2007-01-10

Affirmative Action Boosted White Enrollment...

...at elite universities. Without AA, more Asians will enter such schools, as already demonstrated at UC-Berkely when California outlawed AA. Fewer blacks, and even whites, will get into the elite schools. But more blacks and whites will actually graduate, because they will get shifted to lower-tier schools, where their high school academic record has more appropriately prepared them.

As usual, Tom Sowell is on the mark here: if the elite US schools become more Asian and less white (and black), nobody should fret! INDIVIDUALS who want to attend such schools should just study harder and pick better courses in high school.

2 comments:

Nadir said...

But Jennifer Gratz wanted to go to the elite school. This is why she filed a lawsuit, and this is why she was tapped to lead the MCRI.

If the elimination of Affirmative Action ends with the result that someone like her wouldn't make it into Michigan anyway, does that make her crusade in vain?

This lends credence to Paul's prediction that racist AA opponents may call for more diversity in US classrooms, especially once Asians outnumber them at elite universities and Latinos become the majority population in the nation.

Paul Hue said...

Gratz was incorrect, as I have stated many times over the years, that without AA she would get admitted. The racists among AA opponents will start calling for AA once they see that AA actually protected honkies from the better-achieving Asians. Like the black average under AA, the white average graduation rate (and quality of major selection) lagged behind Asians.

I have another prediction for schools that lose AA: as they come be be dominated by Asians, many majors will drastically lose students, include important solid academic majors in the liberal arts (history, literature, economics), phony silly majors (education, communication, criminal justice, social work, business, ethnic studies), and trades that really belong in separate professional schools (accounting, nursing, various health sciences).

This will happen of course because Asians flock to the hard sciences and engineering, eschewing both valid intellectually rigorous subjects in the liberal arts, and the proliferation of fluff and otherwise non-academic subjects. The professors in those areas will surely demand students, and the only way I can imagine that they will get them is if a separate admissions track develops for students who commit to those majors. Affected universities would have to develop a mechanism for tagging these students so that they can't switch into the "Asian" majors, to prevent Asians from getting admitted into Social Work then switching to Physics.

This development would lead to more Asians in those areas, and also provide a race-blind process by which whites and blacks would get into these schools.