More on affirmative action

In my next-to-last post I threatened to say more about affirmative action, and now I’m following through.

I hear a lot of opponents of affirmative action say that college admission decisions should be on “merit”. There are two problems with that.

• It buys into the idea that college degrees confer higher social status.
• It suggests that some people are more worthy of higher education, and we can determine who they are when they are still very young.

Now, in an ideal world where different universities had essentially the same status there wouldn’t be so much need for admissions officers to make determination about who gets in and who doesn’t: we have enough universities with enough open slots that everyone who really wants to go to college should be able to find a place somewhere. Since we don’t live in that world, how should they decide? By who is best prepared to succeed at the given university.

The way it works today, with affirmation action, is that most minority students are stuck in sub-standard elementary, middle, and high schools, where they often aren’t able to learn the skills and build the toolsets needed to succeed in competitive universities. And then those universities decide to show how non-racist they are by letting them in anyway. These unfortunate students drop out at higher rates than their peers, or end up switching to less challenging (and therefore less useful) majors.

Basically we have a system where certain groups are disadvantaged at every step of their educational careers except when the decision to admit them to college takes place, and then we pretend that that somehow makes things better. If higher education institutions really wanted to make things more equal, they would need to start working with K-12 institutions to help the disadvantaged children better prepare for a college career. But that would take a lot of work and expense, wouldn’t it?

While I think the Supreme Court made the correct decision about affirmative action, I’m skeptical that people who claim to care about equality will do the right but difficult thing and work to improve the entire arc of young people’s education.