On Class-based Affirmative Action

John Rosenberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates come at Peter Beinart from opposite directions for his op-ed urging Barak Obama to embrace class-based affirmative action as a replacement for race-based affirmative action.

When do we consider "no affirmative action"?

The virtue of a change to class-based affirmative actoin would be to assuage the anger of those who believe that the already-priviledged offspring of such as the Obamas and the Cosbys are receiving preferential treatment at the expense of hard-scrabble whites. Unfortunately, there is no political reason why these concerns should be elevated over those of blacks who believe that their underrepresentation is proof that higher-ed is a white racket. And in the mean time, we still have the same problem: a group of people elevated beyond the warrant of their cognitive station.

Lost in this discussion is: what ought a university admissions committee try to accomplish?

Here are some worthwhile objectives:

1. Predict Success. Can the applicant successfully complete the academic program? If his portfolio says no, then it doesn't matter that he faced discrimination or that his mother is a crack-whore: he ought to be steered in a direction in which he has a higher probability of success. If your prediction models tell you that objective criteria (test scores and GPA) underpredict the college performance of blacks and poor people, then by all means take these factors into account. But I haven't seen any evidence that this is true, and much evidence to the contrary.

2. Academic Uniformity. When all students in a classroom possess the same level of cognitive ability and preparation, all students benefit. In contrast, when an instructor must pitch his presentation at the mean of a wide distribution, all students suffer. The smart students are bored and learn less than they would at a more advanced level of instruction; meanwhile, the deficient students learn less than they would were the material presented at a slower pace.

Here is a wrong objective:

Diversity. The claims made for the benefits of diversity are mostly bogus. Whatever the theory about Learning To Get Along With Different People, Etc., the experience of "diversity" as it is actually practiced on college campuses is quite alienating: witness Michelle Obama.

Or perhaps alienation, a.k.a. "raising minority racial consciousness" is the real goal. Fine: go sell it to the voting and tax-paying public.

Lest I seem too dogmatic about this, I can think of other formulations, for instance, that schools wish to produce a particular type of graduate whose post-college career in the real world doesn't reduce to his collegiate GPA. I'm skeptical of the good faith of this claim made in this context, but stipulating good faith, I would challenge supporters of race-based affirmative action to rewrite Title IV of the Civil Rights Act specifying the kinds of racially discrimination that they now favor. And of course, sell it to the voting public.

Good luck with that.