NY Times opinion: Affirmative action mattered a lot for very few and very little for most

As the left went into full freak-out most last week denouncing the Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, I argued that they were really overstating their case. One of the points I made in passing was that most colleges aren’t competitive. Today a pair of academics have written an opinion piece for the NY Times highlighting this even further.

We’ll get to the text of the argument in a moment but the article itself opens with a graphic highlighting all of America’s major four-year colleges ranked by admittance rate. So, for instance, Harvard and Stanford have the lowest admittance rate in the country of just 4 percent. But only a small handful of schools have admittance rates under 25%. All together those schools educated about 6% of the entire total. If you include schools with an admittance rate up to 50% you’re still talking about just 16% of total enrolled students. The vast majority of schools have an admittance rate around 70% and that’s where the majority of students are attending. Here’s what the graphic looks like with the two schools who were part of the SCOTUS decision highlighted.

“Because affirmative action only opened a tiny window of access to America’s most elite institutions, the ruling will make little difference for most college students,” write Richard Arum and @mitchellatedf. https://t.co/OHQd3OMEYf

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) July 3, 2023

Best I can tell, this graphic does not include community colleges which enroll about as many students as four-year-colleges. If you were to add those to the graphic they would all be on the far right because their admittance rate is usually around 80%. Obviously, you don’t need affirmative action to get into a school with a 70% or greater admittance rate. And since that’s most schools in the country, most students simply didn’t benefit from affirmative action.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision that struck down race-conscious admissions, we should recognize that, in practice, affirmative action mattered a great deal for very few and very little for most…

…the majority of Black and Hispanic students attend universities that accept more than three-quarters of their applicants. The exception here is Asian students, who on average are much more likely to attend elite universities. The proportion of all Asian students who attend a school with an acceptance rate under 25 percent is more than three times that of Black, Hispanic and white students…

While the Supreme Court’s decision is a blow to Black and Hispanic students who dream of attending the most competitive universities, improving and better supporting the institutions that serve the lion’s share of students of color will do far more to advance the cause of racial equality in this country than anything that admissions officers can do in Cambridge, Palo Alto and Chapel Hill.

The ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education. Non-selective colleges and universities can be genuine engines of economic mobility, but they do so in the face of significant headwinds.

And that’s about where the authors start to lose me. They are undoubtedly correct that affirmative action benefitted very few students (and only then by pushing out better qualified students), but the idea suggested by the authors that we should try to make every school into a Harvard or a UCLA is just wishcasting nonsense.

The reality is that those schools not only have the most advanced and hard-working students, they also tend to have many of the top professors in a given field. That doesn’t mean you can’t get a good education at, say, Iowa State University, but you’re certainly less likely to be on the cutting edge of certain disciplines than the students who attend MIT.

Personally, I think that’s fine. The people with the most aptitude and evidence of academic merit deserve the best resources. Again, that doesn’t mean that a graduate from Iowa State or any of 1,000 other schools like it can’t be perfectly capable in their field and still earn a good living.

My own view is that the real problem wasn’t being addressed by affirmative action at all. The problem was the sad state of many of our K-12 public schools. I’ve written many times about the pathetic state of Baltimore’s public schools. But many of the same problems can be found in San Francisco. We don’t need every university to be Stanford but we do need every K-12 public school to be able to teach students to read and do math before they graduate. Right now that isn’t happening, especially for minority students.

Finally, some of the commenters get it. This is the 3rd most upvoted comment.

An article on higher education and upward mobility that ignores the role of K-12 suffers from the same bug as does the fixation on AA that has characterized the Time’s initial coverage of the implications of the SC ruling. When social promotion results in HS graduates commonly reading below an 8th grade level how are colleges supposed to graduate those same students? Even with two years of remedial classes the six year graduation rate drops to around 50% for those least selective colleges. The other remedy, requiring college degrees of fewer job applicants, would then require employers to test for college level literacy and numeracy. Do we want our workplaces also populated by people with 8th grade level reading when the job requires college graduate level reading, data analysis and reasoning? Or do we want to actually fix K-12 so people only graduate high school when they actually meet 12th grade standards? How about considering something like the German system of a 13 year primary education with tracking and vocational tracks possible at the 11th year? Community colleges could be merged with the k-12 system for this purpose since both are state funded. 80% of jobs would really only require those 13 years with other training occuring at work. Finally no discussion of education is complete without talking about families and US culture. The more people who learn from Asian families rather than trying to discriminate against them the better.

I don’t know about the specific proposal to overhaul schools but the author of that comment is right about colleges not being able to make up for the failures of K-12 schools that graduate kids who can’t read and can’t do math at any sort of high school level.