Why affirmative action should be abolished

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By using this website you consent to our use of cookies. For more information, please see our Cookie Policy. Toggle navigation. Opinion: Affirmative action is not the way to end discrimination Affirmative action is used to ensure different groups of people have access to education, but it serves as a bandage over bigger issues, such as education inequality.

ASU wrestling prepares for season with intrasquad scrimmage. Biden drops free community college from bill, keeps Pell grant expansion. Students see month-long wait time for counseling services. So do varsity athletes. As many writers have pointed out, when we are considering colleges and jobs, there is a pipeline problem.

They went to the same high schools that their brothers did and most of them probably got better grades. The success of affirmative action in employment and university admissions has not eliminated the education and income gaps between whites and blacks. Although the poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics has dropped some since , it is still more than double the rate for whites. Americans of color are starting from much farther behind.

Millions never get on board a train that most whites were born on. The Supreme Court case that admissions offices rely on today is Regents of the University of California v. It was decided in , and, despite several attempts to relitigate it, it is still the law of the land. Bakke is a good example of the jurisprudential confusion around affirmative action: the Court managed to produce six opinions in that case. The plurality opinion, by Lewis Powell, struck down an admissions program at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, from which Allan Bakke, a white man, had been twice rejected, but it upheld the right of schools to use race-conscious admissions programs.

The problem at Davis was that the medical school basically ran two admissions processes, one for everybody and one that effectively considered only minority applicants, for whom sixteen places were set aside. Bakke was able to show that his record was superior to the records of some of the students who had been admitted through the special program. The Davis program was obviously not narrowly tailored.

One consideration that the university offered in the way of compelling state interest was its belief that minority M. Powell found no evidentiary basis for this, and it was arguably a racist assumption. The school could have investigated whether applicants had worked with underserved communities in the past. They did not, and Powell suggested that such a standard might be a better proxy than race. Admissions programs determined by race are in violation of both the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws racial discrimination in institutions that receive federal funding.

Powell argued, however, that another right was in play: the First Amendment; specifically, the right of academic freedom. There is no constitutional right of academic freedom, but Powell cited a case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, in which Felix Frankfurter, in a concurring opinion, quoted South African jurists to the effect that the principle of academic freedom allows a university to determine who will teach its classes and who will sit in its classrooms.

The Michigan case, Grutter v. Bollinger, in , was basically a relitigation of Bakke. As was Fisher v. Texas, in , and the second round of that case, known as Fisher II, in The Fisher cases involved a white woman who was turned down for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, U. Each time, the Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in admissions, but they were close calls.

The vote in Fisher II was 4—3. Harvard, is the same case one more time. The person behind both Fisher and the Harvard case is Edward Blum, a man who for whatever reason has decided to devote his time to preventing a small number of black and brown teen-agers from attending colleges that are desperate to have them. Harvard won at the trial level because the judge ruled that its admissions program is consistent with other Supreme Court decisions, such as Bakke. But, given the composition of the Supreme Court, it is all too likely that it will decide that the country has timed out of this particular form of remediation.

For remediation is fundamentally what affirmative action is. But the reason we have affirmative action is that we once had slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and racial covenants, and that we once had all-white police forces and all-white union locals and all-white college campuses and all-white law firms.

It was zero. Affirmative action is an attempt to redress an injustice done to black people. The Fourteenth Amendment protects white people, too, but that is not why it needed to be written. Holder vacating a central provision of the Voting Rights Act has backfired.

It turns out that, when you remove enforcement mechanisms and remedial oversight, things tend to revert to the status quo ante. However, students of color, especially black and Latinx students, are more underrepresented at selective universities today than they were 35 years ago.

In fact, a black student enrollment disparity exists at 45 of the 50 flagship state universities, meaning that the percentage of undergraduates who are black is lower than the percentage of high school graduates in that state who are black. For example, black students constituted 50 percent of — high school graduates in Mississippi , but were just Banning affirmative action only worsens this persistent problem.

For example, one study found that students of color experience a 23 percentage point decline in likelihood of admission to highly selective public colleges after an affirmative action ban goes into effect. While much progress has been made in recent decades, students of color still remain underrepresented on college campuses nationwide. Prioritizing diversity and employing race-conscious admissions policies are critical for promoting equity in higher education.

Diversity on college campuses enhances the educational experiences of students of all backgrounds. These benefits may translate to better economic outcomes and, among other payoffs, prepare students to work in a diverse global economy , increasing the productivity, effectiveness, and creativity of teams.

Institutions of higher education have placed a greater priority on integration and campus diversity in recent decades. White women may have been among the greatest beneficiaries of this effort. Between and , female college enrollment more than doubled —from 19 percent of all students to 44 percent.

During this period, the percentage of white women age 25 to 35 with college degrees surged from less than 15 percent to more than 40 percent. People of color have also benefited significantly from college integration and efforts to prioritize campus diversity. Overall, an abundance of evidence demonstrates that systematic efforts to prioritize diversity in college admissions can improve the representation of historically excluded groups while bolstering the educational experiences and economic outcomes of all students.

While income can and should be considered as part of a holistic evaluation of applicants, it should complement rather than supplant the consideration of race and ethnicity. Wealth makes it easier for families to relocate to better school districts, purchase test preparation books and classes, and pay or help pay college tuition.

But centuries of systemic racism and intergenerational transfers have provided white households with far more wealth than households of color, even after controlling for income. I estimated the association between adopting a ban and measures of state demographics and political climate using an event history analysis. These models are able to provide information based on both the longitudinal information about states and comparisons between states that have and have not ever adopted an affirmative action ban.

I find two consistent state characteristics that are associated with ban adoption. First, the theory I used to guide this research suggested that a direct connection to the phenomenon of interest in this case access to higher education could be a critical predictor of the adoption of policies like affirmative action bans. I investigated the relationship between ban adoption and the black, Latinx, black and Latinx, and white shares of undergraduate enrollment.

Harris , Brad Olsen , Richard V. Reeves , Jon Valant , and Kenneth K. Wong Friday, March 12, Brown Center Chalkboard What happens if affirmative action in college admissions is banned? Second, as neighboring states adopt a ban, the state of interest is less likely to adopt a ban. Some individuals and organizations did select certain states as prime environments for advocacy of ban adoption.

However, these individuals did not work in all states that adopted bans and, in some states where the individuals advocated, bans were never adopted. This makes it interesting to focus on the way that neighboring states could potentially learn from each other, while acknowledging that outside actors could and did advocate for ban adoption.

What does this mean practically?