Sometimes an unwelcome shock can produce constructive reform. The US Supreme Court’s decision to effectively end affirmative action has certainly been a shock, albeit an expected one. Over the past 40 years universities have built that legal principle and diversity into their DNA. Now the court has told them in no uncertain terms that, however well-intentioned it might be, race-based decisionmaking violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Many universities would no doubt try to work around the court’s decision. Indeed, a legion of academic bureaucrats has been drawing up ideas for doing just this for months, if not years. These include replacing standardized tests with subjective measures — which wold make it impossible for Asian students, who were principal plaintiffs in the case against Harvard University — to prove that they are being discriminated against. For example, students might be asked how they would contribute to campus diversity in their personal statements. The convoluted nature of the admissions system would flummox potential watchdogs. “Will it become more opaque? Yes, it will have to,” says Danielle Ren Holley, the incoming president of Mount Holyoke College. “It’s a complex process, and this decision will make it even more complex.”
Such obfuscation would be a mistake. Flouting the law is never a good basis for higher education policy particularly when the judgment has been stated with the clarity by the highest court in the land. There would at least one vigilant overseer: the Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the separate cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that resulted in this decision.
The Supreme Court pointed to numerous practical problems with affirmative action — that it uses blunt racial categories to decide the fate of millions of individuals; that ethnicity is only one aspect of diversity, and arguably not the most important one when it comes to education; that students who are given an artificial boost might well flounder in the highly competitive atmosphere of elite colleges. It also chided the president and fellows of Harvard for imposing almost all the costs of its policies on Asian Americans while protecting their own children and those of alumni and donors, thanks to a parallel system of affirmative action for the privileged.
However, you cannot simply abolish affirmative action and not deal with the issues it tried to solve. For a couple of generations, it helped expand the US’ black middle class. The court’s decision now raises the prospect of a whiter elite. Democratic societies can only thrive if their elites look something like the mass of the population, as France is currently discovering as it deals once again with rioting in the excluded banlieues.
When California changed its state constitution to prohibit race-conscious college admissions in 1996, the number of enrollees from under-represented groups fell by 50 percent in the most selective colleges. In 2019, black freshmen made up just 2.76 percent of the incoming class at the University of California at Berkeley; Hispanics made up 15 percent despite being as much as 52 percent of public high school graduates.
Knowledge-based societies can only flourish if they draw on all the talents of the population regardless of race, class and family circumstances. Yet, social mobility in the land of the American dream is pitiful. At Harvard, 15 percent of students come from the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; 70 percent come from the top 20 percent; and only 3 percent come from the bottom 20 percent. For all the celebration of affirmative action and diversity from the losing side of the court’s decision over the past few days, elite colleges have only become more economically exclusive while touting the policies.
There is a much better solution to the US’ educational problems for the taking: active meritocracy. Meritocracy means judging students by their individual academic potential rather than by extraneous factors; and active meritocracy is searching for ability wherever it might be in the population and paying particular attention to hard-to-reach corners.
And it is not just searching. The most serious problem with affirmative action (and one that the court ignored) is that it is too little too late. The best way to address inequality of opportunity is at the high school level and earlier, rather than at college when most of the damage has already been done. Elite America needs to shift its focus to fixing the supply chain of talent.
The obvious way to start is to abolish affirmative action for the rich, which the court’s judgement leaves in place, despite a lot of tut-tutting, because it is based on class rather than race. Astonishingly, Harvard actively discriminates in favor of ALDCs — athletes, legacies, the dean’s interest list and children of university employees. For one, that could cover the children of politicians and celebrities, as well as people who might give the university lots of money. It also sweetens the pill of diversity for the people who administer it by discriminating in favor of the children of alumni and staff. ALDCs make up less than 5 percent of applicants to the university every year, but 30 percent of freshmen.
Harvard’s “preferences for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty are no help to applicants who cannot boast their parents’ good fortune or trips to the alumni tent all their lives,” Justice Clarence Thomas acidly wrote in his opinion. ALDCs are also 67.8 percent white (11.4 percent are Asian American, 6 percent are black and 5.6 percent are Hispanic). Other elite universities pursue similar policies.
