Racial Preferences
The Unraveling of Affirmative Action
Racial preferences spring from worthy intentions, but they have had unintended consequences—including an academic mismatch in many cases between minority students and the schools to which they are admitted. There's a better way to help the disadvantaged.
By RICHARD SANDER and STUART TAYLOR JR.
Jareau Hall breezed through high school in Syracuse, N.Y. Graduating in the top 20% of his class, he had been class president and a successful athlete, and he sang in gospel choir. He was actively recruited by Colgate University in rural New York, one of the nation's top liberal-arts colleges.
None of Colgate's recruiters mentioned to Mr. Hall that his combined math and verbal SAT scores were some 250 points below the class …show more content…
That is, schools need to demonstrate that if they wish to use race, it is as a supplement to a fundamentally more honest measure of disadvantage. This would also create incentives to seek more socioeconomic diversity. Of course, as schools create more genuine diversity, they also need to make special efforts to help less privileged students of all races succeed academically and navigate the new social environment they will encounter at college.
Third, schools should not be permitted to use race-based scholarships. Genuine need can be fully met through need-based scholarships; the race-based kind simply foster the sort of zero-sum competition that now causes American law schools to give four times as much grant aid to rich blacks as to poor whites, as one of us (Richard Sander) found in a 2011 study for the University of Denver Law Review.
These measures won't solve all the problems of affirmative action; neither will they completely overturn the idea of race-consciousness in admissions. But they will set us on the path to more honest policies and
Racial preferences spring from worthy intentions, but they have had unintended consequences—including an academic mismatch in many cases between minority students and the schools to which they are admitted. There's a better way to help the disadvantaged.
By RICHARD SANDER and STUART TAYLOR JR.
Jareau Hall breezed through high school in Syracuse, N.Y. Graduating in the top 20% of his class, he had been class president and a successful athlete, and he sang in gospel choir. He was actively recruited by Colgate University in rural New York, one of the nation's top liberal-arts colleges.
None of Colgate's recruiters mentioned to Mr. Hall that his combined math and verbal SAT scores were some 250 points below the class …show more content…
That is, schools need to demonstrate that if they wish to use race, it is as a supplement to a fundamentally more honest measure of disadvantage. This would also create incentives to seek more socioeconomic diversity. Of course, as schools create more genuine diversity, they also need to make special efforts to help less privileged students of all races succeed academically and navigate the new social environment they will encounter at college.
Third, schools should not be permitted to use race-based scholarships. Genuine need can be fully met through need-based scholarships; the race-based kind simply foster the sort of zero-sum competition that now causes American law schools to give four times as much grant aid to rich blacks as to poor whites, as one of us (Richard Sander) found in a 2011 study for the University of Denver Law Review.
These measures won't solve all the problems of affirmative action; neither will they completely overturn the idea of race-consciousness in admissions. But they will set us on the path to more honest policies and