John Fund -- Racial Preferences Under Siege.

From John Fund at National Review Online:

Two recent events, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, demonstrate that after half a century, support for racial preferences in college admissions is getting more and more unsustainable — both politically and intellectually.

In California, liberals have long deplored the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences at state universities. Its backers pointed out that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is often cited as the authority for mandating preferential treatment for racial minorities, actually forbids all racial discrimination. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts has concluded. Polls show that most Americans agree, and even after an intense negative campaign, Prop 209 was backed by 55 percent of Californians, including three-quarters of whites, four out of ten Asians, and a quarter of blacks and Latinos. In general, Prop 209 has worked well by forcing better legitimate outreach efforts by universities. The percentage of blacks and Latinos in the overall University of California system has actually increased from what it was in 1996 (while declining at the most elite UC campuses).

Nonetheless, many California liberals are determined to return to something akin to quotas. Democratic state senator Ed Hernandez used his party’s two-thirds control of the senate to push through a ballot measure that this fall would have asked voters whether to end the ban on racial preferences. The measure appeared set to fly through the assembly, which also has a two-thirds Democratic majority. ............................

It may not be. The intellectual case for preferences is looking increasingly shaky. Last month, a packed auditorium at Harvard Law School featured an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate on whether “affirmative action does more harm than good.” Harvard professor Randall Kennedy, the author of the book For Discrimination, and Columbia professor Ted Shaw, the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued that diversity is an important and noble goal that universities must pursue. UCLA professor Richard Sander, author of the book Mismatch, and University of San Diego professor Gail Heriot, a commissioner on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, presented statistics from over 20 peer-reviewed studies that showed how the good intentions of affirmative-action supporters have had disastrous results.

The research cited by Sander and Heriot shows that universities routinely put a race-conscious fist on the admissions scale, rather than a thumb. These heavy preferences mean that the median African-American student at law school has credentials lower than those of 99 percent of the Asian and white students — and underrepresented minorities admitted to law school based on a heavy preference are two to three times more likely to fail the bar exam.

Going to any school to which a student is admitted because of race, rather than to a school better matched to the student’s aptitude, isn’t helpful. For example, affirmative-action students are 50 to 75 percent more likely to drop out of a science program than are regular admits. But students who attend a school where their entering credentials are similar to those of their fellow students are more likely to follow through with an ambition to major in science or engineering, more likely to decide to become a college professor, and more likely to finish law school and pass the bar. We almost certainly now have fewer minority doctors, lawyers, and business chiefs than we would have had under race-neutral admissions policies.

Colleges go to great lengths not to give students an informed choice, concealing the failure rate of students who enter with lower grades and test scores.