To start, there is widespread discomfort in this country with government or institutional policies that factor race into decision-making. One concern, a legitimate one, is that this door swings both ways: By opening it in order to use racial identity for benign purposes, such as overcoming past discrimination or promoting diversity, we also make ourselves vulnerable to institutionalized prejudice and bias.
The real challenges intrinsic to gaining diversity’s many benefits must not be conflated, however, with the very different and erroneous idea that the United States in 2013 has become a post-racial society, for that surely is not the case.
According to the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, the nation’s population of African American and Latino K–12 students is more segregated than at any time since the 1960s. One-third of black students and almost one-half of white students attend a primary or secondary school where 90 percent of their classmates are of their race, a trend that shows no signs of abating. Particularly for these students, a college experience of immersion in a diverse student body will be essential if they are to thrive in the multi-racial society they will inhabit as adults.
Another familiar argument for ending affirmative action in higher education,
cloaked in new data and rhetoric, is that such efforts put African American and Hispanic students in educational environments where they are over their heads and bound to fail. However well intended, this “mismatch theory” has been
widely criticized by scholars for employing flawed methodology. Indeed, if there is one thing that
respected studies have shown, it is that both minority and low-income students who went to top-tier colleges do better later in life than equally smart students who did not.
Finally, it is understandable that public concern about high tuition costs and growing student debt has focused attention on maintaining socioeconomic diversity. But let’s be candid. The source of increased tuition is not too much racial and cultural diversity; nor will the problem be solved by ending affirmative action in admissions. The real culprit here is the foolish decision of too many state governments to slash investment in public universities, like the one I graduated from, where the vast majority of students in the U.S. receive their college education and find a ladder of opportunity.
percentage of admitted undergraduate students who are African American is still 40 percent below what it was 17 years ago when the state adopted a referendum banning any consideration of race in the admissions process. The figures for admission of Latino applicants are better only because of the huge increase in the proportion of California’s high school graduates who are Latino. Make no mistake: This outcome hurts all students on campus by robbing them of the skills learned through exposure to diverse people and perspectives, the very skills needed to succeed in today’s global marketplace.
What capital? Capital that would be better spent on what?
