Further, those selective colleges and universities that do take into account the race and ethnicity of historically underrepresented minority applicants ordinarily assign greater and more dispositive weight to all applicants' scores, grades, and extracurricular achievements. Elimination of the programs would increase the white applicant's probability of admission, which is about 25 percent, only to about 26.5 percent, according to extensive data available to Bowen and Bok. By numerous measurements, opportunity for white persons in the United States today far exceeds that for blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. The gaping disparity between college graduation rates of whites and members of those groups has been increasing, not decreasing, and is projected to widen, not narrow. Whites continue to make much more money on average than do those minorities.
Whites still occupy federal, state, and local public office in disproportion to their numbers.
There is no serious argument that affirmative-action programs of the limited type now administered by the institutions of higher education that have them will reverse white domination in our lifetimes, if ever. One possible answer is that the programs offer a case study for some in the majority to claim rhetorically, after all these years, the moral high ground in a matter of race. The programs supply some minority group members a case study as well. Here they can propound a different rhetoric, in which their victimization is traced to social engineering by a patronizing white intellectual aristocracy. Nor should we gainsay the rhetorical excesses of some affirmative action advocates.