College diversity will survive but remain only skin-deep

By Chris Powell

Despite the hysteria it has provoked, last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision purportedly prohibiting racial favoritism in college admissions — euphemized as “affirmative action” — probably will make little practical difference.

From the beginning of its consideration of racial favoritism in admissions, in the case of California v. Bakke in 1978, the court had been ambivalent. Its position was essentially that race could be a factor but not too much and not too explicit. Since no college needs clear quotas to manipulate its admissions, racial favoritism endured, usually behind some subtlety.

Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the case decided last week, messed things up for everybody by not being subtle enough — by rejecting too many applicants of Asian descent with high academic achievement. Asians have become what Jews were in discriminatory college admissions systems a century ago: overachievers who would dominate any student population that was based entirely on academic achievement.

A century ago colleges didn’t care much about racial and ethnic diversity. Today diversity is practically a religion.

As a matter of law the Supreme Court’s decision makes perfect sense. The Constitution promises equal protection of the law and racial favoritism is unequal and what the country long has pledged to eradicate.

But if academic achievement determines admissions (along with prowess in the sports that draw big television audiences), there goes diversity (except maybe in football and basketball), though diversity is vital to education, even if the diversity sought by most colleges is only skin-deep, not intellectual or political.

Fortunately for colleges, they retain the many fuzzy admissions criteria they have used to disadvantage Asian applicants and disguise racial favoritism in admissions, criteria like character, personality, and non-academic accomplishments. Asian applicants with excellent academics get marked way down on the fuzzy criteria. This practice may have to diminish and become less obvious.

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Unfortunately higher education will need some pretenses to sustain racial diversity in admissions as long as academic performance remains so unequal racially in lower education. Continuing to fudge college admissions criteria for racial diversity will seem necessary until the country closes the racial achievement gap in elementary and high schools and produces more minority students who are qualified for college more by academic achievement than race.

But an effort to increase diversity in higher education by improving lower education would impugn the welfare system and upset not just its many direct dependents but also its many government employees and the political structure of the cities from which the Democratic Party draws its pluralities.

Any such effort also would raise the uncomfortable question of why Asian students succeed so disproportionately anyway, outperforming everybody else academically, though Asians also long have suffered discrimination in this country.

What’s their trick? It can’t be inherently racial. So is it a matter of differences in culture and family life, wherein people shrug off disadvantages and work harder than they complain?

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Whatever it is, as was suggested by the student loan debt forgiveness case also decided last week by the Supreme Court, college is overrated, overpriced, and increasingly a matter of mere credentialism rather than education. President Biden claimed the power to cancel student loan debt by executive decree but the court found he lacked the authority.

If college was really so valuable, the many thousands of former college students would not be complaining about the student loan debt burden they incurred, and the president and other Democrats would not be striving to transfer that debt to taxpayers generally, penalizing those who worked their way through college or didn’t go at all.

Besides, most student loan debt appears to be carried by people who are or will be able to repay it, and college loans aren’t really a subsidy to students at all but to educators. That is where all the money has gone, more than a trillion dollars: to a group that is the biggest component of the Democratic Party’s army.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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