Affirmative Action: What's It Good For?

 When it comes to Affirmative Action (AA), we tend to see the proposition from the point of view of our own individual experiences or from an eagle's eye view of large numbers and statistics.

August Macke 

Currently, I am working my way through Melvin Urofsky's book, "The Affirmative Action Puzzle," and it has changed my mind in some important ways, but the biggest controversy is over applying AA practices to schools and there I'm not quite moved.

When labor unions excluded Blacks from being firemen or plumbers or electricians, the harm that did Black men and their families could be measured in dollars and cents.

When the Dixiecrats made sure Negroes did not get VA loans and so could not buy houses after World War Two, the effect on family wealth was measurable.

But if a Black kid cannot go to the University of California at Berkeley,  or Harvard or Brown, or Princeton what has been lost is less clear. The Ivy League colleges have guarded follow up data on their graduates tightly for generations. What you would want to know is how much the 4 years at college changed the financial fates of the students who graduate.  After the Second World War, when so many veterans went to college, often the first in their families to go to college, a whole new middle and upper class was established as a college degree became a passport to upper level management jobs. It's not at all clear that going to Princeton does that any more--children of rich parents who send their kids to Princeton tend to become rich and upper class but is that because their families made sure of that or because they were transformed into leaders at Princeton? 

What we assume is that going to a highly selective college is getting your ticket punched and you are launched into the upper classes. Not at all clear this is true.

The concept of admitting people to schools (or jobs) BECAUSE they are members of a particular group, race or ethnicity collides with the notion that, in America, you should advance yourself because of your own personal qualities, your individual drive and willingness to work hard, not because you are White or the son of a rich man. We aspire toward a "meritocracy." 

As Michael Sandel has noted, that idea of meritocracy is not as benign as we thought.  For one thing, the whole idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps means if you find yourself poor, working in a dead end job  then it's your own fault because in a meritocracy all you have to do to succeed is work hard. So, if you're poor, you deserve to be poor and miserable.

In my own family academic achievement was the top priority. My parents didn't care if their sons were good athletes or if we could sing or dance or make money; what they cared about was our grades and our test scores.

So, it came as something of a shock, when, in my freshman year at college--an Ivy League college, no less--a student asked the professor of English if we could interrupt our scheduled discussion of the play we had read to discuss the important issue of whether our college should commit to admitting to the next freshman class 12% Black students--as that was the percentage of Blacks in the national population.

This struck me as ludicrous: If Blacks wanted to go to our college, let them apply and compete as we all did, playing by the same stupid rules we had to play by, study for the SAT exams, grind away coloring maps and taking quizzes and exams to earn our "A's" and get in the same way we all did.

Making the goal achieving some outcome, like 12% Blacks in our classes seemed absurd. If 100% of the class turned out to be Asian, I said, that was fine with me, as long as we all played by the same rules.  I noted that nearly 100% of our basketball team was Black, and nobody suggested we have 88% white players on that team to reflect the general population.

The goal should not be 12% Blacks in our classes but the goal should be that every body who got in had the same chance when they applied.

Of course, what I did not appreciate was how thoroughly the Black kids had been disadvantaged and for how long in the training for the races and contests which would "qualify" them for admission to our college.

The other thing which nagged at the back of my brain was the rules, the criteria, the colleges used to judge who was talented and desirable and who was not.

As a junior in college I tried to be exempted from taking a calculus course required for my major (Biology) and I had to see a dean who also happened to be the Dean of Admissions. During our discussion, he reached into a file cabinet and retrieved my admission folder, scanned through it and he expostulated: "How did you ever get in here?"

I wanted to be exempted from that course, so I did not say: "Well, I've been in the top 10% of my class since first semester freshman year, so maybe you're not much of a judge of talent."

The fact is, since the California system eliminated AA, the campuses have seen only minor changes at the state schools, Chico State, Fresno State, which are more like community colleges where kids live nearby and often commute, but the number of Blacks at Berkeley fell by half and Hispanic students fell by about 25%. Asians have increased slightly but not overwhelmingly. 

The loss of places at universities is only important if what happens at those universities really makes a difference in the lives of students.

For me, at least, college was broadening, maybe transformative in some ways, but looking at most of my classmates, I doubt this was true. Apart from the engineers and the pre meds, most of the students I could see who majored in the humanities or arts did not change much or get enough out of college to say that denying them that experience would have hurt them much.