Mismatching Students for Dollars
A Hidden Scandal
[Reprinted from Issues & Views Spring 1996]
Reactions among academics have been all too predictable to the decision of
the 5th Circuit of Appeals, banning the affirmative action admissions policy
at the University of Texas law school. The president of the university says
that a ban on affirmative action would lead to the "virtual resegregation of
higher education." A professor at the law school predicted, "You will have
lily-white universities across the United States."
Time will prove how ridiculous these remarks are but, even before that
happens, it is worth understanding why. Fear of such dire consequences is one
reason why many people support preferences and quotas in both academic and
non-academic settings, even when they feel misgivings about double standards.
Black students at the University of Texas law school, as at various other
major law schools and other academic institutions, are admitted with lower
academic qualifications than the white students at the same institutions.
However, that does not mean that black and other minority students are
"unqualified," or even that these particular minority students are less
qualified than white students nationwide.
There is a familiar pattern at elite academic institutions across the
country. The minority students they admit are not "unqualified." They simply
are mismatched with the institutions they attend. The University of Texas law
school is not chopped liver. Many of its minority law students could
undoubtedly be admitted to other good law schools without the use of racial
double standards. And many might well be better off somewhere else, where
they can learn at a pace geared to students with their academic
qualifications.
The systematic mismatching of minority students and the institutions they
attend has been one of the hidden scandals of the academic world for more
than a quarter of a century. Minority students with all the qualifications
for success have been artificially turned into failures by being put into
settings where the great majority of white students would also fail if they
were admitted. However, white students who lack the rare qualifications to be
in the thin top layer of high-pressure institutions are unlikely to be
admitted to such places.
Some people think it is doing minority students a favor to admit them to
these high-pressure institutions and, thereby, set them up for failure. But
others understand full well that it is a self-serving policy for the benefit
of the institutions themselves. Both institutional image and the ability to
continue receiving millions of dollars in government grants are enhanced, by
having a suitable body count of minority students on campus. This same body
count logic applies to minority faculty, many of whom are also quite capable
of meeting the normal hiring standards of institutions other than the ones
where they are employed under affirmative action.
As many of us predicted in the 1960s, such systematic mismatching of
minority students with institutions would not only have bad academic
consequences, but also bad consequences for the whole atmosphere on campus.
Such pessimistic expectations have, unfortunately, proved to be right.
If the 5th Circuit Court's ban on preferential admissions is not overturned,
and spreads to become the law of the land, what we will see will not be
"lily-white universities across the United States," but a redistribution of
minority students to settings where they meet the same standards as the other
students around them, and can succeed more often than they do now.
Thomas Sowell is an economist and author of many books, including
Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside American
Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free Press/MacMillan)
and The Vision of the Anointed (Basic Books).
Copyright © 1996 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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