The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear two cases that challenge the affirmative action policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
In these consolidated cases, a group representing students and parents is asking the Supreme Court to find that race-based affirmative action programs violate Constitutional and statutory prohibitions on race-based discrimination. While the broad outlines of the programs at issue should be familiar to anyone who has ever sought a highly competitive job or spot in a selective school, some of the facts of these cases defy belief. For example, the evidence at trial against Harvard showed that the school knowingly discriminated against Asian applicants by continually giving those students poor marks on the “personal rating” portion of the evaluation, describing them as industrious and intelligent but unexceptional and indistinguishable.
Affirmative action programs are contrary to the colorblind ethos of America.
While we continue to strive to better meet that ideal, the answer to discrimination based on race is not more discrimination based on race. Distributing benefits and burdens based on a person’s race or ethnicity alone is both immoral and harmful in that it pits race against race and fosters anger and resentment. Race-based affirmative action programs at government institutions also undermine the fundamental concept of equal protection of the laws. No citizen of this great country should have the government take his race into account when making a decision.
But there are two larger problems that are rarely discussed in the commentary around affirmative action. Both of these concerns show that affirmative action programs harm the very minority populations the programs claim to help.
Admission practices that have a bias for students based on race can produce negative effects for the individual students admitted under those programs. UCLA law professor Richard Sander, who has long warned about the harmful effects of affirmative action, noted in The Atlantic nearly a decade ago that “large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively — even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.”
As Sander and his co-author Stuart Taylor, Jr. described, racial preferences may put students in educational settings where they have little chance of succeeding. Affirmative action programs can admit minority students who are less prepared for highly competitive, extremely rigorous courses of study for which the minority students have had weaker preparation. A natural consequence of this is that minority students admitted based on affirmative action preferences perform poorly in these programs, sometimes so poorly that they become frustrated and transfer out of the more rigorous courses, or, in some instances, drop out of school altogether.
Those who do make it through will have gotten less out of their classes than their better-prepared peers, and they will be at an even bigger disadvantage as they enter the job market. As the authors point out, racial preferences end up being a force for economic inequality. How many minority doctors, physicists, and English teachers are we missing today because callous administrators placed these students in an environment in which they were almost guaranteed to fail?
Second, affirmative action programs offer an easy way out for people who want to look like they are doing something to address disparities in minority achievement but don’t actually want to do anything. Addressing the social pathologies that can harm black students — too many absent fathers, crime-ridden neighborhoods that can make achievement nearly impossible, and everything in between — is hard. Our would-be race balancers at elite institutions would rather allow these problems to continue to fester in the black community and just focus on the superficial diversity of skin color in the faces they see every day.
Unlike in previous decades, there are no longer legal impediments to hinder the achievement of black and minority students. If special consideration is to be given, it should be on the basis of circumstance, not race. So also must the academic community drop its opposition to transparency surrounding their admission procedures.
Dr. Ben Carson is the founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute and the former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
