the same fanaticism about academic overachievement that a significant portion of Asians demonstrates. “It saddens me,” Brown emailed back, “that you are comparing groups based on stereotypes. Asians are not monolithic and neither are URMs [underrepresented minorities]. ‘Whites’ aren’t either. Individual merit—properly identified, supported, and rewarded—should be what we *all* care about, at least it seems to me.”

  If only.

  3

  AFFIRMATIVE DISASTER

  A growing body of empirical evidence is undermining the claim that racial preferences in college benefit their recipients. Students who are admitted to schools for which they are inadequately prepared learn less, in fact, than they would in a student body that matches their own academic level. A controversy at Duke University demonstrated, however, that such pesky details may have no effect on the preference regime.

  Duke admits black students with SAT scores on average over one standard deviation below those of whites and Asians (blacks’ combined math and verbal SATs are 1275; whites’ are 1416; and Asians’, 1457). Not surprisingly, blacks’ grades in their first semester are significantly lower than those of other ethnic groups, but by senior year, the difference between black and white students’ grades has shrunk almost 50 percent.1 This convergence in GPA might seem to validate preferential admissions by suggesting that Duke identifies minority students with untapped academic potential who will narrow the gap with their white and Asian peers over their college careers.

  Three Duke researchers demonstrated in 2012 that such catching-up is illusory. Blacks improve their GPAs because they switch disproportionately out of more demanding science and economics majors into the humanities and soft social sciences, which grade much more liberally and require less work. If black students stayed in the sciences at the same rate as whites, there would be no convergence in GPAs. And even after their exodus from the sciences, blacks don’t improve their class standing in their four years of college.

  This study, by economics professor Peter Arcidiacono, sociology professor Ken Spenner, and then-economics graduate student Esteban Aucejo (now a professor at Arizona State University), has major implications for the nationwide effort to increase the number of minority scientists.2 The federal government alone has spent billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money trying to boost minority participation in science; racial preferences play a key role in almost all college science initiatives. The Arcidiacono paper suggests that admitting aspiring minority scientists to schools where they are less prepared than their peers is counterproductive.

  The most surprising finding of the study is that, of incoming students who reported a major, more than 76 percent of black male freshmen at Duke intended to major in the hard sciences or economics, higher even than the percentage of white male freshmen who anticipated such majors. But more than half of those would-be black science majors switched track in the course of their studies, while less than 8 percent of white males did, so that by senior year, only 35 percent of black males graduated with a science or economics degree, while more than 63 percent of white males did. Had those minority students who gave up their science aspirations taken introductory chemistry among students with similar levels of academic preparation, they would more likely have continued with their original course of study, as the record of historically black colleges in graduating science majors suggests. Instead, finding themselves in classrooms pitched at a more advanced level of math or science than they have yet mastered, preference recipients may conclude that they are not cut out for quantitative fields—or, equally likely, that the classroom “climate” is racist—whereas the problem may just be that they have not yet laid the foundations for more advanced work.

  Attrition from a hard science major was wholly accounted for in the paper’s statistical models by a freshman’s level of academic qualifications; race was irrelevant. While science majors had SATs that were fifty points higher than students in the humanities in general, students who had started out in science and then switched had SATs that were seventy points lower than those of science majors. Any student in a class that assumes knowledge of advanced calculus is likely to drop out if he has not yet mastered basic calculus.

  Predictably, a number of black students, alumni, and professors portrayed the research, whose methodology was watertight, as a personal assault. Members of Duke’s Black Student Alliance (BSA) held a silent vigil outside the school’s Martin Luther King Day celebration in protest of the paper and handed out flyers titled “Duke: A Hostile Environment for Its Black Students?” In an email to the state NAACP, the BSA called the paper “hurtful and alienating” and accused its authors of lacking “a genuine concern for proactively furthering the well-being of the black community.”3

  Naturally, the BSA leveraged its protest into demands on the Duke administration for more black faculty and administrators and for more funding of black-themed programs. A Duke professor of English, women’s studies, and law, Karla Holloway, tweeted that the study “lacks academic rigor”—this women’s studies professor neglected to specify which of its algorithms she found flawed—and that it “re-opens old racial wounds.”4 A senior research scholar, Tim Tyson, wrote in an op-ed that the paper was a “political tract disguised as scholarly inquiry,” representing a “crusade to reduce the numbers of black students at elite institutions.”5 (Both Tyson and Holloway were active in the witch hunt against the three Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused in 2006 of raping a black stripper.) A group of recent black Duke graduates called on the study’s authors to “stop their attack on students of color.”

  To the extent that these critics tried to address the paper’s arguments, they missed its gist entirely. The Duke alumni alleged that black students “shy away” from “so-called ‘difficult’ majors” because they’ve been told all their lives that they are “inferior”—overlooking the fact that Duke’s black students “shied away” from the sciences only after starting out in those fields. Tyson claimed that black students choose the humanities over the sciences because they “come from cultural and intellectual traditions different than—not less than—most white students at Duke”—again, ignoring the fact that black students overwhelmingly intend to major in the sciences when they arrive at Duke. An essay by a professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University faulted the researchers for not exploring the “countless” ways in which “racism” denies black high school students
equal access to SAT prep and advanced placement courses. But the focus of the major-switching paper was on what happened to minority students after they arrived at Duke, not before. Moreover, the paper did note that the racial difference in academic preparation is “not surprising, given disparities in resources between black and white families.”

  The study’s critics also asserted that the intellectual demands of humanities and science majors are indistinguishable. Applying Ferdinand de Saussure (a nineteenth-century Swiss linguist invoked today only in literature classes) to The Matrix, it was claimed, is as challenging as mastering the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Here, too, the protesters ignored the paper’s empirical evidence: Duke seniors in the hard sciences have lower grades than freshmen in humanities and social sciences, even though the SATs of science majors are, on average, higher than those of humanities majors. For blacks, the disparity in grading is even greater. Black freshmen at Duke get higher grades in the humanities and social sciences than freshmen of all races get in the hard sciences, though black students’ test scores and overall grades are significantly lower than other students’. As for the coursework demands in the various fields, it is students themselves who report spending 50 percent more time studying for the hard sciences, and who rate those courses as more difficult than those in the humanities and the social sciences.

  In a different world, the Duke administration might have tried to dispel the critics’ distortions of the Arcidiacono paper, given the authors’ patent lack of invidious intent and the rigor of their work. Instead, Duke’s top bureaucrats let the authors twist in the wind. In an open letter to the campus, provost Peter Lange and a passel of deanlings declared: “We understand how the conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes.”6 It is hard to imagine a more hypocritical utterance. To the extent that the paper reinforced “negative stereotypes,” it did so by describing the effects of Duke’s policy of admitting black students with lower academic qualifications than whites and Asians. It is Duke’s predilection for treating black students as a group whose race trumps their individual academic records that constitutes “stereotyping,” not the authors’ analysis of the consequences of that groupthinking. (Campus spokesman Michael Schoenfeld ignored a request to specify the “negative stereotypes” that the paper might reinforce.)