by Joel VanDixhorn | A statistical look at the effects of affirmative action.
Affirmative action has become a loaded and often misunderstood term at Tufts University. The racial implications that accompany its utterance have worked to limit open discussion in the academic community. Proponents of affirmative action provide a multitude of reasons for the necessity of its creation and also its continued practice. Compensation for past wrongs that minorities endured, along with the continued racism that non-whites suffer, is a sample of the arguments supporting affirmative action. While these arguments are recognized as having some merit, and often sympathized with, statistics cast doubt upon the validity and effectiveness of altered admissions procedures. Evidence from law and medical schools highlight the detrimental effect that affirmative action has on minorities as well as society in general.
While many individuals support affirmative action as an active way to redress past discrimination, the Supreme Court has found that such action is constitutionally impermissible. Race is a classification that is subjected to strict scrutiny, meaning that the onus is on the institution to prove that there is a compelling interest in using race as a consideration when making decisions concerning admissions. Because of this high standard of review, in 2003 the Court invalidated the University of Michigan’s undergraduate practice of adding an automatic “plus” to every minority applicant. In a perplexing decision, the Court then decided to uphold Michigan Law’s system, in which a subjective plus is added, as opposed to an automatic one, to minority, specifically African-American, Hispanic American, and Native-American, applications. The school emphasized an amicus brief from Patricia Y. Gurin, Chair of the Department of Psychology, which claimed that the diversity, resulting from the admission of African-American students, provided a compelling reason to practice affirmative action. However, the National Association of Scholars refutes these claims, and contends that “after controlling for other explanatory variables, there are no educationally significant positive relationships between the racial diversity of an institution and any of the 82 cognitive and non-cognitive student outcomes included in the study.” In a 2001 report, NAS provided evidence that Gurin manipulated data and showed that, “her claims are based on models that fail to control for all relevant explanatory variables simultaneously.” Much of Gurin’s data was self-reported cognitive measures, while the source of the rest of her data (the Higher Education Research Institute) has refused to allow NAS to perform its own statistical analysis with the same data.
The fact remains that affirmative action is present at all levels of academia and also in many sectors of the workforce. Law schools as well as many law firms have preferential application processes. However, statistics indicate that this practice may inflict more harm than good upon minorities. John Leo of U.S. News reports that, “young black lawyers leave big firms at two to three times the rate of whites.” Coupled with the fact that blacks are six times more likely to never pass the bar exam, even after multiple attempts, it becomes clear that many blacks are unable to succeed when placed in schools not suited to their academic capabilities. These are individuals who clearly have talent and ability, especially ones applying to top-tier law schools, but are given little chance to succeed because they’re placed in an environment incongruous to their skills. Those familiar with college football witness a similar phenomenon each year. Notre Dame, one of the most popular and decorated teams in college football history, is perennially put into a Bowl game it does not deserve. As a result, Notre Dame, even though it usually fields a very good team, has lost nine straight Bowl games, last winning in 1994.
This sequence of events also plays out in the field of medicine. The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) did a study of 47 public universities and discovered that race played a larger factor in the admissions process than previously thought. For example, in 1999, black students with grades and MCAT scores similar to white students, were 21 times more likely to be admitted to the University of Maryland medical school. In the same program only 68 percent of blacks graduated, compared to 82 percent of whites. A quarter of blacks went on to fail the first step of the US Medical Licensing Examination, while less than 3 percent of whites suffered the same fate. Unfortunately, this not only affects individuals, but society as a whole. All the universities in this study are public, meaning millions of tax dollars go into educating students that are ultimately doomed to fail because they are placed in an inappropriate environment. This is a gross misappropriation of funds and a socially irresponsible program. Linda Chavez of CEO notes, “More than 3,500 white and Asian students were not admitted to the schools CEO studied, despite having better grades and test scores than black and Hispanic applicants who were given preferential treatment.” As a sector that thrives on intellectual development, it is unfortunate that affirmative action deprives the medical field of vital human resources.
Universities are swamped with evidence that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of affirmative action. A plethora of colleges witness blacks fail at a rate much higher than whites. Economist Walter Williams warns students against attending a college if that student’s SAT is at least 200 points lower than the college’s average. Statistics echo this warning repeatedly. It’s odd that graduate schools do not abandon affirmative action but instead continue to employ race preferential practices. It would seem that effects of social injustices, or the supposedly prejudiced SAT, would have been corrected after the undergraduate level. Since Tufts practices affirmative action, there is no reason for Maryland medical school to advantage a black applicant with a Tufts degree over his or her white counterpart. Even after minorities are exposed to the same education as whites, universities still believe minorities need preferential treatment, which is counterintuitive and even belittling to minorities. Justice O’Connor had an interesting observation in Grutter v. Bollinger, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” However, until she and the rest of society realize that affirmative action hinders the advancement of minorities, and instead creates self-perpetuating stereotypes, its end will always be “25 years from now.”
Mr. VanDixhorn is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major.
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