Scalia Was Right About Race Preferences

The debate about these college-admissions policies is too focused on their legality, not their efficacy

By Jason L. Riley, WSJ. Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.Excerpts:

"We live in a political environment where the intent of a policy aimed at helping minorities is all that matters; questioning the policy’s actual effectiveness is tantamount to racism."

"Justice Scalia is right to question the assumption that racial favoritism in college admissions has been a boon for blacks."

"such concerns have been voiced by conservative and liberal scholars alike and are as old as the policies themselves, which date to the late 1960s."

"Nearly 50 years ago, Clyde Summers, a professor at Yale Law School and longtime critic of labor-union discrimination against blacks, explained how preferential admissions policies at elite law schools like his own damaged the educational prospects for black students not only at Yale but also at less-selective schools. When a top-tier school like Duke lowered the admissions criteria for a minority student who met the normal admissions standards for a second-tier school like North Carolina, he noted, the latter institution was left with a smaller pool of qualified applicants and forced to begin admitting students who would be a better fit for a third-tier school, and so on.

“In sum,” wrote Summers (who died in 2010), “the policy of preferential admission has a pervasive shifting effect, causing large numbers of minority students to attend law schools whose normal admission standards they do not meet, instead of attending other law schools whose normal standards they do meet.”"

"An analysis of black students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1980s found that they had scored in the top 10% nationally on the math portion of the SAT but in the bottom 10% among their classmates at MIT. As a result, black students were dropping out at much higher rates, and those who didn’t leave typically received lower grades than their white and Asian classmates."

"After racial preferences were banned in the University of California system in 1996, black enrollment at higher-ranked UCLA and Berkeley fell, but black academic outcomes improved. Mr. Sander and Mr. Taylor have demonstrated empirically that as more minority students attended schools where they weren’t at a preparation disadvantage relative to their classmates, grades rose along with graduation rates. That isn’t surprising. Historically black colleges and universities, which are less selective than the top-tier schools, produce about 40% of blacks with undergraduate degrees in math and science, despite accounting for only around 20% of black enrollment."

"Thomas Sowell, a longtime critic of racial double standards, predicted in his 1990 book, “Preferential Policies,” that they would be “educationally disastrous” for blacks and increase racial tensions and resentment on college campuses. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, liberal scholar Andrew Hacker of Queens College sounded a lot like Justice Scalia. “I agree,” he wrote, “that some of the minority students being recruited by high-powered colleges would be better served at schools like my own, where they could proceed at a pace more in tune with their preparation.”"