Affirmative Action Is Obsolete

Affirmative action, as practiced in America’s most reputable universities, has outlived its utility. It emerged in U.S. social policy with John F. Kennedy’s 1961 executive order declaring that affirmative action would help ensure federal job applicants “are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Since then Affirmative Action has spread to the admissions process at the premier American institutions of higher education. At its inception, Affirmative Action was intended to rectify historical and present racial discrimination in employment and admissions to prestigious universities. In the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court redefined Affirmative Action’s raison d’être as ensuring “an educational benefit that flows from student body diversity.”

While both the original and current goals of Affirmative Action are commendable, there is reason to believe that the costs now outstrip its benefits. For one, the America of today is not the America of Jim Crow, and as such, Affirmative Action’s potential to counteract widespread racial bias in college admissions is diminished.

[su_pullquote align=”right”]Increasingly, the most relevant determinant of success is not race, but economic endowment.[/su_pullquote]More salient is the rising socioeconomic disparity between the wealthiest and least affluent in American society. With economic inequality unseen since the 1920s, the economic elite wield a tremendous advantage, whether it be access to the most expensive and prestigious schools, private tutors, or an upbringing in the safety of a pristine gated community. Increasingly, the most relevant determinant of success is not race, but economic endowment. College has long been an engine of upward socioeconomic mobility in American society, yet the current iteration of Affirmative Action permits perverse situations in which an economically deprived Asian-American student from an abusive home with excellent qualifications might be denied admission to a top university while an equally qualified, affluent African-American applicant from a supportive family would more likely matriculate. One might respond that an applicant’s rejection from Harvard does little to harm the job prospects of an ambitious and sedulous student. But the reality is that one’s alma mater matters. Employers do, in fact, weigh the educational backgrounds of applicants as a heuristic for evaluating the intelligence, diligence and potential of prospective employees. Consequently, Affirmative Action acts not to reduce the gap in opportunity between groups, but to flatten any disparity in success.[su_pullquote]Consequently, Affirmative Action acts not to reduce the gap in opportunity between groups, but to flatten any disparity in success.[/su_pullquote]

This effect is apparent in the federal court case Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. Documents released by Harvard reveal that on the vague and subjective metric that is the “personal rating,” Asian-American applicants on average were rated significantly lower than their Caucasian-American counterparts. This gap widens when compared to African-American applicants, which seems coincidentally aligned with the relative probability of admission according to the purported effects of Affirmative Action. As reported by The New York Times, while it’s certainly possible that these disparities are due to genuine differences in applicant pools, data released by Harvard itself also revealed that differences in the “personal rating,” between White American and Asian-American applicants were non-existent when interviewed by alumni rather than admissions officers. Even more striking is the fact that admissions officers sometimes generate these ratings without even meeting the applicant.

Ironically, Affirmative Action harms the very individuals it’s designed to help. Consider the menace of self-doubt that accompanies the thought that one’s skin color may have tipped the scale in one’s admission to a prestigious university. Such a pernicious thought would unquestionably undercut a person’s sense of self-worth. Yet, imagine compounding that idea with an academic environment in which the majority of your peers are more prepared for the grind of one of the nation’s most rigorous colleges. Harvard’s current Dean of Admissions, William Fitzsimmons, recently testified that African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students are sent Harvard recruitment letters with PSAT scores of 1100 or above, while those same recruitment letters are only sent to Asian-American students who receive a 1350 or above. If the PSAT is any gauge for college readiness–as it was meticulously designed to be–then Harvard is systematically attracting students who are, on the average, less prepared for its coursework. Under these circumstances, beneficiaries of Affirmative Action at Harvard and other Ivy Leagues are less likely to succeed in the challenging academic environments that define these premier schools. Moreover, these students are more likely to lose confidence and self-esteem in the face of their better-prepared peers.

[su_pullquote align=”right”]There lies an ironic consensus among proponents of Affirmative Action that discrimination based on race or ethnicity is unjustified.[/su_pullquote]Ultimately, the policy of Affirmative Action represents a violation of a superordinate principle in American society: equality under the law. There lies an ironic consensus among proponents of Affirmative Action that discrimination based on race or ethnicity is unjustified. Under any guise apart from Affirmative Action, preferential treatment for people of a specific racial group would be rightfully derided as what it is: racist.

Johnathan Romero ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at johnathan.romero@wustl.edu.