Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier are doing important work in developing an argument for affirmative action that is based on more accurate information about how selection works. Their argument focuses on the selection decisions used in hiring, in admissions to education, and in promotions, and it begins by challenging the implicit assumption that those who are selecting applicants know what they are doing. It is certainly reasonable to argue that organizations have a right to select the best and most capable applicants. But in many cases, they make no rigorous attempt to do so. Perceptions of applicant ability based on the typical method of unstructured interviews have roughly zero correlation with subsequent performance in jobs.
Many employers appear to have no systematic arrangements for selecting among applicants.
What may be more surprising is that even systematic attempts to determine who will be a good employee or a successful student are far from accurate. Selection tests and college admission tests are limited to predicting performance in first jobs and first-semester grade point averages, respectively. The strongest argument against this common objection to affirmative action comes from empirical results about what affirmative action actually does in practice. A recent and important survey of this literature by Harry Holzer and David Neumark reaches several noteworthy conclusions. Finally, and most importantly, these employers do not appear to pay any price in terms of employee performance for engaging in affirmative action.