A second method is to emphasize objective rather than subjective assessments of applicants. That means academic and objective tests such as the SATs as opposed to so-called holistic ones that account for extracurricular activities, personal statements, and measures of potential rather achievement.
Critics of the SATs argue that they favor the rich because those students can, in effect, purchase higher scores through coaching.
However, you can mitigate that providing in person or online coaching to all students; and you can also compare the SAT scores of people from similar backgrounds, and take the top performers in each income group.
SATs are less gameable than other types of measures. A large cottage industry exists to teach people how to write personal statements. The Varsity Blues scandal demonstrated that rich parents can unbalance the system by loading their children with extracurricular, if gentrified, achievements such as rowing or lacrosse. The more holistic the assessment system, the more class-biased it would be.
Third, and most important: Fix the pipeline from regular America into the elite. Certain elite colleges are already trying to cultivate a better supply of talent by scouting and forming closer relations with public schools. For example, the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University specializes in identifying bright children at an early age and giving them access to enriched learning. Private philanthropies are trying to make a reality of diversity by providing scholarships for children from underserved communities. The New York-based program Prep for Prep recruits about 225 students of color a year out of 6,000 applicants, sends them to academic boot camp, and then places them in private high schools.
However, much more needs to be done to breathe new life into the American dream. The US only has 160 schools that take students on the basis of their performance on academic exams — out of a total of 42,000 schools in the country. The US needs to establish more elite schools in geographical areas where minorities are concentrated. Charter schools are banned from selecting pupils on the basis of ability.
The UK has had enormous success creating high-performance schools in poorer areas. In 2019, three academies in the East End of London — Brampton Manor in East Ham, the London Academy of Excellence in Stratford and Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney — sent 100 pupils to Oxford and hundreds more to other elite universities. There is no reason the US cannot emulate Britain’s example.
Gifted programs also have a good record in providing a head-start for bright children. The sort of people who object to charter schools selecting on the basis of academic ability also anathematize gifted programs on the grounds that they contain a disproportionate number of white and middle-class students.
However, if you base the programs in minority-heavy districts and select on the basis of IQ tests rather than parental lobbying, you would dramatically increase the number of minority children who can profit from them.
The meritocratic idea has a wide range of enemies, from Harvard alumni who want guaranteed admission for their little darlings to teachers’ unions who think that the best way to avoid disappointment in life is to lower expectations.
Nonetheless, it is a far better solution to the US’ problem than trying to muddle through with manque affirmative action.
For one thing, it complies with both the spirit and the letter of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Founding schools and gifted programs in America’s poorer communities would disproportionately benefit black people and other underrepresented minorities.
For another, it respects the preferences of the American people. Affirmative action is unpopular to folks who live outside higher-education enclaves. A 2022 Pew poll found that 74 percent of Americans thought that race and ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions (by contrast just 14 percent thought that standardized tests should not be a factor). About 59 percent of black respondents said race should not be a factor.
Meritocracy, by contrast, is deeply rooted in a country that regards individualism and upward mobility as its defining values. Former US president Thomas Jefferson argued that the job of education was to discover the “natural aristocrats” that nature “has scattered with an equal hand through all its conditions.” Millions of immigrants flocked to America on the grounds that they would be able to rise on their own merits rather than be held back by the Old World’s social prejudices. This faith in merit continues to burn strongly. In a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent favored a merit-only approach to college entrance, and just 26 percent endorsed race-conscious admissions. If US universities proceed with their policy of workarounds, they risk defying public opinion as well as the court.
It is America’s eternal tragedy that it withheld the promise of meritocracy from black Americans, through slavery, Jim Crow and residential segregation.
However, the way to make up for that is to apply the merit principle more generously than ever before — and by giving it life through rigorous schools, rather than clinging on to the dying principle of affirmative action.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author, most recently, of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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