Affirmative action should be ended in college admissions

In R2 I introduced contentions claiming that affirmative action harms the recipients it is intended to help. Here I will provide additional arguments and evidence supporting that contentions. Affirmative action puts applicants into difficult academic situations for which the not prepared. The problems this creates for the students is called mismatch. The impact is carefully documented in a book published last year. [11. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It”, Basic Books, 2012] Sandler is a civil rights advocate, lawyer, and law professor who served as a community organizer in the Black neighborhoods of Chicago. (Familiar?) Taylor is an investigative journalist. The book is based upon quantitative data in academic studies, and by interviews with admissions officers.First, understand that the preferences given to applicants are very large, which means that they end up in schools way beyond their ability. In [11], the authors write:... Thomas Espenshade, a leading expert on (and supporter of) affirmative action, and his coauthor Alexandria Walton Radford obtained academic data on a large number of students at a sample of selective, mostly private colleges. In their 2009 book on race in higher education, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, they reported that black applicants received “an admissions bonus . . . equivalent to 310 SAT points” relative to whites and more relative to Asians. ... Other studies focus on the vastly greater chance that a black applicant has of being admitted compared with a white applicant with the same academic index score.There are two important points here. First, racial preferences are not remotely close to being the “tie-breakers” they are sometimes claimed to be. They require admissions offices to give priority to minority applicants over hundreds or thousands of white and Asian applicants with substantially higher academic indices. And second, because of the large divergences in average academic indices across racial lines, large racial preferences follow ineluctably if elite schools want student bodies whose racial mix reflects their applicant pool.The disparity in preparation is so great that the effects are devastating:It is not lack of talent or innate ability that drives these students to drop out of school, flee rigorous courses, or abandon aspirations to be scientists or scholars; it is, rather, an unintended side effect of large racial preferences, which systematically put minority students in academic environments where they feel overwhelmed. Because of the mismatch effect as well as the related role of racial preferences in fueling pernicious stereotypes of black intellectual inferiority, we will argue that the biggest problem for minorities in higher education is no longer race but rather racial preferences. [11. Introduction]Affirmative action in general diverts resources away from low-income students of all races: Most universities’ pervasive neglect of poor, working- and even middle-class students and its relationship to their single-minded focus on racial identity. ... Black students are, today, about a third more likely than are white students with otherwise similar characteristics to start college (although blacks are less likely than similar whites to finish college—in large part, we believe, because of mismatch). Meanwhile, low-income students of all races are 70 percent less likely than their affluent counterparts to enter college. In other words, the problem of access (which financial aid and moderate, targeted preferences can address) is social and economic. The problem ofpersistence—of ending up with the degrees that students start college to achieve—has become a racial problem largely because of the pervasive use of very large racial preferences. [11. op cit] The evidence against affirmative is so persuasive that long-time supporters are rethinking the issue: As a high-profile defender of affirmative action, I used to think the so-called ‘mismatch’ problem was a bit overblown. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor have caused me to think again. How many bright and promising minority students, we must ask, have failed because they were steered—with the best intentions, of course—into elite schools for which they were less prepared academically than most of their classmates? What better ways can we devise to boost academic achievement and expand the pool of qualified students of all races? We don't do future generations of students any favors by trying to ignore this issue or pretend it doesn't exist. If common-sense moderates don't step up and engage this debate, we only allow extremists to take control of it.—Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning (1989 for Commentary) syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune [12. http://www.indiebound.org...] We can help students who are genuinely disadvantaged, and we should be doing that instead of affirmative action as now constituted and practiced.