Race-Based Admissions Harm Minority Students

The U.S. Supreme Court faces a discomfiting decision. If it chooses to hear a case concerning racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas, the court will confront evidence of its complicity in harming the supposed beneficiaries of preferences.

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In 2003, when the court ruled on two cases arising from University of Michigan undergraduate and law-school racial-preference policies, the court contributed more confusion than clarity. It struck down the undergraduate policies as too mechanistic in emphasizing race but upheld the law school’s pursuit of educational benefits from a “critical mass” of certain approved minorities.

A brief submitted by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and legal analyst Stuart Taylor argues that voluminous research refutes the legal premise for such racial classifications: They benefit relatively powerless minorities.

“Academic mismatch” causes many students who are admitted under a racial preference, but who possess weaker academic skills, to fall behind. The consequences include especially high attrition rates from the sciences, and self-segregation in less-demanding classes, thereby reducing classroom diversity. Blacks are significantly more integrated across the University of California system than they were before the state eliminated racial preferences in 1996, thereby discouraging enrollment of underprepared minorities in the more-elite institutions.

Another study showed that, even if eliminating racial preferences in law schools would mean 21 percent fewer black matriculants, there still would be no reduction in the number of blacks who graduate and pass the bar exam.

A second brief, submitted by three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights–Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow and Todd Gaziano–argues that racial preferences in law-school admissions mean fewer black lawyers than there would be without preferences that bring law students into elite academic settings where their credentials put them in the bottom of their classes.

There are fewer minorities entering high-prestige careers than there would be if preferences were not placing many talented minority students in inappropriate, and discouraging, academic situations: “Many would be honor students elsewhere. But they are subtly being made to feel as if they are less talented than they really are.” {snip}

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