The Tragedy of Affirmative Action

Blacks were making rapid progress before the 1960s. Racial preferences didn’t help, and if anything they slowed the improvement

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the unrest that ensued nationwide, including on college campuses, schools stepped up efforts to recruit black students and faculty. To expedite the push for racial diversity, elite colleges began lowering admissions and hiring standards. Previous black recruitment efforts had involved searching for capable students who met existing admission criteria and could handle the rigor of the institution. For the first time, schools started creating special programs to recruit black students with academic deficiencies."

"Studies conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s showed that, at some elite schools, half of undergraduates admitted through special programs for blacks were on academic probation."

"More than five decades of affirmative action has created the impression that black advancement is impossible without racial preferences. In anticipation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard,Sherrilyn Ifill, a former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that court-imposed race neutrality would have “catastrophic implications” for blacks. Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown, predicted that “public and private universities will resegregate.”"

"past experience clearly shows that black advancement in higher education was far more momentous in the decades immediately prior to the implementation of quotas and set-asides."

"the advent of racial preferences coincided with the end of a black-white convergence in the quantity and quality of education in the U.S. that had been under way for nearly a century. Well before the implementation of racial preferences, blacks were making unprecedented strides despite tremendous racial hostility."

"During the first two-thirds of the 20th century . . . Education gaps narrowed, incomes rose, and poverty declined."

"In 1940, 25- to 29-year-old whites had 3.6 years more schooling on average than their black counterparts. By 1960 both groups had advanced, but blacks outpaced whites and the gap narrowed by more than half, to 1.7 years."

"a high school diploma. Between 1940 and 1960, the percentage of blacks who met that qualification more than tripled, again growing at a much faster rate than among whites. But as more colleges began compromising their admission standards in the late 1960s to admit black students, these trends slowed."

"education gaps that had been narrowing started to widen. Greater numbers of blacks had been graduating from high school and entering college, but now fewer were completing college relative to their white peers. The “fastest and most dramatic progress toward parity between blacks and whites finishing high school was achieved before 1970"

"after 1970, the relative rate at which blacks were completing college dropped, then flatlined, and never recovered its previous upward trajectory. In fact, today black Americans are completing college at a lower rate compared to whites than they were in 1970.”"

"just as absolute and relative educational gains among blacks had been speedier in the decades prior to racial preferences in college admissions, wages for black workers rose at a faster pace in the decades before racial hiring quotas became commonplace."

"In 1939, the annual median income was $360 for black males and $1,112 for white males. (These figures are nominal, unadjusted for inflation.) By 1960 those figures had reached $3,075 and $5,137, respectively, an increase of 568% for blacks vs. 362% for whites. Among females over the same time, there was a 275% increase among whites and a 418% increase among blacks."

"Between 1940 and 1970, the median annual income for black men rose from 41% to 59% of the median annual white male income"

"under the first quarter-century of affirmative action, 1970-95, black male earnings as a percentage of white earnings grew by only 8 more points, to 67%."

"Median black female earnings climbed from 36% of the white female median in 1940 to 73% by 1970. Between 1970 and 1995, however, pay for black women grew by only 16 more points"